>"Why is "trend" relevant? Your clarified statement is that modern wage disparity is not due to discrimination. That means that even a handful of counter-examples would suffice to show that that statement is incorrect."

That does not logically follow. If you're offering an explanation for a large dataset which is depicting a trend, the value of that explanation is not undermined by a handful of statistical outliers. If we say that the explanation for women living longer than men is a mixture of biology and cultural factors, a single story about a woman murdering her husband does not speak to the accuracy of a broader explanation at all.

You would need to demonstrate that the counter-examples and the counter-explanation they suggest are statistically significant.

Edit: I'm not engaging in an ad hominem attack here, but I would like to draw attention to previous comments made by this poster to indicate that this is not the first time they've had difficulty parsing how statistics are generally understood to work: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dalke