But even when they do that the promotions, even of women without children, and wage gap between the genders exist AND they have tested that reason behind it, has not gone away. So instead of arguing against every peer reviewed study I can find, how about fix the underlying issue and then no one will argue with you. And, btw, the first study on this bias that I remember reading was over 30 years ago so, yes the bias can last for that period of time.
Well, I'm simply using the statistics provided directly from a mass sampling of the population from here:
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswom2012.pdf. I was a very strong believer in the 20% pay gap until I found that article and went through all the numbers myself. The sources I found on my own discussed some other form of discrimination instead of the pay gap as a whole so I welcome any sources! I commented on this knowing that it would push some people's buttons so I don't mind any anger at all. :3 The other source I used just picked out choice morsels from that report for ease of viewing. The whole point that I am making is that if gender was the primary factor between such a huge gulf, it'd be highly unlikely to see up to 80% of it being lopped away by accounting for a single variable while holding gender constant in many scenarios. What I was getting at is if changing one or two variables largely bridges the gap, what if we happened to do everything at the same time for a more equal comparison? To me, it seems highly unlikely that the pay gap would persist to a large extent when most individual variables besides marriage/children/low education/old age shrinks it down.
Here, I'll do one in addition to those in the article I linked. Here are numbers drawn from page 56 of the report.
Women’s earnings as percentages of a man’s at age 25+ at certain education levels:
79.9% total
76.0% less than high school
76.3% high school
76.9% some college or associates
73.0% bachelors and above.
Pretty abysmal right? Looking from just those numbers, there is almost certainly a wage gap. Now take a look on page 46.
Women’s earnings as percentages of a man’s hourly wage at age 25+ at certain education levels:
86.8% total
78.7% less than high school
79.3% high school
85.3% some college or associates
91.5% bachelors and above.
Still a wage gap but it looks like some areas tightened up quite a bit.
Let's see how much the gaps closed in each category by accounting for just the hourly wage.
34.3% total
11.3% less than high school
12.7% high school
36.4% some college or associates
68.5% bachelors and above.
Some other important variable(s) are likely affecting the results or the impact simply grows with education level judging by how it trends. One could argue physical jobs that don't require an education pay better than service jobs and more men take those, actual discrimination is taking place more frequently at lower education levels, or something of that sort but since I have no numbers, I'll leave that to your interpretation. But look at what happens for the bottom group. 68.5% of the gap in pay between bachelor's degree men and women is accounted for just by isolating their hourly rates. When unmarried, childless, or young women all only have a 10% gap or less between their counterparts without even accounting for hours worked and that men work more hours than women on average, it indicates that those variables are responsible for the gap and gender is probably not the primary factor.