I’m learning to undo the life I’ve built around agendas and the expectations of others. While I’m sorry for ignoring and starving my soul for so long, I feel fortunate that I can now begin building a relationship and honor it by honoring the calling I feel deep within me. This is all a learning process, but I’m finding out that the first steps are to recognize ways my soul is communicating to me through little nudges. Apparently, an enraged response to a Facebook troll about the gender pay gap is one such nudge.

One of the ways your soul beckons you is through passion. When something brings you so much excitement and an intense emotion and you feel an internal flame igniting your energy.

While I didn’t recently discover my passion for justice and equality for women (and all human beings), events of this year have served to remind me of this passion and launching me in that direction. Anyway, I wanted to share with you one such moment where I felt that passion and channeled it into the perfect response to a former co-worker trolling the comments in social media. I’m still proud of especially proud of my response and it’s really a shame that it’s been buried on my Facebook page.

It all started when I posted a satirical video about how women still make 77 cents to a man’s dollar, when this gentleman had an opinion to insert:

Brevity has never been my strong suit… so there were 2 replies full of logic thrown at this guy (although, I was very polite about it). Here’s my full response:

“You’re right that there are a number of different variables that should be considered with the pay inequality measurement, career choice and industry being the primary ones. However, those differences only explain roughly 30% of the gap in pay inequality. The rest can’t be explained by those variables. Additionally, simply because those variables exist, doesn’t mean there isn’t a pay inequality issue. In fact, they’re a big part of the problem.”

“In any case, although it is an average, that 77% is accurate as it measures earnings of full time workers of similarly qualified roles by gender while all other factors remain equal. Job type isn’t a valid argument either, as averages for individual industries also reflect similar, sometimes worse, pay inequality for comparable jobs and skill levels for full time workers. These pay gaps exist across nearly every industry, level of employment, and skill level. Concerning career and life choices, there is actually evidence that men and women express the same range of desires for jobs, income, family values, work life balance, etc., and as the information above shows, very little of these variables can be accounted for in the pay gap between genders.

Also, the gender pay gap isn’t shrinking as much as you might think, or even as much as the author cites. It’s really only improving for women in top pay classes and leadership positions in the US.

I’m still waiting for the part where any Mr. Worstall’s article applies to the US. Be careful with the editorials you mistake for fact on the internet. His article specifically relates to erroneous reportings in the UK, not the US.”

If you’re interested in reading up on this, here’s an exceptional paper that explains many of the points I’m referring to in this post: http://www.nber.org/papers/w21913

And, of course, here’s the video that began all the drama: