Nursing is an occupation massively dominated by women. But the small fraction of nurses who are men earn substantially more than the women, according to an analysis of two large data sets:

Every year, each of the data sets found men earned more than women; the unadjusted pay gap ranged from $10,243 to $11,306 in one survey and from $9,163 to $9,961 in the other.There was a gap for hospital nurses, $3,783, and an even bigger one, $7,678, for nurses in outpatient settings.

Men out-earned women in every specialty except orthopedics, with the gap ranging from $3,792 in chronic care to $17,290 for nurse anesthetists.

Some of the usual possible explanations for how it’s totally not sexism apply, except that those explanations themselves typically involve some form of sexism, if not direct wage discrimination. So, yes, maybe women are more likely to work part-time (because they’re doing the work of caring for families that men don’t bother with).But given pay differentials this pervasive within one occupation (so we know it’s not that women make less because men are on Wall Street and women are secretaries) and across specialties within that occupation, a few of the “it’s not sexism because it’s really about women’s choices, which I am pretending are not constrained by sexism” excuses for the gender pay gap are eliminated. Which makes it just one more big glaring data point on the mile-long list of data points showing that women are systematically underpaid (or men are systematically overpaid) throughout the American economy.

This blog originally appeared on dailykos.com on March 24, 2015. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Laura Clawson is Daily Kos contributing editor since December 2006. Labor editor since 2011. Laura at Daily Kos