Until the gender gap in pay is closed, women will continue to carry a much larger burden in financing their educations than will men.  Wage discrimination based on gender is real.  It can be attributed to many factors: (a) the types of jobs and industries that women traditionally choose to work in, nurturing types of jobs such as nursing and teaching, are not as highly valued in our culture as other predominently male jobs and industries, such as transportation and sales; (b) selection practices that reduce the chances of women being hired, such as focusing on GPA, administering assessment tests with known gender biases, or harboring and fostering stereotyping during interview assessments through lack of interviewer training, all reduce a woman's ability to obtain work; and (c) outright unequal compensation for a women with the same credentials and experience, who works side-by-side male colleagues, performing the same jobs, which continues to be a problem dispite the Lilly Ledbetter Act of 2009. 

When it comes to gaining the right credentials to become a competitive worker in the United States, women are now educating themselves at a higher rate than men are (roughly 57% of college graduates are now women). Women are also being charged the same amount of tuition as men, yet when it comes to testing the value of their education and credentials in the markets, women are still coming up short.  Why is this?  This is because employers have not been properly incentivised to halt their unfair practices, and because as a culture, we have failed to value the work that women traditionally perform as highly as we value traditionally male jobs.  

Women spend more time out of work over their lifetimes then do men, due to family responsibilities and also due to longer job searches from having to overcome unfair hiring practices.  Women outlive men by an average of five years, too, yet they typically do not have the same retirement funding set aside as do men toward the end of their lives, due to not having been in the workforce and not having contributed to their retirement funds as long as men.

If women are going to continue to be paid $0.77 per each dollar that men make, then they should have a reduced principle on their federal student loans, to make their educations more affordable and of equal value to what they will be compensated in the markets.  To ask colleges and universities directly to reduce the cost of tuition for some programs, or for female tuition, would be nothing short of detrimental to women's chances of being treated fairly within educational systems.  Therefore, it is up to the federal government to correct this 23% shortage in women's earnings by first reducing the principle cost of their student loans.  

Each year, federal student loans for women should continue to be adjusted according to the gender wage gap, until this gap is eradicated.  I propose that in 2012, all federal student loans owned by females should have their outstanding principle reduced to 77% of their current value; and each year thereafter, each new federal student loan owned by a female should automatically be adjusted to that year's statistically verifiable gender wage gap rate.