One day, back in 2009, I discovered that I was making less money than the man sitting next to me.

This man was my co-founder; we had been working side by side for over seven years. When we went to our first conference, we had stayed in a youth hostel together, where I spent four consecutive nights in a bunk room with six snoring men.

We had hauled boxes of magazines to conference centers by foot — sometimes across dirt fields and train tracks. We had flown to DC together on Valentine’s Day to pitch our magazine to executives in gleaming shoes. We even shared a king-sized bed in a boutique hotel because these same executives had assumed, erroneously, that we were a couple.

We both had bachelor degrees from the same Ivy League college, had both poured our blood, sweat, and tears into the venture. And yet, somewhere along the way, my co-founder made a secret, unilateral decision to pay himself an annual salary that was $10,000 more than mine.

In retrospect, it’s glaringly obvious that I should have been paying closer attention to the financials. But he handled the operations and I handled all things editorial. It’s true I had never entirely trusted him. I just so desperately wanted to.

I’m certainly not the first woman to find out that I’m making less money than the man sitting next to me, and unfortunately I won’t be the last. Stories like these, famously highlighted by the U.S. women’s soccer team and the equal pay settlement they reached this past February, are at the core of most conversations about the gender pay gap.

This type of gap, if it’s uncovered at all, is easy to understand. When an equally (or more) qualified woman makes less money doing an equivalent job as the man sitting next to her, an injustice has clearly taken place.

But while the factors driving the gender pay gap include these blatant disparities, they have far more layers and nuances that are often left out of the conversation. The income I’ve lost out on goes way beyond a $10,000 discrepancy I uncovered at age 28.

Here’s what else has been at play:

I was socialized from a young age to be a “helper” and “helper jobs,” typically dominated by females, offer lower pay than the Big Important Jobs that the patriarchy has deemed more economically valuable.
I’ve taken on a disproportionate share of the unpaid labor at home, which limits my ability to benefit from a working culture that rewards butts in seats.
Regardless of my efficiency or the results I produce, I am perceived as less committed, less ambitious, or having less potential — particularly since having children.
There are some men, I’ve discovered through firsthand experience, who get very angry at any mention of the gender pay gap. They rant and rage all over the Internet, often in all caps. They are vehement that the gender pay gap, like most everything else women “whine” about, is something we invented because we so desperately aspire to victimhood.

Women work less than men, they insist. We have a “natural” inclination for lower-paying industries with less economic worth, and we opt for less demanding roles because our God-given maternal instincts make us yearn to spend more time taking care of our partners and children. Therefore, it only stands to reason that we should be paid less.

Let’s unpack these myths one by one:

Myth: Women choose jobs in lower-paying fields that are less economically valuable.
I was raised by progressive parents. My mother, like most mothers I knew, worked outside the home, and my father cooked most of our meals. But still, I was socialized to nurture at a young age. I was given dolls and tea sets, played “house” with my friends, and often dabbled in the kitchen.

I also had a mind for numbers. In middle school, I skipped seventh-grade math; in high school, my trigonometry teacher proclaimed me a “math genius.” While “genius” was most definitely an overstatement, I did go on to score a five on my AP Calculus exam.

But I never, not once, considered a career that involved math. I believed I was only good at math because I worked hard in it, not because I had any natural proclivity. Math teachers might be women, but mathematicians, as far as I knew, were men.

I didn’t just “choose” a career in the nonprofit industry because I wanted to help people. I’d been primed to want to help people. It’s the same reason women “choose” careers in nursing, caregiving, and teaching.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with opting for a career in these fields. They are incredibly demanding — and absolutely essential to our economy, as Covid so starkly revealed. Yet they are still consistently devalued, and sometimes openly mocked. They are not “serious fields.”

Social perceptions around “men’s work” and “women’s work” are far more powerful than we tend to acknowledge. The female software developer may be making less money than the male software developer sitting next to her, but how many females never become software developers at all?

To be clear, narrowing the pay gap is not just about inspiring women to be scientists or software developers. It’s also about inspiring men to be nurses and teachers. And it’s about recognizing the economic and social worth of our nation’s caregivers and helpers, then paying them accordingly.

Myth: Women work less than men.
My partner was a stay-at-home dad for the first 18 months of our daughter’s life. It was a decision made out of of financial necessity, but I was also proud of us for challenging traditional gender norms.

Yet neither of us realized how much continual brute force it would take to swim against the currents of socialization. When baby #2 came along and he went back to school, I unwittingly became the default parent, taking on the majority of daycare drop-offs and school pick-ups, the brunt of the scheduling and appointment making, the lion’s share of school volunteer work and after-school activity coordination, and a higher percentage of household chores. This, in addition to being the sole income earner for my family.

My story may be unique, but my disproportionate share of invisible, emotional, and household labor is not.

According to the pay gap deniers, men work more than women and should therefore be paid more. On the surface, self-reported data collected by the Department of Labor seems to support this claim. Women do, on average, work 42 fewer minutes a day than men — if by “work,” you mean paid labor.

But that’s a big if.

Study after study shows that working women still take on far more unpaid labor in the home — in the United States, over four hours a day, compared to men’s 2.5.

Not only is unpaid labor, well… unpaid, it is not perceived by society as particularly worthy or important. “What is the economic value,” one commenter asked me, “of changing a diaper?”

Despite the fact that children are the most important resource for a country’s future economic growth, and despite the fact that caregiving comprises the backbone of our economy, all genders are still socialized to see childrearing and household management as work that happens “outside” the male-driven economic engine of business. And it is largely still “women’s work,” whether or not a woman also works outside the home.

Men often either flat-out deny this imbalance — hence, the term “invisible labor” — or justify it by asserting that their female partners have more flexible or less demanding jobs. A fascinating study outlined in All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership revealed that male doctors with female partners who were lawyers claimed their partners’ jobs were more flexible, while male lawyers with female partners who were doctors made the same claim.

Men often pitch in, of course — they too change diapers, cook dinner, and wear Ergos. But gender disparities in household labor are still stark, and even more stark in households with children. Men who work 42 minutes longer at their paying jobs than their female counterparts are still enjoying, on average 45 more minutes a day of leisure — and a heftier paycheck.

Myth: Women choose less demanding roles because they want to spend more time with their families.
As I entered my fourth decade of life, I was making moves in my career. I’d gotten a sizable raise and promotion at the end of my first year at a national nonprofit, and our executive team had nominated me as one of the country’s 50 emerging nonprofit leaders.

Then I had a baby.

I took off 10 weeks, only partially paid through disability insurance. After returning to work full-time, I left the house at 7 a.m. every morning and returned to my infant at 6 p.m. every evening. I cobbled together a few hours of sleep every night, then woke up to do it again.

At work, there was no more talk of promotions or raises. When my partner and I decided to move across the country, my request to work remotely was denied. Not long after, my former coworker, who had reported to me, told me he was thinking of moving across the country, too. “Do you think they’ll let me work remotely?” he wanted to know.

I told him probably not, but good luck.

Turns out, he didn’t need my good luck wishes. His request was not only approved, but shortly thereafter he became the director of my former department.

Women, and particularly working mothers, are not only penalized in their day jobs for their unpaid morning, afternoon, and evening shifts, but also for a persistent perception that they are less committed to their jobs, even if the evidence points to the contrary.

We are simply not “VP material” because our children cannot transport themselves home from daycare, and the daycare closes promptly at 5:30 p.m. Our children are also sometimes sick, and they cannot stay home unsupervised.

Who cares that we’re miraculously efficient? Who cares that we produce results? Who cares that we’re often the ones who are most excited to return to work on Monday morning after a chaotic weekend of errands, runny noses, and cold birthday party pizza?

The butts that are in the seats the longest are the butts that get rewarded, and unfortunately, our mommy butts often have to be in multiple places at once.

Closing the gender pay gap is partially about ensuring that women make as much as the equally (or less) qualified men sitting next to them. But it’s also about challenging a working culture that rewards long hours above all else. It’s about balancing gender ratios and pay scales across all industries. It’s about balancing paid and unpaid labor across all genders.

At the worker-owned co-op where I’m now employed, my fellow co-owners and I are tackling and untangling these knotty issues, one by one. Maybe we can’t solve them for everyone, but we can at least start solving them for 15 people, and we can offer a blueprint to others for doing the same.

In the meantime, I’ll happily accept the money I make when gender gap deniers hate-read my stories. I consider it back pay for the approximately $240,000 I’ve lost out on over the course of my own 20-year career.