Is “women earn 77 cents for each dollar men earn” explainable by factors other than discrimination? Or is that kind of missing the point?

So this is floating around:  Obama once again made his pitch to women that he will save them from the injustice of being underpaid, relative to men.

And there are all kinds of ways to understand the data around this.  A while back, I explored some of the numbers.  Women at the lower end of the pay scale are paid at more equal rates than at the upper end, according to the bls data.  Women working fewer hours per week earn more than men working the equivalent number of hours, and younger women earn nearly the same as men, and their wages have been growing while men’s are declining, according to another set of data.  And there are other analyses out there that will tell you that, when you account for profession, age, family status, and a host of other factors, the difference between men’s and women’s wages is negligible, and in some cases, women are earning more.

Megan McArdle pointed out the other day that this is fundamentally a matter of choices, made by both men and women, about careers and family.  Women (that is, professional and white-collar women generally) are far more likely than men to make decisions about career and work hours with an eye toward being available for their family, whether it means working fewer than 40 hours, declining overtime, choosing careers that don’t require overtime, or putting their career on hold, and, consequently resuming their job at a lower pay level later on.

But (to play devil’s advocate) that’s kind of missing the point.  Or, at least, feminists/progressives/leftists will tell you that women are making wrong choices, for a number of reasons.  They’ll say that women have been falsely conditioned to think it’s a good idea to take a couple years off or work part time while the kids are young, and that the next generation needs to be trained properly for both men and women to take time off in equal proportion.  They’ll say that neither men nor women should be working long hours, because employers’ expectations of overtime are bad for the advancement prospects of women who don’t work overtime, and bad for the mental health and physical health of men who do, so the government should forbid it.  (Serves me right for not having proper tags as I blog — I was quite certain I blogged about a Slate article on this topic a while back and I can’t find it!)  They’ll say that women don’t enter STEM careers for dozens of reasons which have nothing to do with aptitude or interest, and with proper incentives and conditioning and support, they’ll bring up their representation in these fields.  On so on.

So is it fun to rail at the seeming ignorance/hyprocrisy/trolling of the War Against Women Democrats?  Oh, sure.  But we’re kind of missing the point if we don’t recognize that they understand, but disagree with all of the choices surrounding these numbers.

UPDATE:  This article in Bloomberg View pretty much proves my point:  it’s poorly argued but basically says that women are paid less because they’re not in the Right Jobs and because employers are unfairly rewarding overtime-working inflexible-scheduled workers disproportionately.