The gender wage gap is NOT due to discrimination.

I am arguing that the gender wage gap is not due to gender discrimination - to put another way I argue that the wage gap can be closed *almost* completely by controlling for various factors, I say almost as a small portion of the gap could be due to discrimination - however, the actual amount due to discrimination (if any exists) would be so insignificant that it might as well not even exist.Introduction-The uncontrolled gender wage gap (described as a woman earning about 80 cents. to every dollar a man makes earns in the US, however, it varies between countries) is often cited by the layman and sometimes the more informed as discrimination against women in the workplace. I will show 3 different pieces of evidence that this wage gap is not due to discrimination, starting now:1) Studies controlling for different factors other than discrimination reduce the size of the wage gap to near non-existence - There have been many studies which control for various confounding factors which could affect earnings, these include numbers of hours worked, overtime, type of job, time off, ect. When these calculations are done the wage gap vanishes. For example, in the USA, a company called CONSAD conducted a meta-analysis to eliminate non-discriminatory reasons for the gap - the report, which was produced for and endorsed by the department of labor reduced the gap to between 4.8 and 7.1 percent, from the original 20.4% - now that's not to say that the rest is due to discrimination, as noted in the report, it is impossible to control for every factor. [1]Another study in the US showed the same thing - a report by Payscale (an American website which provides information about salary, benefits, and compensation) was able to use the salary information in their database to reduce the pay gap to 2.4% from 23.7% (this method is likely more accurate as unlike the meta-analysis their database can be used to control for differences between their 1.4 million employees they have on it). [2]This pattern is also international, The HayGroup (an international consulting firm, which e collect job size and pay information for over 20 million job holders, in more than 25,000 companies across over 110 countries) used its database to control for company, level and function between 8.5 million employees in 33 countries and found that in all of them the wage gap decreased greatly, on average the controlled gap was 1.6% and the uncontrolled was 17.6%. [3]2) The wage gap is in favor of women...when they are in their 20s- Women in their 20s out earn the men of the same age (UK) [4]. If the wage gap was down to discrimination then how come women in their 20s outearn the men - what is the reason for companies to be sexist towards women over 30, but not those younger.3) There is no correlation between gender equality of a country and the wage gap - Using data from the 2016 Global gender gap report as a measure of gender equality (I know that it is not a perfect measure of gender equality of a country, but it is the best I could find) [5] and plotting it against the uncontrolled wage gap from the HayGroup in the 33 countries [3]. I was able to find that there was a positive correlation between the equality value wand the wage gap, meaning that at equality of a nation increased, so did the magnitude of the wage gap (note that when Spearman's rank correlation coefficient was found the correlation was insignificant). This shows that discrimination based on gender is not a good indicator of the wage gap - hence discrimination has an insignificant effect of the gap, so other factors likely contribute to the existence of the gap.Final Thoughts-I would just like to add an excerpt from the CONSAD report as it sums up the existence of a wage gap even when factors are controlled for quite nicely:"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. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers...it is not possible now, and doubtless will never be possible, to determine reliably whether any portion of the observed gender wage gap is not attributable to factors that compensate women and men differently on socially acceptable bases, and hence can confidently be attributed to overt discrimination against women. In addition, at a practical level, the complex combination of factors that collectively determine the wages paid to different individuals makes the formulation of policy that will reliably redress any overt discrimination that does exist a task that is, at least, daunting and, more likely, unachievable."References: [1] https://www.shrm.org...[2] https://www.payscale.com...[3] http://info.haygroupupdate.com...[4] https://www.theguardian.com...[5] http://reports.weforum.org...;