Untruths that sound reasonable are most dangerous. Desiree Dudley's letter Wednesday regarding the gender wage gap is a prime example.

Dudley warns against misleading statistics, but proceeds to cite just such a statistic. A study "reveals," she writes, "that when you control for age, education, occupation or experience, women without children earn 98 cents to the man's dollar."

Nowhere does Dudley ask what this qualification actually means. It means that a woman who can act just like a man will get paid almost as much as a man. It means that pregnancy is a huge detriment to one's career path, and, until men start getting pregnant, this means women will bear the economic costs of reproduction.

American business is built around an assumption that workers are unencumbered by responsibilities such as child-care, elder-care, and housework.

In other words, it assumes workers are male.

That is sexism, and it is systematic, not isolated. Dudley chalks this all up to "free will," the mantra of objectivism. Apparently anything short of being tied up or held at gun-point is freedom as far as she is concerned. I think most people, however, if they reflect on their own lives, will recognize the incredible power of social and economic pressures in narrowing options and restricting freedom.

Until social responsibilities are equally shared by men and women, women will continue to be economically and socially handicapped by their sex. If it looks like sexist discrimination, and it acts like sexist discrimination.