Well established but not widely accepted - Women want different things than men and different things than ideologues think they should want

Hmmm.  From Why is Management So Male? by Alice Evans.  Based on the work of Claudia Goldin, we know.  On average, men work more hours, over longer stretches of time, with greater continuity, take more risks, and seek more advancement and compensation.  In all OECD countries for the past fifty years and thousands of research papers.  

You take those variables into account and all the "gaps" disappear.  The system rewards accomplishments.  All the hoary explanations of exclusionary old boy networks, rank misogyny, signaling, etc. have no explanatory value.  They are popular explanations among ideologues but they do not actually explain the data.

In the US, and in most OECD, in most fields, 15-30% of the top whatever are women.  Top executives.  Top income earners.  Top reward recipients.  Top publishers of papers or books.  There are occasional exceptions, but 15-30 is the default assumption that covers almost everything.

Evans is looking at some recent research out of Germany.

"The Broken Rung: Gender and the Leadership Gap" by Ingrid Haegele

Ingrid Haegele finds that junior men are more likely to apply for promotions, primarily due to a greater desire for team leadership.

Sceptical? Suspicious?

Well, let’s first look at the dataset:

• One of the largest manufacturers in Europe, employing over 200,000 workers.

• Personnel records of over 30,000 white-collar and management employees in Germany from 2015 to 2019

• The universe of job application and vacancy data within the firm’s German operations. (In this firm, employees must actively apply for internal job switches, including promotions).

• A large-scale attitudinal survey of employees.

Haegele then examines drivers of gender gaps in promotion applications.

Evans then goes through all the old ideological standbys.   

Discrimination?  No.  Well, women who do apply are disproportionately successful in their applications!  They are either better prepared/qualified in their application and/or management is actively seeking to promote women.

Male dominance?  No.  Women are reluctant to seek promotion even when in female-leaning sectors, when they have female supervisors, or are in a team with an above-median female share.  

Expected rejection?  No.  Employees partook in a survey where the name was varied by gender. They were asked to rate the hypothetical employee’s prospects of promotion.  Neither men nor women expected sexism.

Confidence?  No!  "Men in this sample are certainly more confident, more willing to compete, and less averse to risk. But even controlling for those characteristics, men are still more likely to apply for promotions!

Location flexibility?  No!  Even in the same city or geographical location, there were large variances between the sexes in application rates.  

Childcare constraints?  No!  "Even women who do not have children and are not married (which the author uses as a proxy for fertility planning) are still less likely to apply for promotions, and are less willing to take on team leadership."

Ruling out the ideologically favored explanations, what is the key finding?

Men are more than twice as likely to apply for a promotion if it requires taking on responsibility over a team

Not all promotions require taking on responsibility over a team. Exploiting this heterogeneity, Ingrid Haegele finds a large gender gap. Men are doubly likely to apply for early career promotions that mean team leadership. This is not true for women.

Neither Evans nor Haegele seem to remark on what seems most obvious and which is found in research everywhere else in the OECD.  But the data is reported.  

The headline finding they are seeking to explain is:

Women (compared to men) are 27.4% less likely to apply for early-career promotions.

OK.  Everywhere else, women's achievements are tightly tied to the degree to which they, like men, work longer hours, flexible hours, and continuous hours (no career interruptions).  Hold those constant and there are no gender gaps.  We have two data points from this study.  Full-time versus part-time and number of hours worked. 

Men worked, on average, 11% more hours a week than women, 42.2 hours compared to 37.9 hours.  98% of men worked full-time compared to 74% of women.  A 32% difference.  

Now we have the data for a crude comparison that is none-the-less likely to be significant.

Women (compared to men) are 27.4% less likely to apply for early-career promotions.

and

Women (compared to men) are 32% less likely to work full time.

Those seem suspiciously close in magnitude to at least be a candidate explanation.

Haegele, like Goldin, finds that the enterprise processes are fair, inclusive and non-discriminatory against women.  The difference in outcomes is entirely because women and men want different things, primarily related to desired family structures and outcomes (children and caring for children).  

The ideologues won't let go of this issue.  They want there to be malevolent discrimination even where there is none.  Once you accept that the systems are fair and non-discriminatory (which is what you would expect since it is illegal), all you are left with for an ideologue is simple coercion.

You want women to want what you as the ideologue think they ought to want and you are willing to try and implement policies that will force them to do what you think they should want to do.  No matter how negative is the impact on their lives.  

Haegele's is useful additional information confirming what is now well established but still not widely accepted.