[korkoros]

I work for a federal defense contractor that is required to prove in Department of Labor audits that pay is not discriminatory. The possibility of losing those federal contracts is an existential threat to the company. Definitely not "niche cherry picked reporting stats that few people look at."

The significant restructuring (affected several hundred people) that you describe did in fact occur.

[jncfhnb]

Hmm, no, still don’t believe it. That’s just absurd. I just refuse to believe that they systematically demoted women / promoted men to try and obfuscate pay differences at original levels.

This idea is surely much more expensive to implement than just paying the women more. It’s also fairly easily discovered by an audit of any competence or whistleblower. And the women would surely have a strong negative reaction to this which is an operational risk of them just leaving.

What you are proposing happened is illegal discrimination to begin with, but it’s also really difficult to do. Seems more likely a willing company would prefer to simply lie