It's not because women aren't being given more opportunities, what with them more likely to go to college, more scholarships towards them, graduate from college, and more likely to be hired out of college for the same credentials as a man and even outearn men if they don't have a kid in their first 10 yrs of their career...
No, there is no "barrier" stopping women from outearning men, and if anything, we massively incentivize more women to go into STEM and they actively choose not to.
Why? Because STEM is boring and the classes are hard and probably 90% of the reason people go into it is because they want the money. I have about a dozen software engineer friends...none of them can tell me wholeheartedly they "love" it, and most would admit they only did it for the money. So why would men prioritize higher paying fields that are boring? Because men are JUDGED in the dating market based on what they do for a living, and Freud was a very clever man, because sex and future relationship status is a very large motivator for both men and women. Dozens of studies show that women only want to date up and across socio-economically while guys typically date across and down.
And it's mostly agreed upon WOMEN are the gender that primarily decides the rules of dating dynamics with guys needing to adjust to their preferences. So women's own standards prioritize high earning men, making getting a high paying job in a boring field you don't give a damn about a much higher priority, while men prioritize no such thing in women. If anything, most women who make more money than men don't want to date them anyways, so it's not like a guy who works as an Amazon delivery guy stands a snowballs chance in hell at dating a doctor/lawyer anyways.
