Why be very careful when you are trying to address the "gender pay gap"

 So, it has been established that the Gender Pay Gap is not a result of some evil male-conspiracy to pay women less for the same amount of work, but mostly the result of lifestyle choices: women -in general- realizing they want families once they reach a certain age, and want to spend more time with their families, rather than spending 70+ hours at work.

Regardless, many activists, journalists, and people with bullhorns want to redress this situation in a way to "elevate" these women in the expense of those evil men who make more money.

There is one problem with this viewpoint: it looks at individuals rather than family units. Because if one partner has a lowered income due to childcare duties, you know what happens? The other will try to make up for this shortfall. He will put in more work. He will fight harder to progress his career and increase his earning potential. He will spend more time at work (which ironically means he will have less time to chip in around the house.) So if you somehow make it more difficult for men to earn money (or favor women in general with diversity quotas and other methods in hiring), you will make life really, really difficult for those women who are at home tending the children.

Now I understand that for a feminist this is no way for a woman to live (we only respect choices if they are the right choice), however, it is still the result. You make families (and hence women) worse off. Which is a textbook case of unintended consequences of poorly though-out policies. Trust me, these things end horribly almost always; I came from an ex-communist country - I should know.

Equal pay, entitlement and women's soccer team -how our reality is manufactured by the media

So the news have been full of how unfairly the US' women's soccer team is treated by the Patriarchy. The poor souls get paid less than the males! How horrible, right? Sue the fuckers responsible!

And they did.

And the lawsuit was promtly dismissed by the judge.

The reasons were simple: the women actually made more than the men did. Had the situaton of the two teams been reversed, the men would have received less money than the women. Initially they were offered the same contract as the men, which they rejected in favor of a different contract, and now they realized that if they had taken the original contract they would have made even more with their present success, so now they want the original contract retroactively.

Which seems to me less than a fight against the Patriarchy, and more a case of greed. Which is fine, because you can be as a greedy motherfucker as you want to be, it is a free country after all.

However, wrapping your greed into the flags of Social Justice to press your case, well, is not cool, to say the least. It does not just make you greedy, it makes you an asshole.

And here comes the actual point of this post: the media manufactures our reality. This really is a clear-cut case. And yet, the most prominent media outlets, Biden, everyone are still pushing the social justice angle, going into tortorous arguments about how it is a clear violation of the law, even while the women did make more money than the men would have, using this case as a clear demonstration of the existence of the Gender Pay Gap. Which it isn't. But reality is defined not by facts, but by narratives, so there you go. 

Either people who are supposed to be our betters really are so simple they cannot understand this concept as they are blinded by their ideology -or they are so cynical they decided not to understand why the lawsuit was dismissed. Either way the prospects are scary. It matters not what the truth is -what matters is that you use your bullhorn to shape it to your liking. And this is scary because what started out as a fringe social studies experiment now is used to shape government policy and our culture. The most powerful person in the world (Biden, presently), should not be standing there spouting nonsense. He, of all people, should really, really make sure he has all the facts on the ground available.