Just because you're unaware of the context doesn't make it a straw man. There is a larger ongoing dialogue at HN in which this theme consistently crops up.
And coincidentally, it is also a consistent argument that having a memory of these threads is either unfair or unsportsmanlike.
That's a really weird conclusion to draw based on that statistic. Another way to say the same thing would be "Donald Trump performed more poorly in California than any other Republican candidate since 1936."
(I see he removed his comment. For posterity, he argued that Donald Trump got "almost a third" of the votes in California and, therefore, liberals were on the decline).
My point was more that it was surprising to me that someone as vilified as Trump still got almost a third of the votes in CA, but I agree that your point makes that look substantially weaker, so I retract it.
The meta argument I am trying to make is that recent arguments about this have shifted to including accounting for jobs (and usually experience levels), since jecjec was claiming that it's still the antiquated version that does not account for any of those things. If you want to have a discussion about the quality of any of those articles or the studies they're based on, well, that's a different discussion entirely, I present these as evidence that the discussion has moved, not that any of them are correct.
Band 5 staff earn between £21k and £28k. Band 8d staff earn between £65k and £81k.
When we restrict ourselves to a single healthcare profession (in this example I used widwives) that has many more women than men at the entry level jobs we still see men being promoted above women.
That's not what is meant by wage gap, you have been (intentionally) deceived. The gap only works if you do NOT account for things like "doing the same job".
Are you somehow personally slighted by this? every single wage gap "report" or debate is all about median/avg, not actual same job/title/responsibilities.
The problem is that the way the issue is (intentionally, I'm sure) presented is with charged phrases like "for every dollar a man makes, a woman only makes X cents". To a reasonable person, that sounds like it implies "for the same work" -- otherwise, you're comparing apples to oranges, so they must not mean that, the reasonable person thinks. And so the reasonable person gets (rightfully) angry and it becomes a very emotional issue, even though it was based on deception. In that sense, what most people imagine when someone says "wage gap" doesn't exist.
Many people find it more convenient to instead believe the difference is caused by people in charge automatically offering women less than what they would offer a man. Of course, studies controlling for the type of job, credentials, experience, ability, etc., show that to be a poor hypothesis, but it is nevertheless a phrasing that makes it easy to make people angry (and vote for you).
The concept of minimum wage is beneficial to the big players as well, because the small players will eventually have neither the money to pay people more than they're worth nor the upfront capital to develop the machines to replace them.
You will also never be able to justify hiring more expensively if you can instead use a cheap/free machine, which is of course where we're heading, since people refuse to acknowledge the truth in OP's quote.
