The Pay Gap Is Not as Bad as You (and Sheryl Sandberg) Think

Article here. Excerpt:

'It’s a galling and often cited statistic: women make 77 (or 81, or 82) cents to a man’s dollar. President Obama campaigned on it last year, announcing in an ad that “women being paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men isn’t just unfair — it hurts families.” Everyone from Lilly Ledbetter to Marlo Thomas has repeated it. And there it is on Page 6 of Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In:
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If you control for things like college majors and occupations, the pay gap, or the discrepancy between men’s and women’s earnings that can be attributed to bias and discrimination, shrinks down to about one-third of its size. This is what the American Association of University Women determined when it surveyed male and female college graduates one year after graduation and found that, absent all explanatory variables, even including a graduate’s GPA and how selective their school was and how long they were unemployed after graduation, the women made 93% of what the men were making. In other words, 93 cents to the man’s dollar. Not 77 cents. Not 81 cents. Ninety-three cents.'