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> Turns out "gender pay gap" magically disappears as soon as you start controlling for relevant variables

I think this is false?

The gap certainly becomes smaller when you control for those factors, but it does not disappear.

But don't take my word for it; search for "unadjusted gap" (or "uncontrolled") vs "adjusted gap" (or "controlled") to see various reports. Your quoted source does not cite much data that I can see.

My understanding is that the adjusted pay gap is approx. 99¢ vs. $1 for men; one source, with data and a description of their methodology: https://www.payscale.com/research-and-insights/gender-pay-ga...

(and of course, aside from this, the question of why women would tend to have less experience and lower titles than men, is a valid topic on its own, and adjusting for it doesn't make it unimportant)



> 99¢ vs. $1 for men

isn't it on the border of measurement error ? Would it be fair to say, after controlling for some variables the gender gap narrows down to 1% (which is a fairly small number if you ask me).

Like $1000 per year on a median salary in the US


> isn't it on the border of measurement error?

At least going by that payscale.com link, I don't think so. That is compiled from 600K+ responses, so they have enough data to measure small differences with some confidence, I think. I didn't sign up to download the full dataset though, so I'm mostly going by their claims.

Quoting from the article:

  Although $0.99 may seem very close to $1, the red line in the chart
  below has never crossed the dotted $1 line in blue representing men’s
  pay. Even when women are doing the same jobs, the gender pay gap is
  not zero.
If it were a "lost in measurement error" thing, I would expect that chart to have a lot more noise in it — some years women would be above men, other years below (that said, I do wish the charts had error bars). Instead, it's showing a small-but-consistent difference repeated across the years.




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