"To place all the blame of pay differences on women’s career choices fails to recognize the social structure that determines value. Young girls and young women do not make choices in a vacuum about what to study and where to work. They make them under the influence of peers, family members, and adults who tell them, through words and actions, the subjects, majors, and careers that are acceptable for them to choose.

These influences inevitably inform their later decisions on careers. Stereotypes also underlie the decisions that are made to assign a certain dollar value to some kinds of work and different values to others: a female first-grade teacher, for example, usually makes less than a male video-game software developer. Sometimes people place no dollar value on work at all: for centuries, women have borne the brunt of everyday

housework and caring for children and the elderly for no pay," said the report. 

Another factor one might wish to consider is that whatever work done by mostly women is, by definition, seen by society as women's work. However what does and does not count as women's work can change over time, and thus so can its compensation levels. For instance, while computer programmers today are mostly men, for many years programming was specifically seen as a job for women. Consequently, programming was seen as a low-wage, low-skill job, according to a study on the industry's shift (see page 23). However, this began to change around the 1980s when programming began being seen as a high-skill, high-wage job and became increasingly male-dominated to the point to the point where, today, people are wondering about how to get more women into an industry where they make about 30 percent less than their male counterparts.

Similarly, the proportion of men entering the nursing field has tripled since the 70s. Meanwhile, compensation for nurses has been steadily increasing over the decades to the point where salaries increased on average about 1.3 percent per year from 2008 to the middle of 2014, and 2.6 percent per year since then (though even in this environment, a study in 2013 found that, even though the profession remains majority-female, men still make more than women). 

With this kind of information in mind, the report's authors said that, when it comes to careers, there are six "rules of the game" for women: 

1. Get one more degree in order to have the same earnings as a man.
2. Pick majors that pay well, as major choice largely determines earnings.
3. If you major in liberal arts, get a graduate degree to attain middle class earnings.
4. Negotiate your first paycheck well, as it will impact your lifetime earnings. The gender wage gap increases with age, peaking by the early 50s.
5. Be careful with postsecondary vocational certificates because they have limited labor market value for women.
6. If you don’t pursue a BA, consider getting an industry-based certification