I used to work in the financial industry, specifically in a program geared toward women (trying to make financial services more approachable and inclusive). Much of their published "educational" material is about the harsh financial realities of being a woman, and the writers keep repeating this falsehood ... as if the phrase "controlled pay gap" is profanity.
Don't get me wrong, we should still be mindful of bias. We should acknowledge the pressure on women to take career breaks as caretakers (and, on the flip side, the pressure on men to be primary wage earners). And it's perfectly valid to question whether pink collar work is undervalued and underpaid because these are traditionally female occupations.
But the women I worked with (most of them VPs in finance) simply preferred to believe that they were underpaid because of their gender. No matter what dollar figure you offered, no matter the industry/company/job role/etc., they would firmly believe that having a penis = 20% pay bump.
That thing is more about collapsing options as time moves on though. When you're a kid you really can be 'anything' ignoring social and economic stuff. The probability curve is pretty open to anything at that point though. Once you're thirty it feels squarely like that is less true and my options are clearer but more limited.
It's scary but also awesome that you have so many open doors as a kid and adults that say this are mostly envying something they've lost and didn't appreciate or see until later