Culture wars in riddle format

They must work in an environment that does not have competitive labor markets with profit maximizing firms else the firm hiring the man could increase its profits by firing him and hiring the woman.

This is unfortunate, because the prospect of stuff like social justice is actually pretty great. Everybody agrees that it’s better when society is fair.

Hmm, I don’t think this is true…

But social justice is a calibration problem, and a hard one: there’s only one way to be fair, and infinitely many ways to be unfair.

Ok, now this is definitely not true.

A few ideas occur to me, all based on the man having a larger range of employers to choose from.

1. More men than women migrate to find work.

2. Men are willing to commute further.

3. Men are more willing than women to apply for jobs that they do not meet the requested qualifications for.

The briefest Googling suggests that there are studies to support all of these, but I'm not going to search any further for the needle.

These three all look like manifestations of a single characteristic, "initiative", or "get-up-and-go", but neither of those terms is good in a search engine.

I'm a bit confused by the details of the thought experiment.

• When you say "a fictional world where gender wage discrimination doesn’t exist", that could mean either:
  • Hiring managers don't take gender as a direct input on hiring in such a way that the distributions P(pay|gender) = P(hire) if the applicant is equal otherwise. In this case, intervening variables (such as height) might make men paid more than women on average, since they are on average taller and people who are taller are paid more for whatever reason.
  • Gender doesn't have any population level effect on pay, i.e. the population distributions P(pay|gender) and P(pay) are equal. In this case, differences between genders that matter for hiring (such as educational attainment) would necessitate that people of different genders be paid different amounts (so that the difference in educational attainment is balanced out by the explicit gender preference in pay).
• When you say "negotiate the salary the same way", it could mean:
  • Negotiation strategy does not depend on gender (but may depend on, e.g. disposition, in which case we can have intervening variables again)
  • The people being compared in the thought experiment are forced to employ a fixed negotiation strategy (in which case people with different circumstances or dispositions will apply for different jobs).

Not a fan of the format - I suspect I've seen some of the studies you're referring to, but in this case the puzzle is distracting from your intro, and the more interesting point that you yourself are struggling with stepping outside the culture wars.  I'd love to hear more about how you found alternate voices, and how you're convincing your brain to down-weight the models that most of the people around you are supporting.

One of the issues with culture war dynamics lies in people having a lot of certainty for their views with very little evidence for their views. The real world is very complex.

Your riddle shows one dynamic that leads to higher pay for men but it's just one of many factors.

If you for example read the moral mazes sequence it provides you with one mechanism that likely reduces the number of women in top management positions.

In the real world, some people are trying to counter perceived biases and overcorrect. 

It's really hard to know what factors go into why a certain job pays women differently than men but as humans, we love to feel like we know what goes on. We like to pretend that we can easily generalize effects over a large number of different examples.

Two possibilities:

• The company figured out that men consume less health care than women, and adjusted their salaries to account for it
• The company has a defined-benefit pension plan, and realized that this costs more to provide to women because women live longer. So they adjusted salaries to account for the difference in costs

Maybe the company is discriminating on some property that is not gender itself but is due to gender. Based on the description it would have to be something that does not affect the employees' work.

One possibility is that the company pays sole breadwinners more to help them support their families, and men tend to be sole breadwinners more often due to differing preferences/abilites/cultural expectations of the genders.

My thoughts were

• Education - men might invest more in education outside of the job - which is factored into future value.
• Socializing - men might socialize more with potential business partners/customers.

I tried mistake theory, conflict theory, critical theory, but the result is usually the same: after checking all the evidence, I come to the conclusion that my favourite political tribe is always right, and everyone else is an idiot.

Seriously? Doesn't sound like you did a good job there. Maybe your identity is a bit on the large side? Having a "favorite political tribe" is sus already, and "always right" is a dead giveaway that your evidence checking was thorough enough. 

My guess: the woman was hired later than the man and hasn't been promoted/given raises as much.