In my lifetime work experience, many women I've seen do not deserve the same pay as the men with the same titles. For instance, I held a senior systems engineer title at a large computer site; they gave the same title and pay to some women to make them feel better. While building a row of computer servers and data cabinets, one gal comes along with a server on a mobile stand and asks me to hook it up for her. I said why, she should do it. She said "I don't know how." She didn't know how to hook up a keyboard, display and mouse. And wanted engineer pay. And she couldn't lift the server into a rack. I was responsible for calculating the power requirements for the data cabinets, assembling the cabinets and installing power and UPS to them, building the servers and installing the system software and doing the router communications. None of which she could do. Now multiply that by half a dozen similar women at the department and you get an idea of why the men were pissed off. Complaints would do no good, as department managers protected the women.
I've had other similar experiences at other places I worked. I've only encountered a couple women who were equal to the tasks as the men. One had no problem crawling through rat infested tunnels between buildings to install new data comm wiring, and knew her engineering as well as any guy. But on average, most women were overpaid, while the men were overworked.
“they gave the same title and pay to some women to make them feel better”
“Complaints would do no good, as department managers protected the women.”
Now you know why these steps were taken; they were purely to protect the company from lawsuits 1) relating to pay, and 2) relating to hiring women at all. I’ve worked with some talented women, and others that weren’t; I’ve just never seen money thrown at unqualified, unproductive men the way I see it with women. It is all affirmative action window-dressing to keep lawyers and the government at bay.
When you see the efforts and money thrown at programs today to unsuccessfully get women into STEM fields, it becomes clear that there are differences between genders that can’t be ignored. They may be cultural, as some Asian women seem better adapted to those fields, but they exist nonetheless - American women don’t want to work in those very difficult fields. They just want the pay that comes with them, so the IT receptionist will be paid as a programmer.