The wage gap exists only because most women want cushy desk jobs and dont often choose careers requiring higher education or intensive labor.
I feel like you're talking about the actual wage gap as opposed to the adjusted wage gap.
No one cares about the actual wage gap. When people are complaining about discrepancy, they're talking about the adjusted statistics. When account for ALL the things you've brought up there is still a 5% gap in overall pay between the sexes(?). So right away, that's actually a big deal. Let's be clear, 5% is a big number. In a standard work year of 260 days, women are only being paid for aprox. 247. In other words, it's the equivalent of having to work for no pay for a full day slightly over once a month.
Not the most egregious discrepancy, but let's not act like that isn't a big deal.
Now it's actually worse than that, because the actual vs. adjusted takes into account one thing that is pretty obviously biased but never gets talked about: time worked.
1) Maternity leave. One of two factors that accounts for the different hours is maternity leave. Women can't physically work as long as men because they have to take time off to give birth. A man has just as much responsibility in a baby being born, but practically they don't bear the brunt of the downsides like women do.
And yes, this is an issue. Society needs a steady birth rate to function. You can't penalize women for doing something that keeps society functioning. (Japan). That's the whole push for stronger protections for maternity leave. It is important and "adjusting" time spent off for maternity leave is ludicrous.
And I want to be clear on this point. This isn't a choice. From a macro-societal perspective, women don't have a choice here. It is absolutely necessary that women have babies and take maternity leave. You can point to single individuals and say, "they have a choice", but if you give EVERYONE a choice, then society collapses. So that's great policy making there.
2) Opportunity of time. Men work overtime more than women. Sure. But also, men are OFFERED overtime more than women. You can't just blanket adjust for pay gap when women are denied the opportunity to work as many hours as men. If men are given more hours, then no duh, they're going to work more hours.
MATH
Even if we take the low end numbers and say 5% as a baseline (the accepted amount of sexism in the adjusted pay discrepancy), that's still pretty significant. If 5% of the time men are offered an 8 hour overtime shift when women are not, that's a problem and it adds up.
40/8 = 20%. 20%x 1.5 (rate of pay for overtime)= 1 shift is +30% of base pay. Only happens 5% of the time so +1.5%.
So now we're at a pay differential of 6.5%, not 5.
But wait! There's maternity leave.
There are, let's say, 160 M works. Half are women. So you have 80M workers who take maternity leave at a rate of 70% for 10 weeks.
Men on the other hand 80m at 40% at 1 week. (Rounding to make things simple)
So the base discrepancy of having a child between the two is a difference of 35 days for women (7 weeks) for women - 2 days for men.
The impact of a child is a difference of 33 days worked.
We'll say the family has 2.5 children over the course of their lifetime, then you have a difference of aprox. 83 days lost by women in the work force over the course of their life time carrying out a completely necessary function.
83 days
42 years before retirement on average
Divide the totals (Expected years before retirement) and you end up with a lifetime loss of about 1%. So add that on.
Now we're a CONSERVATIVE pay differential of 2.5% + 5.
Women make, on average, 7.5% less money than men. Once again, best case scenario for these numbers. The reality is probably somewhere between 8.5 - 10%. Varying on industry.
CONCLUSION
I'd be pissed about making 5% less money than someone else just because. But it's worse than that. I'm tired and don't want to go into it, but if you take into account COST differential and the fact that it's just frankly more expensive to be a woman (health insurance anyone?) then looking at it as a pure standard of living adjustment, the pay gap is well above 10%.
But hey. I'm sure if your boss came in and said, "I'm going to pay you 10% less because the color of your skin", you'd be super cool with it. It's not lie he's paying you 30% less.