For the wage gap take as an assumption that companies were genuinely able to pay women less for doing the exact same quality and quantity of work as men. Well what would happen? We already live in a world where big companies relentlessly squeeze every penny they can from minimizing labor costs. The notion that people are intentionally paying more to men just to be around more men defies belief, to put it mildly.
And there's a corollary to this as well. As 'wage gap' entered the zeitgeist, there's no doubt that some companies, ever anxious to provide a bump to their next quarterly, did actively look to see if they could replace their male workers with females to save on labor costs. And the results of their research, in that no companies seem to be doing this, speaks for itself.
So for instance on this case, I agree with you. I've no doubt women get paid less than men on average. And tall men get paid more than short men. And fat men get paid less than non-fat men. And I suspect that if we broke it down into hair color, you'd also find discrepancies there. Differences do not mean discrimination.
A problem would be if companies were unlawfully actively discriminating against people. As you yourself said, that is almost certainly not what's going on.
> A problem would be if companies were unlawfully actively discriminating
It's a problem that companies discriminate, period, whether they're doing it intentionally or not. Overlooking skilled short people to hire and promote tall people means they're working against their own best interest and against society's interest, at the same time. (That doesn't mean I'm advocating for any particular solution, or that I think height should be a protected class. I'm just saying it is in fact a problem.)
It's extremely difficult to try to objectively measure the competence of an individual in general, but IQ does tend to provide a workable measurement that does tend to be quite predictive and map well to aggregate performance in 'mental' fields. But we're talking about height, so why am I bringing this up? As counter intuitive as it is, height correlates strongly with IQ. We could discuss the possible reasons for this (environmental? sexual selection? shared genetic markers? something else?) but the point is that this is not disputed. Here [1][2] are a couple of sources if you were not aware of this. You can find countless more on google scholar searching for 'height iq correlation'.
But this raises the issue that not only do tall people earn more than short people, but that it's highly likely that companies paying more to tall people are indeed working in their, and society's, best interest. The long and short here is that you cannot assume differences are a result of irrational decisions.
So you're left to try to argue that short people bring something to table that's valuable but less visible than their individual competence (at least in so much as IQ is reflective of that). This could be true, but I think that there's scant evidence for such. The first issue you'd need to overcome is the existential case. And I find the way most people try to do this is by getting back to assuming discrimination, yet now you're stuck in circular logic or having to assume your conclusion. 'All people are equal. What about these vast quantities of data showing substantial differences from ostensibly objective assessments? It's caused by environmental issues and discrimination. Why do you think that? Well because it doesn't show all people being equal!'
And to be clear, everything I'm saying above applies to people considered as groups - not individuals. Einstein, for instance, was about 5'7". It just means there are different distributions among different groups, and so when you consider these groups as a whole you'd expect to see these different distributions reflected.
[1] - http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jou...
[2] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381191...
There is a lot of room for drivers to optimize their driving so that they end up making more than average by choosing times and locations to drive that will get them a larger portion of their time giving rides, rides at a higher speed, rides with higher surge multipliers, etc. The more experienced drivers could be making significantly more than the average amount, while less experienced drivers who haven't learned these tricks yet are earning less.
> For the wage gap take as an assumption that companies were genuinely able to pay women less for doing the exact same quality and quantity of work as men. Well what would happen? We already live in a world where big companies relentlessly squeeze every penny they can from minimizing labor costs. The notion that people are intentionally paying more to men just to be around more men defies belief, to put it mildly.
There are multiple problems with this sniff test. First, it makes the same fallacy as the economist who sees a twenty dollar bill on the ground and then says that there couldn't really be a twenty dollar bill on the ground because someone would already have picked it up. Markets are not perfectly efficient and any conclusion based on that assumption is nonsense.
Second, the companies aren't choosing to pay men more just because they are men. They are paying them more because men have higher existing wages which gives them more bargaining power. It is irrational on an overall basis but it is rational on an individual basis, so no individual company has an incentive to change.
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/79zxz8/q_why_... [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/5v0o0i/lots_o...
30y ago news was on the frontpage, corrections on page 4 in small print at the bottom.