The data keeps telling us we are not nearly as prejudiced as the ideologues say we are.

Certainly five years ago, possibly as many as 10-15 years, I came to the conclusion from data that sex discrimination between men and women in compensation was negligible to the point of non-existent.  

Which makes sense.  Pay discrimination has been illegal for fifty-seven years.  In addition, in economic theory it should never work barring very onerous cultural or regulatory conditions.  And over the the past twenty or thirty years, the hard data has been accumulating that in fact, when you take into account demand and productivity, there is very little evidence of discrimination.  Or discrimination that is significant enough to show up in the numbers.

As a practical matter, I am confident that there are still biases at play (sex, age, school affiliation, class, race, appearance, etc.) but it appears that those biases wash each other out.  

When you take into account the real confounders such as education attainment, hours worked per year, flexibility to respond to peak time emergencies, career choices, industry choices, continuity of career, etc. the purported pay gap disappears.

One of the most admirable researchers in this field has been Claudia Goldin.  She wants the pay gap to be actionable, i.e. due to systemic or biased discrimination.  But all her data and all her research says that those are not the causes of nominal pay gaps.  And she has all along acknowledged the data as it has come in.  

The most recent update I have seen is from How to Win the Battle of the Sexes Over Pay (Hint: It Isn’t Simple.) by Claudia Goldin.  She basically acknowledges all the above.  And the headline is a massive understatement.  It's not that it isn't simple.  It's that it is impossible in a free society.

That is not the reality in the overall labor market, however, where women still earn less than men and there is considerable confusion about the reasons for the gender earnings gap — and about what can be done to eliminate it.

Fighting to eradicate discriminatory employment practices is absolutely needed, of course. I’ve spent many years studying this subject, and my research shows that unequal treatment in hiring and in the work setting is real and may be reflected in unequal pay.

It is easy to overlook the key word there.  Workplace treatment and hiring only may show up in unequal pay.  All the rest of the article is an explanation for why the primary, and perhaps only, drivers of unequal pay are personal choices about careers, hour worked, job flexibility, etc.  

The extent to which a pay gap exists, and in all the rigorous studies I have seen where the obvious confounders are controlled, it is tiny.  Usually between 0-5%.  And heavily weighted towards the 0.

Goldin points out that it is not about social policy - family/female friendly nations such as Denmark and Sweden, have much larger pay gaps than does the US.  

Goldin acknowledges:

Such considerations bring us to a very sensitive area: domestic arrangements at home, especially among couples with children. These are personal questions. In theory, gender earnings equality is possible when both parents take off the same amount of time and enjoy the same flexibility at work.

Yet this isn’t easy to accomplish in the world, as it exists now: Individual families that make such choices may incur high costs. From a classic economic standpoint, if one spouse or partner can earn more by working less flexible hours, as a family, the couple would earn more money by having that parent in that job, while the other partner accepts the more flexible one. A man can certainly be the more flexible member of this household — though he typically is not. Such decisions need to be made couple by couple.

The conundrum is that people are being equally paid for what they are worth regardless of sex and what they are worth depends on the nature of the job, the scarcity of skills, education attainment, competencies achieved, hours worked, adaptiveness, continuity of career, sector chosen, etc.  

Basically, if you let people make the optimum decisions for their individual, couple and family lives, you will get no evidence of discrimination and people will be paid what they are empirically worth.  Thats what the evidence says.  However, the emergent order from all those personally optimizing choices will not lead to equal pay between the sexes.  

To achieve equal pay, the state will have to sub-optimize those personal decisions and everyone will have lower incomes even though they will now be equal outcomes.  The state will have to force families to organize their family roles a certain way, force women to choose different careers, spend less time with their children, etc.  

Goldin comes the closest to acknowledging the implications here than I have seen in the past.

Reorganizing the workplace — a complicated undertaking — would help diminish the gap. It would also be narrowed if the burdens of family life were shouldered more equitably.

In sum, the gap is mainly the upshot of two separate but related forces: workplaces that pay more per hour to those who work longer and more uncertain hours, and households in which women have assumed disproportionately large responsibilities.

But it is not about those two forces (workplace flexibility and female familial responsibilities).  It is about people being free to choose what works best for them.  The gap exists because people are free to choose their optimal, and their optimal choices lead to unequal outcomes.

It is not about just reorganizing the workplace.  It is about allowing the government to override people making optimizing choices for their own goals in order to allow the government to achieve an abstract governmental outcome (equal income between male and female regardless of their personal choices.)

Equality on this court requires a level playing field at home and in the market. There are many battles ahead. Unfortunately, they need to be fought at several levels.

Many battles ahead?  Well, yes.  We have the choice to be governed through our freedom-based system of governance allowing individual choices or to be governed through authoritarian insiders choosing what people "should" want in order to achieve equal pay.  We have a name for those systems of government and we know their outcomes.  It is equality in misery rather than inequality in plenitude.  

Nobody will give up their free choices for reduced well-being in the name of an abstract, and ultimately meaningless goal.