Georgina, I have anecdotal evidence that identically performing women get paid less, but I have never ever seen clear data. In all the cases I've seen the numbers there is considerably arm waving and nonsense like "equal worth" whatever that means. That doesn't mean I don't believe it happens it means the personal integrity of the researchers is so low that I find myself doubting things I thought to be undeniably true. The shit report starts with the conclusion it would like to be true then offers no decent evidence at all.
There are of course difficulties, most of us have jobs where comparing quality of work objectively is very hard unless the differences are very great. In our particular case, I'd laugh in the face of someone who said Quant A was 10% better than Quant B, we just can't measure that finely.
Georgina, I have no interest in people that speak any language other than English, it's not my problem if they were born speaking it or something else. >120 million people speak German how hard can it be if you have an adequate memory and a high boredom threshold ?
I note more sexism in the German job market than the British one, though even that falls far short of ideal but she did herself no favours if she trumpeted her language skills.
C++, SQL, Java et al are based on English, why should I care if she knows some "native" language ? There are jobs where it is useful, hence the receptionist offer, if you don't want to be offered secretarial work, don't sell yourself on secretarial skills.
As a headhunter I will state as fact that in US/UK banking a women is on average more likely to get a job in the areas I work in than an equivalent male, no recruiters has ever argued that point with me, some deride me for stating something they see as trivially obvious.
Of course few women
are equivalent when they drone on languages on their CVs and amongst the most onerous tasks I have is talking to female candidates about programming, none has actually cried on my shoulder over the prospect of writing code, but that day is coming. Some have literally just stared at me when I broached the subject.
And for the record, women do have babies. I'm a father of two of them. One bad side effect of the law around this is that you can't discuss it rationally with the prospective employee, I assume everyone here has read the market for lemons by
Akerhof ?