While systemic discrimination against women (among other demographics) is rife, the "gender pay gap" is misleading. There is no singular gender pay gap; it is widely variable between sectors, careers, and positions (1) and often changes when adjusted for the number of hours worked (as opposed to annual salaries, where applicable). Simplifying the gender pay gap to an economy-wide statistic insinuates specific gender discrimination within companies' salary decision-making processes when this may not be the case. The gender pay gap often ignores key variables such as degree level, nationality, and race (2). Arguably, focusing on gender discrimination within the workplace is misplaced, when women face broader systemic and cultural issues within education (3), childcare expectations (4), and _power_ gaps (5). Systemic disenfranchisement cannot be addressed under the guise of the gender pay gap, and if the gender pay gap is the main focus, some of these broader issues will not be mitigated—and that may mean, ultimately, that the aspects of the gender pay gap that _do_ exist will not be mitigated either. 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/760342/ 2. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/15/ethnicity-pay-gap-disparities-minority-workers-unemployed-precarious-work 3. https://www.globalpartnership.org/what-we-do/gender-equality 4. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-44767657 5. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathycaprino/2020/10/22/impostor-syndrome-prevalence-in-professional-women-face-and-how-to-overcome-it/?sh=69bd6e5573cb

**TL;DR - The gender pay gap is not oversold. The fact that a gender pay gap still exists is extremely worrying and claiming that it is “oversold” is just another way of ignoring the issue at hand.** Firstly, some [stats](https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20200109STO69925/understanding-the-gender-pay-gap-definition-and-causes): • Working women in the EU earn on average 14% less per hour than men do. • Specifically, less than 10% of the top companies’ CEOs are women so when looking at the pay gap in different occupations, female managers are at the greatest disadvantage, earning 23% less per hour than male managers. • Women not only earn less per hour, but they also perform more unpaid work and are more likely to be unemployed than men; all these factors combined bring the total pay gap to almost 37% in the EU. • Despite the Equal Pay Act (1970), the 2020 gender pay gap in the UK was still 15.5%. In this sense, the gender pay gap is definitely not oversold, if anything you could argue that it is understated as a social issue.