As long as we're playing with thought-experiments, soneca could just say: "oh no, women have internalize misogyny too". Which is kind of backed up by research? (I remember reading an article about how female Principal Investigators tended to be biased against female grad student applicants? Couldn't find it in a few minutes of googling.)

But you're right, there should be _some_ data-driven company with an analyst that would say something like: "Oh hey. We're getting as much productivity out of men and women, but the women are cheaper. Let's keep one guy on to manage and interrupt them and fire the rest."

civilian has a point, but what would fix my model, I believe, is that good hiring practices is one among a myriad of variables that affect the bottomline.

Business books for ages are trying to give the "formula" to make a business success (and no one succeeded). It is irrealistic to assume that a company with undoubtably better hiring practices would necessarily and immediatelly (or in a short term) beat the competitors with worse hiring practices.

This even assuming the company would be hiring more productive employees. If the assumption is that it is the same productivity but less cost (as it is in the case we are discussing), the impact at the bottomline is even more diluted.

EDIT: I would add that if the impact was such straightforward and objectively measured it would be much easier to fight it as a society. This (how subjective is to measure productivity and business impact of knowledge workers) is the may reason why we are discussing pay gap as a gender issue and not still voting rights)

But we should see something, somewhere…!

There must be at least one example of an all female company you can point to with clear advantage over mixed-gender competition if the pay gap is at all real, and certainly if it’s over 30% as claimed by, among others, president Obama.

Either the pay gap is too small to matter, or it simply does not exist. So far all evidence favors the latter.

This shouldn’t be surprising—after all wage discrimination has been illegal in United States for over 40 years.

The claim that there’s some widespread corruption, perhaps even a conspiracy, should be treated as any other extraordinary claim. With extraordinary skepticism.

It might be a pay gap too small to matter to the bottomline, but large enough to matter to women earning less.

I do not have an opinion If there is or there is not a pay gap (I do have the opinion that sexism is a real problem at workplaces regardless of the pay gap). But I dont think the argument "if there was, someone would benefit from it" is reasonable.

> And your model only requires that all men are equally sexist.

Hardly. It just requires that enough men are sexist to discourage women from entering a field in large numbers. One abusive person in a position of power can have a hugely disproportionate impact.

This is a different argument and one already addressed by OP:

> For example in Sweden, which is doing it's best to increase gender equality, sex differences between men and women maximized http://jamda.ub.gu.se/bitstream/1/833/1/scb_eng_2014.pdf

It’s more likely women simply prefer different occupations, and auto-select for their own happiness.

Should we disregard either sex’s happiness in relentless pursuit of outcome equality?