Left-handed people earn less on average than righties. Tall people earn more. With a sufficiently large sample you'll probably find a correlation between salary and hair color, hand size, skin pigmentation, freckle density and a million other arbitrary factors that we've long decided are not worth fighting about.
Personally I think the left in general need to grapple with the fact that we're not all equal, rather than saying that idea is tabboo because it has lead to horrible places before. The fact that the left has largely focussed on suppressing this idea that many people believe (and on an individual level is self evident) rather than tackling it head on is what leads to the backlash against political correctness because people feel like the emperor has no clothes, but they can't say so.
I don't care about the motivations of the people paying women. I care about their employee utility function, in which gender shouldn't be a factor.
Unequal outcomes are okay. Fighting unequal outcomes is fighting for equality of outcome and it's unfair and makes no goddamn sense in a society where there is free will or any variation at all between the members.
They even remove names from resumes for hiring decisions to avoid unconscious bias from the decision makers.
This is about as close as you can get to a completely fair system and is far above and beyond what can be reasonably expected from a business.
It seems that your solution is to simply increase bias in the labor market rather than try to make it more efficient. Over time, marketplaces tend to abhor inefficiencies and seek equilibrium, so not only would "give women more money" inevitably have unforeseen adverse side effects, but it also runs counter to our fundamental social and economic principles.
The question is "do women make lower wages than men"?
You are adding confounding variables I assume because you are uncomfortable with the fact that the answer is "yes", but are less uncomfortable if there's some reason that it's yes other than "people deliberately pay women less".
Of course there are reasons women make lower wages than men. That doesn't really matter, though: if the gap is itself a problem as an outcome, the fix is very simple, and the reasons don't particularly matter.
If I asked which of the two of us is taller, all that takes is a measuring tape. The fact that one of us might have gotten better nutrition as a child, while possibly interesting, doesn't actually do much about the fact that one of us is really taller than the other.
What if women get paid less because they tend to pick professions that happen to be lower paying? (This is also true.) Do you suggest we just give them raises? What if the reason the profession is lower paying is because businesses in the field have lower margins? Where are they supposed to get the money for these raises, take it out of the men's paychecks? Speaking of, do you give raises to everyone working in the lower-paying field, or just the women?
See, I think the bone of contention here is that you assume the problem is women being paid less. Most people have no problem with women being paid less; Their problem is with women being paid less SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY'RE WOMEN. This is why very few people are comfortable with the solution of "just pay all women more." Paying someone more because of their gender is literally the definition of sexism.
If you prefer a more intuitive take, most of the attempts to dismiss the gender wage gap say things like "women take more time off for families" and "women choose lower-paying occupational fields". But there's no a priori reason those activities and fields should not be more remunerative than they are, and there is evidence that making them more remunerative is beneficial to the economy as a whole.
How so? What difference economically does it make whether a male or female fills a position
Let's look at the causes , and address those.
I think that's how you solve it. It is pretty sexist to say , "give someone more money because they are a women"
Similarly, giving women more money solves the problem of women getting paid less money.
We make all sorts of incredibly bizarre (from an outside perspective) decisions about who gets paid what; the fact that we've fooled ourselves into thinking that it's because of supply and demand curves may be comforting but is completely unfounded in any data.
I don't understand why this is so difficult to understand or controversial - especially in an industry with such a skills shortage.
If you want more and better employees start hiring more women and paying them.
That is a market solution - consider it an investment. Pay them now, pay them more, have a larger hiring pool later.
This whole process infuriates me. The gender wage gap is an empirical question. It exists. If we believe it's a problem (I do; you may not), it has the easiest solution in the world: give women more money. Seriously, I just solved the gender pay gap, right there: give women more money.
There's all kind of ways you could do that (wage mandates, tax credits, etc.) and they all have pros and cons, but searching for proximate and ultimate causes here is kind of stupid. It exists; if you think it's a problem, the solution is breathtakingly obvious.