'NCCommish said:
This was when comparing the same jobs and career paths. And yes I know there are lots of studies and generally they come to the same conclusion. Women face discrimination in hiring and pay. Sorry I didn't cite every one ever done.
No, they don't come to that conclusion. The conclusion they reach is that there's about an 8% income gap that correlates with gender and isn't explained by quantifiable factors like years of education, years of job experience, marital status, number of children, etc. It's not possible to attribute all of that remaining gap to discrimination because there are a bunch of other factors that correlate with both gender and wages and which are hard or impossible to control for. For example, it is well-known that women, on average, tend to accept job offers without negotiating, whereas men are more likely to bargain for higher salaries. When you consider that a "counter-offer" of something in the 10% range is completely standard and acceptable, it's theoretically possible that this phenomenon could account for the entire unexplained wage gap. (It's highly unlikely that it explains the whole thing because some women do bargain and some men don't, and not all counter-offers are successful, but any honest observer is going to concede that it explains at least a decent chunk of the unexplained gap).
Furthermore, men tend to be more competitive and career-driven than women. This has nothing to do with labor discrimination, but is more of a sociological fact of life, and when you take this into consideration, you would completely expect it to result in some difference in mean salaries.
Finally, women tend to attach a greater importance to fringe benefits and flexible jobs than men do. If you have two groups of workers, and one cares about both salary and flexible hours (say) whereas the other group cares only or mainly about salary, of course the second group is going to end up with higher average salaries. There are studies out there that attempt ot look at total compensation as opposed to just salary/wages, but it's hard to quantify this sort of thing, especially since the problem is being driven by the fact that people place a different subjective value on things like maternity leave.
We could keep going with this, but you get the idea. Once you start to subtract these sorts of issues from the 8% unexplained wage gap, or even the 10% gap that you proposed, you're not left with much that could even possibly be attributed to discrimination. In other words, are there some instance of discrimination out there? Sure. Is there enough to show up as an important social issue statistically? Almost certainly not.