Masculinity includes when men are present, provide and protect in a male and female relationship. Due to basic science, women have always had the responsibility of bearing children and childbirth. As a result of this fact of life, in times of childbearing or birth, men tend to have the responsibility of taking care of the family financially. Men are known to provide for their significant other during times of pregnancy in an ideal relationship, while over the course of history, women have had children in order to sustain the world’s population. Because women have the responsibility of childbirth, they generally have been less prominent in dominant roles and less likely to have on average higher incomes in the workplace than males. Overtime, men have generally been trained to take care of themselves and dependents financially more often than females due to women childbearing. The wage gap exists between men and women in the workforce as a result of the childbearing and the roles and responsibilities of males and females correspondingly. Providing more opportunities to women for business success and higher incomes is one solution for the natural responsibility given to women to make families. The wage gap could be closed within individual businesses if employers would offer men and women in the same position the same income regardless of the sex. As a result, the burden of childbearing would be compensated for by an equal opportunity workforce. Training and communication could be used to ensure business best practices.
It's true in classical societies, since a few decades it's not anymore and the birth rate of most developped societies tend to collapse. Furthermore, a large part of families are fatherless, father and men are more today an optionnal second mother that someone with a real role. Your point seems to assume there is no major different psychological/neurological differences between men and women, and that most differences are a consequence of education. That's the dominant opinion in our societies today, yet, it's possibly false. At first eye, there is no noticeable difference between men and women, and it was the dominant opinion among neurologist until the last decades. https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html There would be a lot to discuss about the so-called wage gape, and sorry, but I'm not motivated to start that debate again. I won't answer on that point. In a short, I would call most of this concept a vast fraud.
The wage Gap doesn't exist there is an earnings Gap. I'll explain the difference. It is illegal to pay a woman less then a man for the same work. That is a wage. Women in general are less than men because they don't work as much as men. Beaches careers and jobs that pay less, they don't put in as much overtime. But on an hour to hour basis they are paid the same if they work the same job.
They understand this, they reject it. It undermines their orthodoxy and ideology. It's like how flat earthers deny the curvature of the Earth. This can't be true if their ideology is to be believed. It's called disgust based thinking and it's essentially the way Puritans operate. If I don't understand it or it goes against the orthodoxy it's evil/racist/misogynistic/somesortofphobic. Misogyny is just their version of a heretic.