HN user
I don't think academic results are the (sole) metric of what enhances society most. I'd argue that getting more folks from underrepresented groups into schools and the pipelines that ultimately follow is a better society enhancement than a school having a slightly higher average GPA.
Did you read the whole paper? They control for the type of job in the multiple studies conducted in this paper - the job same job is advertised with differently worded postings. They also ran tests with male-dominated professions, female-domainated professions, and neutral professions - the result was the same.
http://www.fortefoundation.org/site/DocServer/gendered_wordi...
Pretty interesting study that proves that gendered wording of applications actually makes a significant difference in the gender ratio of folks who apply. The gender biases we've been socialized with might be false assumptions many times, but it's still the programming many people operate on.
This is awesome!
One thing though, any reason you have Mary making 10% less than Dave in your first data set? Seems like kind of a weird thing to include.