When I was hiring folks female candidates always asked for less money than male candidates. Even when counseling female friends about what they should ask for during their job search they still low-balled themselves.

Often it was much more than a 5% difference.

I’m not sure why you’d assume that the field people choose is not related to sexism, or why seniority is not related to sexism. Maybe they aren’t (I don’t know the data either way), but this specific article provides data that shows even when a field is dominated by women at the undergraduate level, it is still dominated by men at the tenured professor level, who make sexist decisions at various points in the pipeline.

Each of your controls could easily be explained by sexism.

Seniority: if men are given promotions when their work was the same quality as women who were passed over, that’s sexism.

Hours worked: if men are given full time employment, women part time, even when both want full time, that’s sexism.

Field and specific profession: if women are encouraged by the exact same mentors to choose different fields, despite having the same credentials as men, that’s sexism.

I’m not saying these factors are the result of sexism, but it’s a bit weird to assume it is, while having data in the original article that indicates all of the above, at least in academic professions, are significantly affected by sexism.

Is controlling for hours worked and seniority just controlling for the specific methods sexism works through? Seems like you could implement a sexist pay gap by rewarding bums in seats even when it's not economically productive, or by only promoting men, and that these measures would then be controlled for.

At this point, though, you would have conceded the point that women are not simply paid less than men on the basis of their sex, the earnings are actually a function of hours worked and seniority. The earnings gap would simply be a downstream effect of the new proposition you are putting forward, which is that the hours worked and seniority are denied to women on the basis of their sex.

This is not something that has been demonstrated to have been true, of course, but that would be the correct way of framing the argument.

No, it isn't, because controlling for those things means comparing the same job to the same job. The gap complaint is women being paid less for the exact same job and hours. It's different from the sexist glass ceiling.

This assumes that there is some essential demographic difference that causes fewer women to end up in these professions. While this may be somewhat supportable in the few fields where muscle mass is relevant, the contention here is that disparity in fields like higher education or software engineering is in itself due to sexism. It's nice that the pay gap isn't that large for women who do manage to enter these fields, but that doesn't address any of the underlying structural causes that prevent women from entering these fields in the first place.

There are many possible hypotheses apart from "sexism against women" though.

Consider the hypothesis of "sexism against men": society considers all women valuable, but only values men who earn a decent amount of money. Men who earn little find it hard to date and have children.

Wouldn't this "sexism against men" spur men to choose high earning (but maybe not fulfilling) professions, while women would feel more free to aim for personally fulfilling (but lower earning) professions?

By the metric of earnings this might look like sexism against women, but by the metric of life satisfaction, it might look more like sexism against men.

I'd strongly reject the argument that "society considers all women valuable", but even so, it's irrelevant to the discussion. Whether it's sexism against men or sexism against women, the disparity is a problem for women who want to enter these professions or for men who want to enter "more personally fulfilling" professions. Regardless of the framing, it's certainly true that inequality can lead to bad outcomes for both men and women.

> it's irrelevant to the discussion

I think it's relevant to how we approach a solution.

If the problem is "discrimination against educated women" then we need to educate people not to be biased against educated women.

If the problem is "discrimination against low earning men", we need to educate people not to be biased against low earning men.

My guess is that if women didn't prefer to date higher earning men, a lot of the wage gap would disappear. The social pressure to find a partner is huge, probably one of the strongest social forces in existence.

Blaming women for the wage gap because they supposedly don't date poor men certainly is one take.

Especially because this entire argument is about the various forms of friction women face as they try to climb the professional ladder.

From all available evidence females across most mammalian species strongly prefer and reproduce with the most successful males.

In humans women strongly prefer men who are more successful than them, are the gatekeepers of reproduction, and generally a greater proportion of women are able to pass on their genes than men.

By Darwinian logic this will inevitably result in a subpopulation of men who the most highly accomplished in certain sex selected traits in the species. This isn't excuse making its nature. I am consistently bemused at how the selfanointed intelligentsia of society that pride themselves on their rationality and scientific acumen refuse to accept this. You might as well cry about Gravity and hop up and down hoping you eventually fly up to the moon.