If market weren’t influenced by subjective perception of value, publicity wouldn’t exist.

Supply and demand is just part of the equation and, in fact, it only applies for “normal products”. If you bother to learn about economic theory, you would learn about the 10 premises for the market to work. One of them is “perfect information”, which is an utopia. And then you have “expectations” that influence prices and market evolution. For example: “If people think bitcoin would increase value, people would invest in bitcoin raising prices and it would become a self fulfilling prophecy”.

Same happens with jobs. If hospitals decide to set a wave for nurses and there is a limited number of hospitals hiring, even if there are few nurses, that would become de facto the nurses wages. And maybe that would mean that they would be understaffed and that the manager would complain about “talent shortage”. Sounds familiar? Because as it happens, it takes time and money to learn a trade or profession. So it might be difficult for a nurse to retrain into a programmer. But even with that barrier, there is not enough nurses. Yet, wages aren’t rising.

And even in your studies there is a part that can’t be explained away but the usual “men’s jobs are more risky, unpleasant, etc”.

And then we have the disparity between job titles and actual responsibilities. It is quite common that women do task over their pay level and for them to take longer to be recognized in the position they are already performing. You would usually get a rise that would be over the title you have, but under the one you are performing. That can happen to men too, but it is usually the women who suffer from this more.

Your link claim that the study is made by “serious economist”, yet doesn’t mention the sources or where their data comes from or methodology used. Not just that, it seems that there were aiming for a result instead of doing an analysis. Otherwise we would have detailed data instead of rethoric questions that, in fact, would point out that they are wrong. Example:

They said that:

“The AAUW researchers looked at male and female college graduates one year after graduation. After controlling for several relevant factors (though some were left out, as we shall see), they found that the wage gap narrowed to only 6.6 cents. How much of that is attributable to discrimination?”

1. There is an admission of a wage gap (6.6 cents). This doesn’t seem much. But 6.6 cents hour meant 132$ for 2000 hours a year, not much, but still there. AND as we know, many times when you negotiate wages in your next jobs, your current wage is used to set the new offer. So the wage gap would expand as your career progress.
2. This cover graduates, not people who is already experienced whose current wage is the result of their previous work history. So if a wider wage gap was in effect when they started working, their current wage might still reflect the previous gap.

When they talk about “individual choices” they forgot that people choose between a few offers, since you can’t change careers without a cost (starting at the bottom again).

Now look at this classic:

“if it were really true that an employer could get away with paying Jill less than Jack for the same work, clever entrepreneurs would fire all their male employees, replace them with females, and enjoy a huge market advantage.”

And add this other supposedly unrelated information:

“Company diversity leads to better profits”

Profits = Income — Cost

Cost include wages. Lower wages means less cost (as CEO’s always reminds us when they do layoffs). So what if in fact clever entrepreneurs are in already doing just that and that is why diverse companies are more profitable?

As for your claims about how HR works, I want to point out that while HR needs to comply with many regulations, there are still companies who won’t complains or ways that you can technically be compliant and still discriminate legally. The google settlement about wage discrimination against women shows it. To be fair, I’m willing to believe that the discrimination wasn’t intentional, but the result of wage setting based on previous wages that would still be influenced by previous wage gap. While tools like Success Factors allow comparisons using data from linkedin and other job searching portals to set wages for a position, they tend to use previous wages to set offers. This is a common HR practice, they don’t publish what the position is worth, they ask you for your current wage or “expectations” (that would be based in your current wage). If you have been discriminated before, that would still carry to the new position by default.

You repeat talking points, but I doubt that you have stopped to analyze the algorithms used in the current talent applications used by HR or the logic behind them. Algorithms, tend to repeat and increase the system (in this case work market) errors. Let’s face it, discrimination and obscurity about wages is a feature of the work market that companies take advantage of.