No, there is a pay gap. Women earn far less than men. That's a simple statistical fact. The only controversy is over the reasons for that pay gap. The academic consensus is simply that it's a mix of factors: discrimination, sexual harassment, overtime work, family work, gender roles, education, mentoring, networks and I probably missed one or two here. Some, like Christina Hoff Sommers, would say that the pay between a man and a woman doing exactly equal work with equal education and experience is relatively small (but still existent!) and thus wave away all of those other issues. That's far too simplistic.
@Akratus: Is linking entire articles really that difficult? Context matters and all. Anyway, here it is. Wanna bet that the students saw those events very, very differently? For instance, if we look at his actual speech I can quite reasonably estimate that what was being booed was not specifically his suggestion that Blurred Lines not be banned, but these two paragraphs:
The PC paradox: in the very act of seeking to save minority groups from offence, it dehumanises those groups, lumping them all together as an indistinguishable mass; and it infantilises them, treating them as sorry creatures in need of protection from harm by the more enlightened, the more switched-on.
Let’s look at the case of Blurred Lines, which has been banned on more than 30 campuses in Britain. The justification given for this ban is that the song is “deeply offensive and dangerous” for women, and could “reinforce their shame and fear”. That, to me, is offensive — not to Robin Thicke, but to women. It suggests they don’t know know their own minds; it suggests they cannot hear a song without their self-esteem expiring.
Which shows that he didn't get what the actual problem with the song was. That's specifically about the way it reinforces not "shame and fear" in women in general, but how it repeats and reinforces victim-blaming rationalizations of rape. We know that victims of rape deal with a lot of shame and fear, that a lot of them question themselves about whether or not it's their fault that they got raped, and that a lot of that has to do with cultural messaging about women "leading on" men and the like. Blurred Lines is a problem because it is a part of that same discourse. His entire speech is a collection of crude misunderstandings of what is actually going on, which is why I'd guess he's being booed -- and why he doesn't understand why he's being booed. Similarly, the other time he was booed was that he was misinterpreting Bukhari's words as apologizing for murder, rather than examining the context within which those murders occurred. Once again, it is the speechwriter who does not understand what is actually going on.
EDIT: Next troll gets you a temp-ban, Akratus. Is it really that hard to just not hit that post button?
