I don't think either is likely.
But guess what...
They care about one thing, dollars. If you are making them money, they will keep you no matter what. If you are not making them money, they will get rid of you. Pretty rational I think.
Corporations are run by people, and they draw on a huge variety of sources to make their decisions. Including, obviously, some that are not rational.
If women choose to forgo higher salaries in favor of something else, that's a different issue and it doesn't immediately mean that they are being "irrational", it just means they favor different things than men do.
If the hiring managers (of any gender) have an irrational bias towards thinking that women are not as effective as their male counterparts, this will affect the respective pay scales even within a competitive market.
Note that I'm not providing evidence or making a claim about the gender pay gap. I'm just saying that the claims you've made have many possible consistent explanations, including irrational bias against women.
And rationality of any one particular hiring manager isn't going to make a big difference; they still need to compete with every other hiring manager in the labor market and must offer something competitive accordingly.
But the grandparent's point is a sticky one: "it would be trivial for employers to reduce their costs by only hiring women." And yet ... no employer ever does this. They hire men and women. Also logical.
Either you're not telling me everything you know, or you're wrong. Without radical argument surgery, to make what you said square with GP, we have to consider changing the parameters in some pretty distasteful ways:
* It's actually the women themselves who value their time less, and let themselves get taken advantage of in salary negotiations.
* Men are more skilled than women for some jobs and those skills are in short supply. They get hired alongside women, but command higher salaries.
I tend to think there is no gender pay gap, but only if we adjust for people's choices to take breaks from their careers in order to raise families, pursue hobbies, mental health, etc.
I think the point being made was, if women are paid less, and thus cheaper to employ, they'd dominate new hires - presumably because salary is the largest cost for most businesses. So, as as an employer you'd want to minimize salaries.
Men are still getting hired, and that's the logical fly in the ointment that one needs to overcome - unless we allow for other distasteful variables to float, as I pointed out above. Or, we can consider there is no pay gap.
Companies think women are not as good workers as men.
That is why men are still hired.
Life is so good when rational arguments can hit a higher pitch than the virtue signals. ;)
But don't let facts stop you from repeating the same tired lies that have been debunked for years
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/09/...
It contains links to many more sources at the end.
Like wise the BBC being forced to disclose pay rates for talent some Male presenters have taken pay cuts btw
I mean, even if it's true that particular company is paying its women worse than its men, and even if legislation means they can't quickly fix it (I don't know how onerous this legislation is in the U.K.), the proper response on the part of any employee who is given these excuses ought to be "Look, that sounds like you have a difficult problem, but that isn't my problem. My problem is that my salary is $X when it should be $X+Y." Because at the end of the day their excuses aren't going to change the fact that they can either fix your problem or not, and if they don't fix your problem somebody else in the labor market can.
It's interesting because younger women hear the USA stats and complain about how they're being hard done by.
In both cases, it's because women choose to leave the labor force for a while, which makes them no longer like the men who made similar choices as them up until that point.
Sometimes men get awards in UK under equal pay legislation too but if it's true that men on average negotiate pay more effectively (and it appears so) then they will disproportionately be affected. When they negotiate and win a pay rise they are unlikely to get it for being male, it's going to be based on merit (largely) & retention needs; but equal pay legislation means a company takes on a risk if they can't sufficiently differentiate that workers output from another - of the opposite sex - who can claim to be doing work of similar value.
Example case http://www2.cipd.co.uk/pm/peoplemanagement/b/weblog/archive/..., see also the ASDA case where working in a different location, doing a different job haven't been considered enough to warrant different pay.
So it's not relevant and nobody should be blaming women for not being able to give you a raise. If someone in management at your company tells you that, they are lying to you and you should change jobs.