> This is an excellent deflection, and it's also a relatively recent phenomenon. A surge in health care worker requirements which involve a lot of traditionally gendered roles has caused this outcome.

But that's the essence of the disparity. If you controlled for gendered roles, there would be no significant gender wage gap in any direction.

> And once again, we get to a phrasing of the problem that implies that it's a problem when men are at a disadvantage but inevitable when a woman is at a disadvantage.

Once again, the problem is the lack of consistency. If it's a problem that there are more men at the 99th percentile than women then it's a problem that there are more women at the 70th percentile than men. Either they're both problems or neither of them are.

> And these laws are largely toothless because of forced arbitration and Non-disparage agreements.

Something has been causing the wage gap to decline over time.

> The month California nullified these, a flood of class action lawsuits against major employers opened up. New York is considering such a law as well. I wonder if other states will have the courage to actually let the law come into play>

Arbitration agreements became popular when plaintiffs attorneys realized that defending against an unmeritorious lawsuit costs millions of dollars in legal expenses and companies would pay thousands of dollars to avoid paying millions of dollars. Arbitration agreements were a flawed attempt to defend against that practice. Eliminating them eliminates their flaws while reintroducing the problem they were adopted to solve to begin with, so what's your alternative solution for that?

> This is a common MRA talking point I encounter. I absolutely agree with you that incarceration rates are absurd and dehumanizing. It's a travesty of justice and in many cases a systemic attack on citizen's rights. This does not have any bearing on our current conversation, and we as a society _MUST_ be able to pursue more than one social justice issue at a time.

It does have bearing on our current conversation because it's the same issue. If gender imbalances are a problem that needs to be solved then they are a problem across the board regardless of which gender they favor in a particular context and they should be addressed in a consistent way. It is disingenuous to say that we should address imbalances that disfavor women today and imbalances that disfavor men at some indeterminate future date that in practice never comes. Neither or both, not one without the other.

> No, you did that. I claimed it was the same as doing poorly in primary school.

Which is essentially the same thing, when the argument for why boys are doing poorly in primary school is that they're being disciplined too often and disproportionately.

> To be clear: I think that argument is as absurd as suggesting that it's strictly women's choices that disadvantage them.

They are meant to be equally absurd. The point is that there is no universal gender adjustment that always applies in the same direction and with the same magnitude. You can't just average everything together into a scalar value and expect it to be meaningful or usefully inform policy.

If you have 17 male prison inmates, 80 male truck drivers, 100 female medical professionals and 3 male billionaires, just averaging their incomes by gender provides a very distorted picture of what is actually going on.