Re: By no means a Microsoft fan, but ...
Yes, in some cases discrimination was even a policy. I recall seeing a job posting (an incredible number of years ago) that gave the base salary and that a man would get $350/month more. Obviously, that was before the equality legislation came along, but more than once I've heard the thought that a woman might be less company-oriented because sometimes she might have to care for her family, she might be more concerned for her family than for the company, that she might move away if her husband got a job in another area, that she might have to have time off to have a baby... All of these and more say you're likely to get less value from a woman, at least to the person who was saying it.
The first salary in a job can make a difference, and if a woman were hired by somebody who thought that (nothing in writing or out loud, of course) the pay rate could stick. I'm a white male and I recently retired from a job where each hire contracted for his salary and that was the basis for what you were going to make as long as you were there. A 5% raise for everybody this year, 2% another year, etc. I was hired at a bad economic time so I didn't start out as high as some people had been a few years before and were a few years later. It was informally understood that if I wanted to get ahead, I'd need to take a job somewhere else and be hired at a new rate. I stayed and was fortunate that a few times I received raises to partly catch me up.
Yes, the ~78% is a bare number, without explanation or adjustments for differences. But I think I'd argue that in some significant number of cases, there probably can be found a sex-related factor in that difference.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
