The gender wage gap is NOT due to discrimination.

I would first just like to say how glad I am somebody decided to debate me, honestly, I was getting a bit worried that nobody would. Anyhow, I supposed that I will be going on the defensive a lot in this part of the debate - so, here we go:1) CONSAD Defense: This is a little point, but I would like to disagree that the Consad study was my main argument - I even stated that the database analysis would be more reliable than the meta-analysis, however, I am still going to defend it. You see, I do not believe that the Consad study is a bad as you are making it out to be, it is indeed by no means perfect and has its fair share of flaws, but it still supports the view that wage gap is mainly not due to discrimination. Just because a study has limitations doesn't mean that its conclusions are invalid or that it should be thrown out. The study itself did say that " additional research in this area is clearly needed" but it also went on to say "this study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. " And this is directly after acknowledging that the longitudinal databases that contain such information include too few workers, however, to support adequate analysis of factors like occupation and industry. And I have to agree, although it's not the best study out there it is still good enough to be mentioned and used as evidence."The worst flaw in the study is that it analyzed part time and full-time workers." - This is actually not that big of a deal, the part-time work is controlled for in the end anyhow so it doesn't really matter - if they did an analysis on just full times workers the end wage gap would be similar, it's just that there would be fewer differences in hours worked which would need to be controlled for, all the other factors would still be controlled for and the end result would (or at least should) be the same.2) Types of discrimination- I am glad that you brought up different types of discrimination which could cause a wage gap, as I left it out of my original analysis. Economist Solomon W. Polachek suggests three possible instances of discrimination: Unfair hiring, unfair pay, and unfair promotion practices. Suggesting they could be explained by outright corporate discrimination, possibly motivated by corporate monopsony power, given that there are far fewer employers (buyers of labor) than employees (sellers of labor); employer misperceptions regarding women’s relative productivity (statistical discrimination); male employees’ distaste for dealing with female fellow workers; and consumer distaste for purchasing products made or sold by women. He also argues their validity one by one, and although I normally hate just leaving a giant quote, I think ill make an exception in this case: " Outright corporate discrimination (paying higher wages to men for the same job) is incompatible with profit maximization: Profits sink when a firm pays men more, rather than hiring less expensive female employees. Stereotyping based on statistical discrimination is possible in the short term, but surely not in the longer term. Firms cannot sustain long-term losses in a competitive environment either by paying men more or by promoting less qualified men over more qualified women, or simply by misjudging women’s abilities. A male distaste for female coworkers is possible, but if so should result in gender-segregated work environments, not gender wage differences within the company. Consumer distaste for products made and sold by women is also possible, but all too often consumers are not aware who actually makes a product, although they are aware of where the product is manufactured. Relative wages for females in sales roles are no different from those in other occupations. Women earn less than men in (almost) all of the most common occupations, including sales...Each type of possible discrimination is inconsistent with negligible wage differences among single and younger employees compared with the large gap among married men and women (especially those with children, and even more so for those who space children widely apart). Again, why would companies discriminate against married women, and even more so against married women with children, but not against younger women, or singles? If employers discriminate based on misperceptions of worker productivity or male employee (offensive or derogatory) feelings about working with women, then why do they discriminate against married women, but not single women? Why should children (especially widely spaced children) exacerbate the level of discrimination?" [1]3) Payscale Defense - "The payscale article you cite concedes a lot...Here, it concedes not only that the pay gap exists, but that even after accounting for ALL OTHER INFLUENCES the wage gap exists, undoubtedly because of discrimination." - The most important thing which I want to say is that it is likely impossible to control for every other factor - even if you were somehow able to control for every factor that we know of there are likely loads of other small factors which influence the gap in tiny amounts. Take for example negotiation, how do you control for "ability to negotiate"? Indeed it would likely be impossible as even if you gave people a script to read off to try and control for negotiation skill it wouldn't be enough as everything from body language to the speed of speech to appearance, or even just how the boss is feeling that day could have an effect. Now, I am not claiming that negotiation ability or the frequency of negotiation or whatever, I am merely trying to illustrate to you that it is impossible to control for every factor - and I am sure that if you were able to control for every factor there would be a very small amount of the gap due to discrimination.You did mention that the Payscale study conceded that the pay gap still exists after controlling for factors - a statement which I have never disagreed with. Now, the report didn't directly say that the controlled gap was due to discrimination (I think it is up to interpretation what they were saying), but even if a assume they did say that then it would be a total non-sequitur, because, as stated, it would be very difficult for every factor to be controlled - you see what you are using is a variation of the "god of the gaps" argument, lets call it the "sexism of the gaps" argument - because any gap you have left you just stuff sexism in it to try and explain it; hypothetical scenario lets say that another factor was controlled for and the 2% controlled wage gap went down to 1%, would you then say that that 1% must be due to discrimination as all other factors have been considered as you are doing now?4) HayGroup Defense - "there is a correlation between wage gap and nation" - No, no, no, no! As I stated previously I ran a statistical test (spearman's) to determine the correlation coefficient between the gender equality of a nation and its raw wage gap, and there was an insignificant correlation. You are cherry picking Mexico and Brazil to prove your case, using the same logic I could say that "the more patriarchal the society the smaller the wage gap " as I could Saudi Arabia has a gap of only 20%, where it is about 28% for the UK, 24% for Australia and 22% for Switzerland, and I am sure we can all agree that Saudi Arabia is WAY more patriarchal and sexist than any of those three countries."Your evidence is from Hay Group, a consultant firm with little history in studies or polling. This is reflected in the flaw with the study you provided: It has a TINY sample size" - Now I'm not an expert on statistics, but I don't think that the sample size is too shabby, have you put this through a sample size calculator or something? Because most surveys/studies have what you would consider a "small" sample size (a <1% of the population sample size). To give an example Pew research often has about 1000 participants per country surveyed, now I am unsure if we can compare surveys sample sizes on the general population with employee database sample sizes and if you say we can' I want a good reason why, but even if we can't I would like proof that 10's or 100's of thousands of people are not enough.5) One final thing on discrimination - Though we just assume that women are going to be the victims of discrimination there is some evidence that women are preferred. Women are preferred in STEM field hiring for example [2] (BTW, I already know the arguments you are going to bring up to try and dismiss this research, this follow up paper: should address any criticisms:[3], I maintain that this experimental evidence along with the real world evidence presented shows a sturdy advantage for women), and women are preferred in shortlisting for senior positions [4] and male reviewers displayed markedly more positive discrimination in favour of minority candidates than did female counterparts. Now, of course other studies show the different results and I am sure we could go back and forth all day about the validity of these studies, but due to the inconsistency in the data, we should probably conclude that there is not yet enough evidence that males are neccesarily discriminated in favour of.References: [1] https://wol.iza.org...[2] http://www.pnas.org...[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...; (SEE: "Possible reactions to these findings" section)[4] https://pmc.gov.au...