We still need more wage transparency. Companies should be required to publicly list all wages, because lack of transparency is detrimental to the workers.
There's no perceptible gap in wages between
almost any pair of social groups,
After all, if women are more represented among junior positions and less among senior positions, some people might blame childbirth - but other people will blame systematic biases like family-unfriendly policies and unconscious biases.
Well in itself, I don't think that's enough to say that things are fair.
For example, that wouldn't take into account hiring biases. If women have a real hard time getting jobs in those roles, what does it matter if people in those roles get paid the same, regardless of gender?
I feel the main issue with the gender gap discrimination discussion is that people try to simplify it to show that there is or isn't a bias, and it's really easy to simplify it in a way that would support either side of the discussion. The discussion is a really complex one and there are so many aspects to it that can't be accounted for (confidence in negotiating salary, aversion to risk or working longer hours, likelihood to want to take time off for family, differences in natural abilities, etc).
>The gender pay gap is the difference between the average earnings of men and women, expressed relative to men’s earnings. For example, ‘women earn 15% less than men per hour’.
But this is not what should be measured. If there's a mining company that employs 90% men working down in the mine and 10% women doing accountancy, then of course the average wages of men are going to be different than those of women, but that tells us nothing about equal and fair treatment of men and women at this company.
Lies and statistics.
It's a perfectly reasonable thing to measure as long as it's not being used as a proxy for equal pay (which it explicitly isn't in this case).
What it can show is systemic bias. Now, unlike unequal pay, it's not necessarily blatantly unfair bias. It might not be unfair at all depending on the detail.
But knowing that there's a gap and understanding the reasons for the gap can be beneficial.