[neilyio]

A lot of comments on this thread seem to feel like the “why” of this matter is settled with an answer of “The men have more experience and are working higher-level jobs. Therefore, they receive higher pay.”

This is not the equilibrium we are aiming for as a society, and the matter is not settled here.

The point of these measurements is not to demand that women are paid more for less work. The point is for us to keep asking “why”, and not just stop after the first one.

“Why are women earning less at the New York Times?”. Maybe the company is just top-heavy with men in leadership roles. This has been floated in this thread as a common cause.

“Why are there more men in leadership roles?”. A few commenters have shared anecdotes of having far more men in their recruiting process. More men applying would help explain more experienced men higher up in the company.

“Why are there more men than women applying?”. We’re getting closer to root causes now. In software engineering, for example, there are just more men in the workforce.

“Why are there more men in the workforce?”. It gets more difficult, but also more important, to investigate the answer at these lower levels. Girls Who Code and similar initiatives are tackling this behemoth cultural problem. It will take years to see the effect of their work, but their success breeds hope that someday, the gap in this New York Times statistic will close a little.

At any of these levels, a company can step in and try and correct the natural bias in their hiring or development pipeline. That is, of course, the most sensitive topic for a lot of us here. Such initiatives should have buy-in from the workforce, and there’s an implication here that the (unionized) workers of NYT do support some kind of intervention.

Their choice, and above all the very measurement of a wage gap, doesn’t need to be threatening to anybody here. It will forever be important to track this number even if we “feel” like the explanations are simple. It doesn’t represent some kind of action the company should be forced to take. It measures where we are on every level of asking “why?”.

[jimbokun]

"We" don't have to do any of those things.

There is no need for a society that forces, top down, every possible occupation to be perfectly split 50/50 by sex. Just let individuals make their own decisions.

In this case, why do we "need" more women coding? Maybe they are doing other work that is just as important and fulfilling and useful to society?

[janalsncm]

The issue is that we can’t make reliable judgements about the hiring or promotion process based on the outputs without more information about the inputs. But I agree, the answer is more information, not less.