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And your model only requires that all men are equally sexist.

There are, believe it or not, women entrepreneurs (and btw the very conservative Poland is leading the rankings[1]), so even if all male employers were in fact equally sexist, that would just mean female-led companies would out-compete them.

[1] http://wbj.pl/poland-high-in-global-women-entrepreneur-leade...

As long as we're playing with thought-experiments, soneca could just say: "oh no, women have internalize misogyny too". Which is kind of backed up by research? (I remember reading an article about how female Principal Investigators tended to be biased against female grad student applicants? Couldn't find it in a few minutes of googling.)

But you're right, there should be _some_ data-driven company with an analyst that would say something like: "Oh hey. We're getting as much productivity out of men and women, but the women are cheaper. Let's keep one guy on to manage and interrupt them and fire the rest."

civilian has a point, but what would fix my model, I believe, is that good hiring practices is one among a myriad of variables that affect the bottomline.

Business books for ages are trying to give the "formula" to make a business success (and no one succeeded). It is irrealistic to assume that a company with undoubtably better hiring practices would necessarily and immediatelly (or in a short term) beat the competitors with worse hiring practices.

This even assuming the company would be hiring more productive employees. If the assumption is that it is the same productivity but less cost (as it is in the case we are discussing), the impact at the bottomline is even more diluted.

EDIT: I would add that if the impact was such straightforward and objectively measured it would be much easier to fight it as a society. This (how subjective is to measure productivity and business impact of knowledge workers) is the may reason why we are discussing pay gap as a gender issue and not still voting rights)

But we should see something, somewhere…!

There must be at least one example of an all female company you can point to with clear advantage over mixed-gender competition if the pay gap is at all real, and certainly if it’s over 30% as claimed by, among others, president Obama.

Either the pay gap is too small to matter, or it simply does not exist. So far all evidence favors the latter.

This shouldn’t be surprising—after all wage discrimination has been illegal in United States for over 40 years.

The claim that there’s some widespread corruption, perhaps even a conspiracy, should be treated as any other extraordinary claim. With extraordinary skepticism.

It might be a pay gap too small to matter to the bottomline, but large enough to matter to women earning less.

I do not have an opinion If there is or there is not a pay gap (I do have the opinion that sexism is a real problem at workplaces regardless of the pay gap). But I dont think the argument "if there was, someone would benefit from it" is reasonable.

> And your model only requires that all men are equally sexist.

Hardly. It just requires that enough men are sexist to discourage women from entering a field in large numbers. One abusive person in a position of power can have a hugely disproportionate impact.

This is a different argument and one already addressed by OP:

> For example in Sweden, which is doing it's best to increase gender equality, sex differences between men and women maximized http://jamda.ub.gu.se/bitstream/1/833/1/scb_eng_2014.pdf

It’s more likely women simply prefer different occupations, and auto-select for their own happiness.

Should we disregard either sex’s happiness in relentless pursuit of outcome equality?

> They are ignoring rational evidence because they have a preconceived idea that women are worse employees.

wouldn't this imply they would avoid hiring much, if any? why bother hiring people you don't feel are worth hiring?

> No, they werent because they were racists.

racists hire people they're biased against all the time if there is some advantage in doing so.

i'm more inclined to believe the circumstance you speak of was avoidance of socioeconomic consequences. there was a time when having a team with too many black athletes (heaven forbid mostly, or even all black) would tank your ticket sales.

> Why are today employers more enlightened that past team owners?

well, it helps that it doesn't hurt ticket sales.

Great point. I'd add:

> they werent because they were racists

It's more complex than that, and it's important to understand the mechanisms: My poor understanding is that racism was (and is to a great degree) a social norm, and as social science and life experience will tell you, humans are hardwired to follow social norms. Think of the common phenomenon of large numbers believing the same erroneous fact (as an easy example, in matters of science) - did they all coincidentally reach the same conclusion, or just follow the norm of their social networks. We unconsciously accept and assume norms, we hardly notice them (they are the everyday 'normal', after all), and to challenge them is to make yourself an outcast, which is dangerous and against human nature. Who even wants to be the only one going against the group in a meeting, much less challenging centuries of culture and your entire community?

I'm not excusing the actions of those team owners at all. But I would guess that there were a few advocates of racial discrimination and many who went along with the established norm. To veer OT: IMHO, standing up to those norms is a responsibility of all of us - if you silently acquiesce, you support them as norms in everyone else's eyes. By speaking you may not change the world by yourself, but consider how it looks from someone else who is questioning the 'norm' in their mind but afraid to speak up, just like you: Seeing one other person speaking out may look insufficient, but it's leaves a far stronger impression than if nobody says a thing, and that one person is more likely to yield two or three speaking out next time.

I don't think that this line of reasoning is very solid, because (a) men running companies definitely have some variation among them and (b) sports teams are small groups and not really representative of the problems facing larger organizations. One difference is that lots of people really want to play sports -- there will always be a huge surplus of eager applicants. In a situation like that, you can be discriminatory and still manage to get together a team, and even a moderately good one (but not the best).

Large companies, on the other hand, have to hire thousands of people a year; and for jobs that are not much fun and which often require considerable training. The effect often has been to reduce discrimination. To take examples from an earlier era -- many immigrant populations in the US found their way into one or another industry this way.

Notably they did not find their way into every industry equally; and some minorities have benefitted less from this effect; but it did happen. The comparable effect would be that we should see some industries adapting to the lower cost of women's labor in something -- though probably not the most elite (posh and desirable) industries.

You didn't consider that men who are less sexist, or not sexist, would have an advantage in the market. Your mental model requires you to generalize all men as equally and utterly sexist in order to work. Does that seem realistic?

Great point!