This is incredibly strawmanny, but it's probably worth replying to briefly at least. Something interesting about it is that it is written from a perspective of

This is incredibly strawmanny, but it's probably worth replying to briefly at least. Something interesting about it is that it is written from a perspective of super-naive, super-optimistic views of capitalism where competition is perfect and actors are always rational. > Another one: women are paid less than men for the same work. If this were the case, companies would - because they could do an equivalent job to a man for less money - simply hire all women workforces which due to their lower wage bill would outcompete and destroy companies that employed men. Yet - again somewhat inconveniently! - the real world refuses to match the theory. The most immediate example of how this is a silly oversimplification is that your hypothetical company is restricted to a fraction of the talent pool (the particular fraction will depend on the industry and the demographs of the education/training pipeline for it). Assume a neutral distribution of applicants, and you're still trying to outperform the competition with 50% fewer potential hires. You could be paying less, leading to lower costs, but you can do less if your workforce is half the size, so you probably aren't going to "destroy" everyone else. For certain industries, and certain demographics, this seems to happen. Agriculture seems to be an example. But it's naive to claim that the lack of, say, an all-female legal firm "destroying" other law firms is an indication that there aren't salary gaps. Another thing to consider is that in industries where the margins aren't razor-thin, the differences would likely be absorbed - and thus essentially hidden from market effects - in top-end profits instead of being passed on to customers.