> but it is difficult to understand why people accept this as fact when the empirical data of systematic isn't all that solid.
It would help if you posted the empirical data you refer to.
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Not OP but almost every one of these studies takes the total sum of money men make vs the total sum of money women make and compares it that way without taking into account the job title, years of experience, time off, etc.
Those are mainly mainstream articles, politicians' and celebrity talking points. They don't even account for the type of job, hours worked, danger of the job, etc.
There are some good studies on this subject that I've read over the years though, for instance one among lawyers in a firm in which women were paid about 2-3% lower than men, on average IIRC. But these often don't or can't take into account personality characteristics. For instance, women on average are more agreeable and so often don't negotiate as hard as men on their salary.
When controlling for all factors, wage differences largely disappear.
Agreed.
Granted if anyone has actual evidence of gender pay discrimination I'm 100% for fighting those battles when they come up, but I'm tired of the same old "Women make 77% what men do!!!!1" headlines and people taking them at full face value.
Here's a study, comparing gender, after adjusting for experience, hours worked, and education. It calculates 0.79:1.00 women to men.
https://www.epi.org/publication/womens-work-and-the-gender-p...
No, what it shows is that women choose different careers that overall yield the ratio you cite. Everyone already knew this, the point is that such a statistic is misleading.
The authors also conjecture that this is due to cultural biases, but obviously cannot prove this.
For instance, their overview that women arrive in college less interested in STEM, and they hint suggestively that this is due to discrimination. Except this hypothesis doesn't at all explain the gender equality paradox; in fact, it predicts the exact opposite of what we see.
Normally in science, a falsification this strong would immediately dismiss a hypothesis as a viable candidate theory. It's suggestive that it hasn't.