Ok, I can appreciate skepticism. But do you have any arguments to advance yourself? Wage gaps are hugely complex, and the stats put out by the labor department (fuck Glassdoor, whatever) are both controlled, detailed, and fairly damning. Women make less on average in almost every field, women are employed less in high paying jobs, and the jobs that are heavily weighted towards women do not pay nearly as much. I don't understand how people can brush off single statistics while ignoring the absolutely massive cache of freely available evidence.
Also, starving people of hours is just as effective at reducing costs as lowering the hourly. I don't think it's in your favor to argue that's something that should be controlled.
I suppose you can hand-wave the aggregate results away if you're comfortable with that 3-6% gap. But your argument basically amounts to "what matters to you doesn't matter to me, so I consider it insignificant".
I do consider 3-6% damning.
If you only compare women to other women, of course you won't see a wage gap; you can blame it all on the individual.
It's this willingness to value personal views of the world to minimize the facts that allows the gap to continue. Do you really think you can reason about systemic discrimination by looking at the individual? That's as ineffable as wondering why some people win the lotto; individuals are dominated by noise, and you only see the disparity in aggregate.
Why bother commenting if you don't care about the wage gap?
The shitty part is the gap, not the explanation. Are you seriously defending a wage gap because you're skeptical about why it exists? That's why it exists.
At no point did I state I thought the wage gap is entirely due to sexism. although, I do argue it is evident sexism; I believe that still requires argument on your part that it's clearly not.
The claim is that women (im aggregate) make different life choices than men, and once we account for those, the "wage gap" disappears.
I honestly don't see anything wrong with different life choices leading to different outcomes, since the same is true within genders! That is, there's nothing sexist about that fact.
The truth is the people advocating for equalizing pay when the sexes make different choices are arguing for sexism, not against sexism.
The only sexist thing here is your support of a baseless claim.
If it's not baseless, presumably you have something to offer.
However, without evidence, you are most likely wrong. Does that wrongness amount to sexism? Hard to say; my inclination says yes since you're referring to shuffling hundreds of dimensions defining employment into "life choices". Yes, that is probably a factor; culture is a powerful force. But it's also probably not the only factor; there are likely myriad explanations. Are you blind to that, or just dismissive?
The only contention I have is one you agreed to elsewhere: that the actual aggregate wage-gap once you've controlled for common variables (such as life choices) is 3-6% (with women earning more in some fields), which likely isn't significant or correctable.
A difference on that magnitude can easily be something about aggregate behavior correlated to sex, an uncontrolled for variable, or just random chance.
So let me ask you: do you have any evidence that 3-6% gap is the result of sexism instead of merely being a fact correlated to sex? (Particularly if we were to confine the data to people under 40, to control for historical biases that take time to age out.)
To be clear, I am not accepting that margin; I'm simply regrettably far from my spreadsheet for 2015 to which I can refer. My objections are a) the assumption "life choice" is NOT a sexist dog whistle, that b) you're talking about aggregate wage gap, which reduces the situation into a single statistic, and c) that a sex linked difference isn't worth addressing even if it does have a dominating effect in today's economy (which I doubt, and evidence is weak at best).
However, there is abundant evidence that there's a systemic divide in opportunities. This is easy to see in the aggregate and particular. That is the interesting thing in itself: if we could be assured that the gap could sexist solely for life choices, this wouldn't be an interesting topic. That's a devilishly hard thing to argue for, however, so id prefer to move forward as a society assuming that we can do more to expose opportunities to everyone, assure that people are protected in their right to follow opportunities, and that we can demonstrate the effect of the policies at moving toward an ideal of equal pay.
If we can't move towards that, perhaps our ideal, well, isn't what society wants. I doubt that we've even approached that level of confidence in our support of communities subject to subtle bias difficult to divorce from "life choices".
I object to the contention that there arent biology correlated preferences and differences (such as attribute variance) which will cause biases in the distribution of labor and aptitude, which likely will always cause some form of imbalance in statistics. I also object to the notiom that we want equal outcomes rather than equal opportunity (even though that is harder to measure).
That being said, I think we should generally imrpove sexist behavior and systems, which hurt both sexes (albeit, in different ways).
I just think the "wage gap" is one of the least sexist fascets of modern society (if at 3-6%), and mostly represents people perpetuating a misunderstanding of statistics. So in that way, I feel like people are over-solving a mostly solved problem, which seems likely to lead to more sexism, not less.
I think that effort spent on fixing the larger issues are also likely to stabilize remaining issues with wages, and we would all be better served focusing on the large gaps in other statistics instead of the small one here.
That said, Im always happy to see new statistics that tell me Im full of shit, so if you find what you're looking for, please post it.
Also, starving people of hours is just as effective at reducing costs as lowering the hourly. I don't think it's in your favor to argue that's something that should be controlled.