There are certain divides in the American electorate that we return to over and over again to explain why people think and vote the way they do. Age, gender, race, education — you know the drill. But other, harder-to-see divisions can be just as important, if not more so. Those hidden divisions aren’t about vital statistics or affiliations. They’re about how people see the world.

Women in the United States continue to earn less than men, on average. Among full-time, year-round workers in 2019, women’s median annual earnings were 82% those of men.

The gender wage gap is narrower among younger workers nationally, and the gap varies across geographical areas. In fact, in 22 of 250 U.S. metropolitan areas, women under the age of 30 earn the same amount as or more than their male counterparts, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data.

The COVID-19 recession resulted in a steep but transitory contraction in employment, with greater job losses among women than men. The recovery began in April 2020 and is not complete. As of the third quarter of 2021, the labor force ages 25 and older remains nearly 2 million below its level in the same quarter of 2019.

In a finding sure to shock those who claim that women are systemically underpaid, Google discovered through an internal company study that among men and women performing similar tasks, more men than women were underpaid.

The New York Times reports that after Google discovered the disparity, the company paid out $9.7 million in additional compensation to 10,677 employees, with what the Times called a “disproportionately higher percentage of the money” going to men.

Google during its annual review of wage equality at the company found that it had been underpaying some male engineers in 2018.

The company quickly corrected course, compensating the men equally to their female peers after the wage analysis identified the discrepancy.

"The 2018 analysis flagged one particularly large job code, Level 4 Software Engineer, for adjustments," Google wrote in a Monday blog post. "Within this job code, men were flagged for adjustments because they received less discretionary funds than women."

SAN FRANCISCO — When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found, to the surprise of just about everyone, that men were paid less money than women for doing similar work.

The study, which disproportionately led to pay raises for thousands of men, is done every year, but the latest findings arrived as Google and other companies in Silicon Valley face increasing pressure to deal with gender issues in the workplace, from sexual harassment to wage discrimination.

We disagree as a country on every possible cultural and political point except, perhaps, one: that private life, as a result, has also become its own fresh hell.

A Silicon Valley culture war pitting liberal-leaning tech firms against a small conservative cohort took on new intensity on Tuesday after Google fired a male engineer for a memo that decried the company's commitment to hiring women.

That his sexist manifesto even gained traction at the company suggests its workplace culture has a long way to go. On Saturday, Motherboard reported that an anti-diversity manifesto penned by James Damore, a software engineer at Google, had gone “internally viral” at the company—and then, after Gizmodo obtained and published the 10-page document, it went viral-viral. The screed aired its author’s qualms with diversity and inclusion initiatives at Google, programs he deemed a waste of time because women are inherently less suited for technical roles than men.

So, Google is a leftist company.

That's no surprise. All you'd have to do to verify that fact is watch the rotating Google doodles throughout the year. They frequently feature social justice warriors, leftist causes celebres and random slaps at religion. Or you could check its search results, which tend to favor leftist causes and politicians over conservative ones.