Young women are also having children later in life, and the disparity between women and men enrolling in college and completing degrees (more women than men) has been increasing.
I think you’re actually re-explaining the outcome of the report, not pointing out a flaw in their methodology.
For what it's worth, my understanding is that the gender pay gap still exists even if you do control for these things, albeit it becomes smaller.
https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/the-gende...
Has that ever been true? I have heard people say "Men push women out of engineering" but in my experience it's been the opposite--it's been men trying to get women interested in engineering.
There are uncountably many WISE, SWE, girls who code, etc. groups that try to encourage women to go into STEM. Women get STEM scholarships that are only available to them.
Of course it's not true. If you majored in CS at a decent university probably 1 or 2 out of 100 students were girls, and in the "labs" the TAs spend the ENTIRE TIME talking to the girls/helping the girls. "Men push women out of engineering" is just a performative statement that means nothing. You will find this in any field where men generally are better at something, like chess. There are plenty of people who whine that "women are pushed out" of chess and so on, and if you ask people to explain that, they can't. It's just pathetic and of course predictable that the same people who can't understand the logical reasons why the demographics of certain groups are the what they are, happen to be bad at activities that require the ability to perform logical operations in their head, like chess, or engineering, etc. All they can do is whine about it emotionally which is the same reason why they can't do engineering or play chess.
Still, the numbers don't lie. Nobody's "pushing women away", it's been the complete, deliberate opposite for many, many years now.
Including in higher paying first job degrees, professions, or however you want to make that adjustment?
Not disagreeing, just curious. Many on HN probably studied CS or EE with a very male cohort, for example. Is that balanced by a programme(s) (with well-paid graduates) that skews heavily female? Maybe medicine (not as much as EE/CS though surely)?
On the medical side, some numbers and research are in order.
Nursing is dominated by women; 90% women, though the trend is slowly decreasing. Nursing is a physically demanding job.
Pharmacy school grads are over 60% women and the trend is increasing.
I had a harder time finding dentistry numbers but 60% of all practitioners under 44 are women. The trend is increasing.
Medical school is 51% women and the trend is increasing.
These are highly paid professions with far more stability and prestige than software engineering. Even nursing is on par with the average software engineer, but with more stability.
With actual compensation for time worked, you’ll have to exceed L5 to get a meaningful jump ahead of registered nurses.
I only special-cased EE & CS because that happens to be HN's skew, not because there's something more special about them than some other engineering or science.
What it doesn't show is that business are treating women better. Maybe they are, maybe they havent treated them as badly as the wage gap politicians want you to think they still are, and maybe things like paternal leave are starting to make a difference.
There's nothing actionable, no way to draw any meaningful conclusion, because it is observing the world through a fog of uncontrolled variables.