If women really worked for 77% of what a man earns, no one would ever hire male workers.
It’s silly even to say. My experience is, men and women in the same job doing the same work earn the same pay.
All the men with whom I worked, at the same job, made the same pay as I.....taking into consideration the level of experience.
If you compared what I’ve earned over the course of my career with what a man in the same career earned over the same period of time, you would probably find that his lifetime earnings are greater than mine.
The explanation isn’t that I was paid less due to being female. I made less because I WORKED less. I worked part-time for several years when my sons were small.
I think that’s the sort of thing that ends up being interpreted as women getting paid less for the same job. That may have been a common practice at one time, but I’ve never seen it in my working life.
It’s not any secret that women tend to work fewer hours, work less overtime, and work in jobs that pay less but have more flexible schedules or schedules that work better with having children. That has nothing to do with inequality or discrimination. It means that a man in the same job or career may be paid more because he works more.