- women on average prefer to work with people and men - with things. Working with things scales well (like IT), working with people - doesnt scale well (nurse, teacher, doctor).
* Mothers are paid significantly less on average but fathers aren't and there are deep cultural dynamics that perpetuate this. There isn't a fundamental reason this should be the case.
* Women (and men obviously too but we're talking about women) are conditioned constantly from birth to have those preferences and have to deal with pressure from everyone in their lives to not deviate from what's expected from them. (Same with men too -- try being a manly man who wants to bake wedding cakes or go into fashion.) And then when women try to be mold breakers and go into "masculine fields" they're pushed away and become lower status.
Re the 2nd - I can come up with an argument supporting my theory that it is not only a social construct as you imply, but I will invite you first to prove your theory that this is ONLY a social conditioning of a woman that makes her make these choices, and there is no biology involved into that (Or very little).
To shade a shadow on your theory (as i assume this is a social construct theory) i recall some info that female orangutans were more interested in dolls and males - in more male toys similar to humans.
Also, in Scandinavian countries that ran out their way to make their societies egalitarian, even more women were choosing "traditional female" jobs than what the "social constructionists" were trying to achieve by their "gender equality" agenda.
But i will not argue about all of this as it is all well known and documented and people just need to make a 3h research on the internet.
Women as a class of people make around 30% less than men. If you don't think this is surprising you should. There's nothing inherent to men and women that would lead you to predict this. And, in fact, looking at the data you might actually expect that women as as class would make more than men because women have higher college graduation rates, and "go further" in higher education on average.
All of the things that "explain" the gap are literally the problems. Just because we have strong evidence that we know what some of the factors that lead to the gap are doesn't mean you throw up your hands and say, "that's just how men and women are I guess."
Isn't this also a problem? There's nothing inherent to men and women that would lead you to predict this.
My point is that this imbalance with wages is that much more surprising because of this other imbalance that seems like it would favor women in skilled fields.
Correlation is not causation.
Maybe men are more likely to pursue stressful, higher paying jobs because of social pressure to be breadwinners.
Not many women want to marry a house-husband.