Multiple things can be true at the same time: - on average there is a pay gap - not all of it is an apples-to-apples comparison of job/experience/hours - not

Multiple things can be true at the same time: - on average there is a pay gap - not all of it is an apples-to-apples comparison of job/experience/hours - not all of it results from discrimination Put another way: is all of that pay gap due to "sexism"/"discrimination"? If not, then simply removing discrimination won't necessarily result in equality. What else might be at play, and what does that mean for public policy? As an example, this study (https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bolotnyy/files/be_gendergap.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bolotnyy/files/be_genderga...): > Mechanically, the earnings gap can be explained in our setting by the fact that men take 48% fewer unpaid hours off and work 83% more overtime hours per year than women. The reason for these differences is not that men and women face different choice sets in this job. Rather, it is that women have greater demand for workplace flexibility and lower demand for overtime work hours than men. These gender differences are consistent with women taking on more of the household and childcare duties than men, limiting their work availability in the process (Parker et al., 2015; Bertrand et al., 2015). The original (provocative) "80 cents" statement seems to imply that the problem is simply solved by making sure we don't discriminate in pay (or perhaps just boost women's pay to compensate, or, as I described here, offer higher referral bonuses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890123) and that's that, we've solved it. But it sounds like there's more to it, doesn't it? See also "why is there a gender pay gap" (https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality-by-gender#why-is-there-a-gender-pay-gap https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality-by-gender#why...), which discusses various adjustments, which in that dataset (contemporaneous with Scott's post, coincidentally) brings it to roughly 90 percent. So right off the bat there exists "well, actually, it's closer to 90 cents when adjusting for..." To me it was an inflammatory way to say, "for a happier life, just smile and nod and do not engage with the topic", set up to provoke exactly the sort of internet back-and-forth to illustrate the point. Parent at least tries to look for some good faith, whereas its sibling straight out yells that I must be a sexist bigot.