you are comparing women with other women but the other poster was comparing men with women, so I think you are both coming from different angles.
There is a huge gap between what women can earn and what men earn when they are doing the SAME type of jobs. There is also, if you are completely unaware, huge gaps in education between men and women, men were typically allowed to access higher education while women were shut out and told to stay at home. Many men are in management positions while few women are. and even a case that was reported this month in my own country, banks were treating widows unfairly and freezing their bank accounts upon their husbands death because they only dealt with the husband as if the wife had no say in the finances as a couple.
When talking about if widows are being treated unfairly, you look at the group most similar to widows to control for as many potential factors as possible. So if we wonder if widows are being discriminated against we look at how widows are treated compared to married women who still have their husbands. If we think women are discriminated against then we look at them compared to non-women (which until recently at least meant men).
The wage gap (once compared in the same job rather than adding up all women and all men and looking at averages) is mostly a fallacy and what isn't a fallacy is best explained by 1) work hours and experience (since women are much more likely than men to take or have taken several years off to raise children and also more likely to work fewer hours per week to handle child care responsibilities) and 2) Women (across the board) tend to be higher in the trait agreeableness (look up the big 5 personality traits) which means that they tend to be worse at negotiation and asking for raises. BTW the bigger gaps seen when compared across professions are because men tend to go into the professions that pay more and work with things while women tend towards lower paying more interpersonal jobs (should those jobs be lower valued is another (valid) question entirely but there isn't a simple solution for that, how do you dictate to people what they must value and how much?).
The education gaps between men and women have mostly been redressed in western countries at least so if we wait a generation then we should see the effects of that disparity start to disappear (and realistically in the west, it already pretty much has in the younger half of the workforce). Seriously I'm going to be 39 this year and when I was a kid, girls were routinely told they could be anything they wanted (in fact I remember a third grade teacher "correcting" our school play career choices when it seemed like all the girls would rather be cooks than construction workers or police / firefighters (those were the three my class got, I was disappointed we didn't have scientists because science was super interesting so that's what I'd rather have been). And there was no shortage of girls in any of my classes. So in the Western world there is no longer an access education gap between men and women (now some people even talk about the war on boys and how education is geared towards a female temperment and treats boys like defective girls).
As for the bank thing. If the account were only in the husband's name and he was the sole account holder, then the bank probably should have frozen the account on the account holder's death until the formalities of the estate were sorted. If it was a joint account then the wife, widow should already have access to it as an account holder so it wouldn't make much sense to freeze the account (though I could see cause for it in a potentially nasty inheritance battle). That's a legal distinction over who holds the account (granted that's what I understand of US law (which isn't much) and other countries may be different).