Parents save more for their sons' college educations than their daughters'

Women earn less than men. They invest less than men. They end up in college majors that lead to jobs with lower salaries.

And it all starts with their parents' college funds.

Two studies recently found that parents save less for their daughters' college educations than they do for their sons'. As highlighted in a Wall Street Journal story, a study by T. Rowe Price examined families who had all boys and families who had all girls.

The families who only had boys saved more for college than the families who only had girls. Fifty percent of households with boys saved money for college, compared to only 39 percent of households with girls. And 83 percent of families with boys contributed to college savings monthly, while only 70 percent of families with girls did. This all stood up no matter how many children the families had.

A study by the student loan marketplace LendEDU looked at college graduates. Ten percent of men said their parents paid for most of their college educations, while only 6 percent of women said the same. Fifty percent of women said their parents paid nothing toward their college educations, and only 43 percent of men said the same.

Experts speculated that this gap could be because of parents' outdated expectations for their daughters' financial lives and careers—that they'll take time off from the workforce and won't earn back the investment in their educations—or because of a paternalistic faith that girls will get their own academic merit scholarships.

“I don’t think parents are going to admit to their 18-year-old daughter that they don’t want to pay as much for her education because they are thinking 10 years down the road to her wedding, but it’s an unfortunate reality," college admissions expert Shereem Herndon-Brown told the Wall Street Journal.

It's all related. If parents are subconsciously burdening their daughters with more student loan debt, or pushing them toward less expensive and less prestigious schools, or planning ahead to weddings, that's one way to perpetuate the gender pay gap.

Make sure those 529 plans are distributed equally.