The only sexist thing here is your support of a baseless claim.

If it's not baseless, presumably you have something to offer.

However, without evidence, you are most likely wrong. Does that wrongness amount to sexism? Hard to say; my inclination says yes since you're referring to shuffling hundreds of dimensions defining employment into "life choices". Yes, that is probably a factor; culture is a powerful force. But it's also probably not the only factor; there are likely myriad explanations. Are you blind to that, or just dismissive?

The only contention I have is one you agreed to elsewhere: that the actual aggregate wage-gap once you've controlled for common variables (such as life choices) is 3-6% (with women earning more in some fields), which likely isn't significant or correctable.

A difference on that magnitude can easily be something about aggregate behavior correlated to sex, an uncontrolled for variable, or just random chance.

So let me ask you: do you have any evidence that 3-6% gap is the result of sexism instead of merely being a fact correlated to sex? (Particularly if we were to confine the data to people under 40, to control for historical biases that take time to age out.)

To be clear, I am not accepting that margin; I'm simply regrettably far from my spreadsheet for 2015 to which I can refer. My objections are a) the assumption "life choice" is NOT a sexist dog whistle, that b) you're talking about aggregate wage gap, which reduces the situation into a single statistic, and c) that a sex linked difference isn't worth addressing even if it does have a dominating effect in today's economy (which I doubt, and evidence is weak at best).

However, there is abundant evidence that there's a systemic divide in opportunities. This is easy to see in the aggregate and particular. That is the interesting thing in itself: if we could be assured that the gap could sexist solely for life choices, this wouldn't be an interesting topic. That's a devilishly hard thing to argue for, however, so id prefer to move forward as a society assuming that we can do more to expose opportunities to everyone, assure that people are protected in their right to follow opportunities, and that we can demonstrate the effect of the policies at moving toward an ideal of equal pay.

If we can't move towards that, perhaps our ideal, well, isn't what society wants. I doubt that we've even approached that level of confidence in our support of communities subject to subtle bias difficult to divorce from "life choices".

I object to the contention that there arent biology correlated preferences and differences (such as attribute variance) which will cause biases in the distribution of labor and aptitude, which likely will always cause some form of imbalance in statistics. I also object to the notiom that we want equal outcomes rather than equal opportunity (even though that is harder to measure).

That being said, I think we should generally imrpove sexist behavior and systems, which hurt both sexes (albeit, in different ways).

I just think the "wage gap" is one of the least sexist fascets of modern society (if at 3-6%), and mostly represents people perpetuating a misunderstanding of statistics. So in that way, I feel like people are over-solving a mostly solved problem, which seems likely to lead to more sexism, not less.

I think that effort spent on fixing the larger issues are also likely to stabilize remaining issues with wages, and we would all be better served focusing on the large gaps in other statistics instead of the small one here.

That said, Im always happy to see new statistics that tell me Im full of shit, so if you find what you're looking for, please post it.

Otherwise, have a good night! :)

You should put your spreadsheet into google docs or office365 so you can access it from anywhere.