"It's real" and "it's not real" are both poor explanations of gender pay gaps that aren't educational. Claudia Goldin won a Nobel last year partly for explaini

"It's real" and "it's not real" are both poor explanations of gender pay gaps that aren't educational. Claudia Goldin won a Nobel last year partly for explaining them - a rough summary is whether women work has changed over time (highest when everyone was a farmer, lowest 1950sish, now up again), the pay gap does exist currently and appears to be caused by having children, and prior to having children the current generation of women are paid more likely due to being more educated than men. The "it doesn't exist" argument is something like "it doesn't exist if you control for job choice and seniority level", which is an example of conditioning on a collider because those things are /caused by/ motherhood, so you can't control for them.