Salary Inequalities Down to Underselling?

NBR reports; senior recruitment consultant Megan Alexander stating that equalities in salary between men and women continue because of women 'underselling themselves':

"“What I do see is that women take themselves out of higher-paying jobs because of the other choices they make in their personal lives ... I do think that women need to learn to sell themselves better … they sell themselves short in a lot of instances, they don’t talk about what they can bring to the role enough"

Stopping short of the words 'absolute bollocks' I do find this hard to swallow. Coyness and lack of confidence in employment situations, I believe, is surely down to the individual and certainly not gender sensitive. For me, salary inequalities continue to favour men because our culture has a history of male dominance in politics, business, and society. The gusto of Women's rights and equality movements are still very much an invention of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and although progress has been made in baby steps (notably through the Right to Vote movement at the turn of the century, Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and beyond) culture - unfortunetly - still evolves at the pace of baby steps. This may seem obvious, but that's kinda my point.

I am by no means excusing such inequalities and am as much an advocate of equal pay as any sensical person. Yet, although I find the argument that women still don't enjoy equal pay because they undersell themselve valid (to an extent), it is totally ignorant of the institutions in place that allow such inequalities to exist.

A smile and commanding request for a pay rise isn't going to change the trends of history

EDIT: Also, as an afterthought, trends show that both men and women are sacrificing their personal lives to pursue healthier careers (delaying childbirth etc.), and not vice versa as Alexander suggests.