Shocking: Men and women aren't equal.
In which case, if men and women do not on average perform equally at given tasks, there's no reason to expect gender parity or even pay parity in meritocratic systems.
That's an unspoken contradiction inmplied by many of these studies. But I haven't seen any researcher mention it recently, for increasingly obvious reasons.
But regardless, even if there’s a difference, we have to consider nature vs. nurture. I think men could be brought up to be more communicative, but that’s just me.
Furthermore, it’s absurd to say the pay gap somehow reflects different skillsets. We’re talking about unequal pay for the same work. Of course women should be paid the same as men doing the same work as they are.
This idea that one group "seems" to be better than another seems rather vague and unsubstantiated, as does the basis for being paid more.
Being paid is a consequence of skills, value, productivity, sales & marketing, profitability efficiency, alongside supply and demand. If you're not marketing your skills (or don't have skills to market), that's no one's fault but yours-- no one owes you anything, regardless of 'communication abilities'.
The original pay gap came from a trash paper which compared average pay of women and men across disciplines. So you had doctors and engineers grouped with nurses and daycare workers. That was the origin of ".75¢ on the dollar". Within most industries there is no paygap that cannot be explained by lack of negotiation and shorter work hours, among other factors. We also take it as a given that average performance of men and women on any task is identical, and that's nonsense.
The paygap myth is pure propaganda.
Edit: imagine my surprise when even CBS is admitting as much!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gender-pay-gap-is-a-complet...
This utopian Western notion of the mind being a perfect clean slate from birth has no basis. Do you really think that the mountains of evidence, in the form of gender discrepancies which have been almost universal across time and culture, can be so trivially handwaved away as "social constructs"?
What about different behaviors in other sexually dimorphic mammals? You know, like, literally all of them?
Of course there are differences which go beyond nurture.