Yup. That’s kind of the rub. It’s not a pay gap on paper anywhere in the sense of pay scales, it’s a bunch of societal biases that lead to overwhelmingly common “emergent” systemic behavior that skews women towards the lower end of the pay bands they coexist with men in while also often denying them promotions into higher positions and pay bands that are more frequently given to equal or lesser skilled men.

Very few of the individual cogs in the system are intentionally aiming for this outcome, but it’s the combination of a shit ton of biases built up over generations about women and how they are expected to behave that all smashes together into the shitty end result of pay discrepancy along gender lines.