With Hillary Clinton now being a popular candidate for president, there has been a lot of talk about the equality of women in the workplace. One famous statistic that has been talked about is the wage gap. For those of you who don’t know about this statistic, it basically says that for every dollar a man earns, a woman earns about 77 cents for the same work. This statement, however, is a half-truth.

So let's start with how this number was calculated. According to Politifact, this number was worked out by taking the average income of women and dividing it by the average income of men. So this does make the wage gap true, except for the last part. This wage gap does not account for the other various variables. This includes education, experience, and various other factors. Do you honestly think we should pay a woman with a BS in education fresh out of college the same as a man with a Doctorate in education who has been in the field for 10+ years, or vice versa? There are also many other ways this statistic is misleading.

Another aspect the number doesn't take into account is what college degrees that women, as a whole, choose to pursue. According to Forbes, most women tend to choose majors that do not have a good return on investment. One degree that women choose more than men is education. On the other hand, more men choose engineering than women. When comparing what engineers make to teachers' income, I think we can all see the disparity between these two salaries. While engineers have an average salary of $66,437, teachers have an average salary of $44,679. This is also not the only example of field of study accounting for income disparity between men and women. Another example would be communications, which was named by salary.com as the degree with the worst return on investment, where about 69 percent of women dominate the workforce. The list doesn’t stop here, either; sociology, psychology, fine arts, and many more are all dominated by women. All of these degrees have bad returns on investment.

So in order to find the true wage gaps, we need to look at these career fields individually.

When you examine some of these fields individually, you actually see the opposite of the wage gap. Women who are media producers earn about 6.2 percent more than their male counterparts. Women who are special education teachers earn about 1 percent more than their male counterparts. Alternatively, women do earn significantly less than men in certain occupations. Women who are salespersons earn about 70 percent of what their male counterparts make. So what we really see when examining this is a mixed bag of both good and bad. Once again, however, these numbers are not really factoring in education or experience.

Another reason the 77-cent wage gap is misleading is that it fails to account for events like a leave of absence. According to the Pew organization, more women take time off work to take care of their families. About 39 percent of the women surveyed said that they took time off work to help with family events. Of this 39 percent, 27 percent said that they left their jobs altogether to help out at home. Only about 24 percent of men said that they took time off work to take care of their families. Of this 24 percent, only about 10 percent quit their jobs to take care of their families. So when considering that women take more time off work, it is apparent why there are some disparities when talking about annual wages.

I’d like to conclude by saying that I am against discrimination in all forms. I would call myself a humanist and egalitarian when addressing social issues like this. Having said that, the wage gap is extremely misleading. What’s even more troubling is that mainstream politicians like Hillary Clinton and President Obama can talk about these statistics without at least some journalist correcting them. I hope that as the election comes closer, the American press will look at these facts more closely.