Not the original poster, but:
A number of the gender based wage gap studies that have made a splash in the press have neglected to account for multiple facets of employment and occupational risk leading to conclusions showing an outsize pay gap... They've documented inequal outcomes in the market based on equivalent experience or education across sectors without controlling for inequality of physical-demands and employment distribution... The popular press then extrapolates these findings inartfully, leading to a shared sense of gender discrimination that is not borne out by the broader market.
I know this is something of a hot button topic, so I'll be extra clear: women and men are of equal value, and deserve equal pay for equal work, naturally. But we have to own the fact that, statistically, men really should be earning more at work as long as men are doing the majority of high-risk occupations and women are taking more time off of work when having children. There are a lot of different studies, but last I dug into this when you start comparing more apples-to-apples you find that the gender gap is nowhere near the oft cited 0.75 cents on the dollar.
There is a gender pay gap, though it's quite difficult IMO to pin that gap on broad sexism given a few cultural factors. Namely men being 6 times more likely to ask for a raise at work, men being more likely to measure self-worth at work through money and not peer approval, societal pressures for men to be a 'provider', and for men to measure self-worth almost exclusively through career success.
While we're looking at why young men are more likely to find themselves doing EOD work or high-voltage wire repair than women, lets also remember that the physical difference between the sexes can, in fact, be a life or death matter in some occupations... And if we want to compare employment outcomes by years of education taken, we really need to quantify how dirty and dangerous jobs oriented towards physical labour would ideally be gender-represented in the market. Ie Sewer repair technicians and plumbers and construction skew male and high paying compared to white collar positions with the same length of training - are we really going to expect 50% female representation in those fields?
Height based studies, on the other hand, are much easier to setup controls for. Outside of the far extremes height doesn't fundamentally impact employment opportunities, and demographically are much easier in terms of experimental design. As long as those studies control for certain kinds of physical work which self-select towards large/small people we should be able to get a reasonable grasp of how the world responds to taller people. Last I checked a few inches in height meant a significant increase in yearly takehome pay, management opportunities, and attractiveness as a mate.
Bottom line: easier studies that aren't politically loaded tend to give us better data than harder studies that are rich with social and political subtext... Women should get paid as well as men, but we can't pretend that Geese and Ganders are one and the same. Deep sea welders get paid a lot of money and jobs like that will create a statistical gender pay gap as long as they are not equally distributed among the genders.
