Clinical psychologist and professor Jordan B Peterson visited Channel 4 News and had a debate on the gender pay gap, campus protests and postmodernism. He was asked if admitted and accepted the abstract empirical observation of the gender pay gap between men and women. It sparked the debate that I am about to discuss further.
Peterson had to repeat his point many times in order to correct misleading interpretations and accusations made by the interviewer: it is difficult to make any moral or normative conclusions about the observation, because it does not tell much about HOW, what are the underlying mechanisms that lead to the outcome.
For example, free choices concerning career can lead to variation in outcome between two statistical populations. Peterson explained differences among average psychological profiles between men and women. Whether "gender equality" is a myth, or whether "equal pay" is desirable, he implied the need for clarified concepts. There is a difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. The question is more universal and comes back to more elementary social philosophy.
Equality of opportunity refers to removal of exact barriers that discriminate focus on substance for irrelevant attributes. Equality of outcome refers to even statistical distribution of outcomes among all potential attributes with less emphasis or causal respect towards the role of substance. The extreme of outcome equality would be collectivism.
In fact, egalitarian and socialist political movements have built a myth of income distribution in general as a driver for welfare. Even though it would serve as an abstract indicator, it still confuses the actual causal relations between input and output. The catch is this: income equality or inequality in society cannot be simplified as drivers of welfare.
Free market competition and entrepreneurship would inevitably lead to uneven distribution of resources, but by generating products for masses and diverse marketing segments. Similar amount of "inequality" can also be a result of less free elements, planned economy and crony capitalism. Designing society by taking the outcome distribution as the point departure means putting cart in front of the horse.
Outcome approach to gender pay gap is a light version of planned economy and other major branches of economic illiteracy.