Women earn less than Men

[GrandizerII]

OK...so if there's a wage gap, why aren't we seeing it in people's actual rates of pay? Why do we always have to do all this voodoo with the earnings gap to make the wage gap manifest? Why don't we simply look at the wages people are actually paid to find the disparity?

While I'm asking interesting questions, did you know that if you look at only the group of women who make identical business and lifestyle choices to the men in their field, they make the same money? Consistently. All women have to do if they want to make what men make is forsake childbearing, take a high-stakes job, then stress about it so much that it shortens their lives by several years.

Sooo...there's an unconscious bias that causes men to unconsciously pay women the same rates and then find covert ways to sneak money away from them so they'll earn less? How does an entire half of the population (or anyone, for that matter) unconsciously do something that pointed and insidious, and why has nobody figured out that they're doing it or how? You probably would have actually been better off trying to defend a conspiracy theory.

Also, that's a bit of an abuse of Occam's Razor. The Razor is not for parsing out which claim is true or even most likely true. Occam's Razor is actually for deciding which order to investigate answers in. When considering multiple possible solutions/explanations, Occam's Razor demands that we test and rule out simple claims before moving on to more complex ones, and the reason for this is time efficiency. If I am weighing two positions, and one would take an hour to test, and the other would only take minutes, It is markedly inefficient to tackle the hour-long test first.

What you CAN'T do with Occam's Razor is claim that the simplest solution is correct just because it's simple, especially in the absence of adequate evidence for that solution. Simplicity is not a measure of truth. Simpler claims are just generally faster and easier to investigate, meaning you can rule out more items in less time.

Something you conveniently ignored, and did not comment on, is the empirical evidence for gender discrimination is real in the workplace. Another thing to point out is that this isn't strictly committed by men. Women are guilty as well. The study I linked to is one example that illustrates this.

As for your questions, there is a consistent unexplained gender pay gap, that has been measured in hourly rates, weekly rates, yearly, etc, that is consistent across nations and majority of professions and even exacerbated among minority races. Gender discrimination is one factor that has been considered to at least partly contribute to that portion of the gap. Studies show subconscious discrimination is real, whether gender or race-based or sexuality-based. You may not like it, but that's the evidence.

No voodoo or conspiracy theory, this is statistics, psychology, controlled experiments, etc.