What do you mean you say a profession is valued less? Do you want to suggest that it's done deliberately by someone or something?

The value of each profession is always a reflection of the market, that is, supply and demand. The employee always wants to be paid more and the employer always wants to pay as little as possible (regardless of the employee's gender).

If women were universally valued less as employees, that would just create a massive opportunity for companies hiring only women to have margins greater than their competitors. In a short time, many other companies would seize the same opportunity, increasing the demand for women's labor and thus normalizing the wages across gender.

My speculative take on this is that the biological differences between genders reflect on their average personality traits, making them choose jobs differently.

For being more competitive, men tend to pursue high-income careers and positions. Also, men have a predilection for things instead of people, which is a driver for choosing STEM careers. On the other hand, women gravitate more toward the humanities and don't focus so much on increasing their income. Of course there are plenty of exceptions, but on average, this seems to be the case.

I'm not well acquainted with the data and I don't think the data presented in this graph is useful at all to understand the issue (as I discussed in other comments). So I can't say I acknowledge that it exists.

I would say this is something that needs to be addressed if it was clear that women make less than men when performing exactly the same job, out of sheer discrimination.

By looking at this data alone, there could be so many different phenomena skewing the average. It could be that women prefer professions that make less money. It could be that women have a greater chance of stopping their careers to take care of their families. If that's the case, then the gap in the average is not an issue, IMO.

Yes, I do. All those services are useful and are paid for, they add value to people in society.

Just because you relate those jobs with public services (that you don't pay directly), it doesn't mean they couldn't be priced properly by the market.

I think the problem in your understanding is assuming any salary should be measured or "justified" by anything other than the income generated by the employee.

In capitalism, prices come from the market process: supply and demand, that's it.

If that's the case, the gap would show up when normalizing for industry or sector. Actually, there might come nice insights from those normalizations.

Very insightful. Considering what you said, would the next step in the analysis be to normalize all salaries by dividing by the profession average?

I don't think it makes sense to compare absolute pay gaps. At least, present it together with a percentual value and sort the countries by the relative gap.

Your economics analysis is ignoring the price factor.

If a significant amount of people didn’t eat meat 1 day a week, demand goes down, price goes down, many people will buy more meat, demand stays more or less the same, supply stays the same.

You'd be shocked how many people would barbecue everyday if they could.