When ideological conviction forces you to ignore the very evidence you are presenting.

A fascinating example of how ideological, non-evidence based thinking can lead you unintentionally astray.

From Your bank's pink tax: Women pay nearly 20% more in bank fees than men do by Kate Gibson. As written, headline and article, it appears that banks are exploiting women, charging them more than men.

Women not only make less than men, they also pay nearly 20% more in check-bouncing fees and other bank charges, ranging from fees for ATM use to late payments and minimum balances. That's according to the banking-and-investing app Stash, which tracked the bank transactions of 500,000 users and found that men users pay $182 a year in bank fees and penalties, while women users pay $214, or about 18% more.

So what the article is actually saying is that women use the ATM more, make late payments more often and fail to maintain minimum account balance more often. For failing to do what is required, they pay the same penalties as men but, because they fail more often, they end up paying more in aggregate.

So actually there is no pink tax at all. No charge for being a woman. There is a charge for using ATMs, for being late in your payments and for not maintaining a minimum balance. No pink tax, just penalties for bad financial management.

In trying to make women seem like victims of a pink tax, Gibson is actually indirectly publicizing financial mismanagement.

Apparently this is not because of income issues. Women across the salary spectrum are more irresponsible than men.

Those with lower incomes were hardest hit, according to the findings, which were based on 205 million transactions over the past year involving externally linked bank accounts by more than half a million Stash users. Women making less than $25,000 a year pay 23% more in fees each year while those making between $50,000 and $100,000 pay 16% more in annual bank penalties, reported Stash.

Demonstrating a rather astonishing incapacity to process their own data, and I guess subject to an ideological belief:

One possible conclusion is that the banking cost disparity is yet another damaging result of the gender pay gap, which leaves women more likely to let their accounts fall below zero, according to Brandon Krieg, the company's CEO and co-founder.

Anything is possible but if you have just demonstrated that both poor and high income women incur higher charges as a result of bad financial habits, it is a little hard to then conclude that this somehow related to a gender pay gap. A pay gap which also does not exist.

If women earning $100,000 a year are incurring 16% more ATM fees, minimum balance penalties, and late payment penalties, that cannot have anything to do with a putative gender pay gap.

The balance of the article is a reiteration of long disproved claims about a gender pay gap which does not exist.

And all this is from CBS News, purportedly a reliable information source rather than a peddler of ideological drivel, fake news, and cognitive pollution.

How did an article containing the evidence in its first paragraph which disproves the thesis it is trying to advance in the rest of the article get through not only the muddled writer but the editors? Bubble effect? 27-year-old-know-nothings, no editors? Who knows?

Which is a pity. Stepping off from the ideology train for a moment, you are left with an interesting conundrum.

If women are managing their financial matters more poorly, why is that happening? Especially if it is happening regardless of income level. Poor financial education? Poor self-management behaviors? Lack of familial instruction on financial management? Genetic dispositions?

All are at least theoretically plausible but it is important to find out what the actual cause is. If we know that, it can be addressed. Better education on financial management, better awareness of consequences, etc. It looks like a solvable problem.

But if the false conclusion is that women are the victims of discrimination, you will fail to solve that problem. Because discrimination is not the cause of the ATM fees, minimum balance penalties, and late payment penalties. It is behavior. And behavior can be improved.