Seriously, the fact that otherwise intelligent people claim this with a straight face is kind of crazy. The "data" here are looking at numbers and seeing which one is smaller and which one is larger, and the wages of women are smaller.
Welp, that's the whole field of statistics down the drain! Who needs complex analysis and accounting for confounding variables when the answer is simply "Big number good, small number not good!"
What does a confounding variable have to do with anything here?
The question is "do women make lower wages than men"?
You are adding confounding variables I assume because you are uncomfortable with the fact that the answer is "yes", but are less uncomfortable if there's some reason that it's yes other than "people deliberately pay women less".
Of course there are reasons women make lower wages than men. That doesn't really matter, though: if the gap is itself a problem as an outcome, the fix is very simple, and the reasons don't particularly matter.
If I asked which of the two of us is taller, all that takes is a measuring tape. The fact that one of us might have gotten better nutrition as a child, while possibly interesting, doesn't actually do much about the fact that one of us is really taller than the other.
Suppose women get paid less because they work less hours (this is actually part of the reason); Do you suggest women should get paid more per hour simply on account of being born with a vagina?
What if women get paid less because they tend to pick professions that happen to be lower paying? (This is also true.) Do you suggest we just give them raises? What if the reason the profession is lower paying is because businesses in the field have lower margins? Where are they supposed to get the money for these raises, take it out of the men's paychecks? Speaking of, do you give raises to everyone working in the lower-paying field, or just the women?
See, I think the bone of contention here is that you assume the problem is women being paid less. Most people have no problem with women being paid less; Their problem is with women being paid less SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY'RE WOMEN. This is why very few people are comfortable with the solution of "just pay all women more." Paying someone more because of their gender is literally the definition of sexism.
Because in every economy we've looked at, gender income parity is strongly correlated with overall economic growth. In addition, research on microlending suggests that this link is statistically co-causal (improving either one improves the other).
If you prefer a more intuitive take, most of the attempts to dismiss the gender wage gap say things like "women take more time off for families" and "women choose lower-paying occupational fields". But there's no a priori reason those activities and fields should not be more remunerative than they are, and there is evidence that making them more remunerative is beneficial to the economy as a whole.
