There certainly is sexism in the workplace, although the court ruled different I think Ellen Pao was a victim of this. That said, I don't know if it as prevalent and widespread so as to lead to meaningful and statistically significant wage gaps when all the factors are considered. Certainly the evidence for this sort of widespread institutionalized sexism is lacking in my mind.
Still I think the conversation here is more that the wage gap numbers are not as significant as they are often presented in discourse about gender equality
Saying you need to control for things that have already been controlled for doesn't leave a particularly good impression.
To me it seems like an uninteresting tautology. Like these others:
“False statements about immigration numbers are often presented in discourse about naturalization policies”
“Misleading financial figures are often presented in discourse about what stocks to buy.”
It’s like... yah. So?
All discourse is full of garbage. If you are interested in the truth, you weed through that and evaluate the numbers and, according to best practices, find a good estimate.
When you do that, you find there is a substantial gender-attributable pay gap in many countries in many industries.
Why that is and how we change it seems like a worthy discussion.
I am curious to why you think the existence of people with a poor understanding of the facts is a worthy topic of conversation.
There will always be people in “the discourse” saying wrong things. If that’s all it takes to halt the important conversation about how women get pay equity, then you have yourself a surefire tool to ensure that conversation never happens. Or at least that you never have to participate.
(And as a side note, the existence of a raw 77% gap is factually true. Media would have to argue that it’s entirely due to sexism for them to step into territory you object to)
"Female Uber drivers make 7% less per hour than their male counterparts—even though the algorithms that determine pay for the ride-hailing service are gender blind, according to a multi-year study."
If their conclusion is accurate, I am puzzled as to what solution can be proposed. Should we lower speed limits or cut mens’ hours?
Apologies if I don’t understand the uber cost structure. Is there not a time component in the service charge similar to cabs?
Taxis often take this even farther and make the time component only include time where the taxi is going less than fixed, fairly low speed (in NYC it is 12 mph), so slowing down from 25 mph to 20 mph wouldn't gain them any extra money on the fare but would cost them extra time.
The studies do not "control for everything". For example I have never seen
1. Control for the much higher levels of sick days taken by women.
2. Control for the product of hours worked and years worked. Women work fewer hours and spend more years out of the work-force. This has a multiplicative effect on "hours of work experience"
Additionally the power of "controlling for X" is vastly overstated. In reality it is only reliable when the different factors are close to orthogonal, have linear relationships and are not causally related. Typically none of the above are true.
Second, when you do that you're sort of controlling the problem away. Women don't seek more work/life balance because they're not as crazy as men. They do it because they're expected to carry more of the burden of raising a child. The literature is clear that the wage gap is relatively small until children enter the picture. After that the gap skyrockets.
This is why the main practical goal of every wage gap activist is equalizing the burden of having a child. It's why the number one policy issue is universal mandatory parental leave for both genders.