[indubitable]

A genuine and pure gender pay gap doesn't makes much of any economic sense. Imagine a company is able to hire women for x% less than men. And we assume these women are absolutely identically, if not superiorly, skilled. What would happen? Unless you think corporations are big into missing obvious opportunities to reduce labor costs, you'd suddenly have companies approaching near 100% women. Companies are already actively working to marginalize and cut the costs on labor as much as possible.

I think identity politics is getting somewhat out of control. Imagine you look at the pay balance between short and tall individuals, gender adjusted. It would be substantially in favor of the taller. Does this mean it's inherently discriminatory and that we need to start getting government to pass 'height gap' laws?

Perhaps the pretentiousness of social science is more at fault. The adjusted wage gap is supposed to compensate for every single factor in an employee's value and weight it perfectly fairly. That, I think, is beyond absurd. Even at the most fundamental level in that an individual's job title is rarely indicative of what they actually do. 'Senior Programmer A' and 'Senior Programmer B' are often going to be taking on vastly different responsibilities, even at the same company. Operations are not finely greased machines with each cog operating in its exact designated way. Individual differences are what result in one person starting at a low level and spending the rest of their life there, and another starting at a low level (with similar qualifications) and working at top level operations 8 years later. And at some snapshot in time you'd see our second person seemingly receiving disproportionate compensation. Well that's because they were doing a disproportionately better job.

This is not to say that there's no inefficiency in companies such that meritorious workers get left behind, or similarly that less capable workers get promoted. But, excepting cronyism, these tend to be inadvertent and undesirable inefficiencies. Horrible ideas like Ballmer's stack ranking are all just desperate efforts to try to resolve this inefficiency. It costs money and it hurts product - nobody wants it. If a company thought that filling every single position they have with transgender transracial dwarves would increase their longterm bottom line by even just a few percent compared to the status quo, our transgendered transracial dwarves would suddenly be the hottest hires on the market.