I made everything much more confusing by making a typo in my first sentence. I meant to refer to group 1 (it's corrected now). I agree that group 2 exhibits wag

I made everything much more confusing by making a typo in my first sentence. I meant to refer to group 1 (it's corrected now). I agree that group 2 exhibits wage discrimination. It was group 1 one or a variant thereof that I meant to discuss: this group presumably values women equally to men [1], hence wants to exploit the wage gap as the GP suggested by hiring mostly women and hence getting ~30% more for their hiring dollars. You proposed that this group would be knowingly paying women less, therefore acting both unethically (depending on your ethical view of the matter, anyway) and opening themselves up to legal liability. I'm saying that this group can just offer positions close to the lower going rate for women: this would presumably result in them hiring mostly women (and some men due to variance, etc). As long as all hiring and wage decisions are gender-blind however, they would not be discriminating - they are only "passively" taking advantage of the gap via their range of salary offers. --- [1] I.e., to them the wage gap is not logical hence women are being underpaid.