What happens when the solution has to be freely chosen and occurs in domains beyond government influence?

From Government Can't Fix Real Gender Pay Gap by Megan McArdle. Both a good round up and, as usual, sharp phrasing.

The solutions that often do get proposed -- mandatory paid maternity leave for at least a year, generously subsidized childcare, more flexible schedules and so forth -- would certainly make it more convenient for working women to be mothers, but to the extent that they make it easier to take off chunks of time, they might even increase pay disparity, not decrease it, particularly among educated women. Subsidized day care is not going to help anyone work 14 hours a day. You can mandate paternity leave, but you cannot mandate that men use it to take care of their kids, rather than getting some work in.

When married men were paid more than single women as a matter of explicit policy, this was relatively easy to fix. When married men are paid more than single women because their wives are relieving them of the burden of home duties, it’s a lot harder to describe a remedy. To the extent that it’s needed, the remaining work to be done on the pay gap has to be done in places where the government, or indeed any explicit policy, has difficulty going: inside families, or the subconscious recesses of our minds.

That's the central issue. What happens when the solution has to be freely chosen and occurs in domains beyond government influence?