I agree with that phrase, and I acknowledge that it's a problem, but you're jumping into conclusions about what I was trying to say. I wasn't trying to say "we don't have complete information, so we should do nothing." Read on:

> you are rationalizing away the preponderance of evidence which shows that, yep, any way you cut it, there's a gender wage gap.

No, that's is precisely my point. It is NOT true that any way you cut it there's a gender gap. If you let me cut it how I want it I can have the gap be anything I want by carefully (as an example) picking which of the omitted variables I adjust for sampling bias and which ones I don't[0]. That is what I was trying to say.

[0] And lets not talk about confounding variables, that problem is at least an order of magnitud harder even than sampling/population bias.

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