[quote=Jorick]I just have to note that I find this hilarious for obvious reasons. Moving on...[/quote]

:lol I never even caught that!

[quote=Jorick]Yup. I very much took maternity things into consideration, as that's a wholly valid and not really sexist reason for a pay gap existing. My issue is with the remaining gap that doesn't have an explanation. Also yeah, I'd be very surprised if there was no sexism involved there, but assuming that it exists without having any evidence to back it up is a bad starting point, as it makes you seek evidence to support your conclusion rather than looking at it as objectively as possible.[/quote]

Agreed. The second you go out of your way to prove a certain thing, rather than to neutrally find the truth of the matter is when bias studies and results happen.
And those don't help anybody.

[quote=Jorick]Wait, what? A couple years, 2-5 years? How long do you think maternity leave actually is? In the US, the bare minimum that must be provided (given a few requirements like the employer must have over 50 employees to need to give it, and the woman has to have worked there for at least 12 months and worked for at least 1,250 hours) is 12 weeks unpaid leave. Smaller businesses aren't legally obligated to give any maternity leave, and women who haven't met those work requirements don't have to be given any maternity leave. From what little I could find on the subject (which was , and their data source was apparently the National Center for Health Statistics), the average time off actually taken for maternity things is 10 weeks. The figures they cited also said that 1/3 of women took no formal maternity leave at all and went right back to work soon after (I'm assuming this means less than a week after, given phrasing and context) giving birth, and a further 16% only took 1-4 weeks off. I would wager that the reason for this is that most people can't afford to take all the unpaid time off, so they get back to it as soon as they feel capable. Anyway, that's roughly half of working women that take less than a month off for maternity leave. It's not a matter of taking years off for the vast majority of women, it's a few months at most unless they happen to work for a company that goes above and beyond the federal requirements for maternity leave, which are apparently fairly rare.

Seriously, if it were a year or more taken off from work for each child then the wage gap would not only be explained, I would expect it to be even higher.[/quote]

I was thinking in total of all children.
That plus any additional time the mother may take off on top of Maternity leave to be with the child.

Maybe I'm too used to mothers staying at home though so my estimate in how it is for a typically working mother was off. :/
But at the same time, that does help highlight the difference between men and women with staying at home or working atm. 

[quote=Jorick]The only field I can think of that is truly so physically intensive that there's a solid reason for a gender pay difference even when accounting for use of machines making things easier is construction, and ironically that has one of the smallest pay gaps of all work fields (7.8% gap, subtract that 7.3% that is reasonably caused by maternity leaves, you're left with 0.5% and that's not an unreasonable difference given the nature of the work). Other work that was very physically intensive in the past, like mining and farming, now seems to be predominantly machine operated as you said, so their larger pay gaps are weird. Same goes for all the desk jobs and such, where greater average physical capabilities shouldn't be a factor at all.

I agree that it's rather complicated and would require professional assessments. The kind of general data we've been looking at only gets you so far, understanding why the pay gaps exist in particular fields of work would need some in-depth studies and such. It'd be easy to cry sexism and start bitching about it, but that would be drawing a conclusion without evidence, and doing that is just plain awful.
[/quote]

Agreed. I'd rather find the true issue than to just cry sexism and make a commotion out of something where there isn't one.
Or make a commotion when there's no given reason to be doing so.