It’s not meaningless if you want to see women making at least as much as men regardless of the job and their skills. That’s the obvious implication of such statistics.
But is that really a valuable goal? The market determines wages, and usually it's willing to favor sacrifices like a 24 hour oncall rotation. Don't those people deserve for the value of those sacrifices to be reflected in compensation?
"Equal pay for equal work" is a much more compelling goal in my view than "equal pay for unequal work".
Not to mention it's incentivize companies to cut the roles with artificially inflated wages. Imagine a government mandated that some component or material cost 15% more than market rate. You'd refactor your design with that new cost in mind, and reduce usage of that component. Similar deal with labor.
I'd counter it's more likely that you'd see even more corruption and revolving doors between civilian and govt roles. It's very easy to spend other people's money (govt spending from taxes).
It's not a straw man. In the UK, the government has stepped in and mandate that two different jobs be paid the same, in the pursuit of pay equity.
Specifically, they forced Next to pay their warehouse workers and retail workers the same. When the retail workers were asked why they wouldn't just take jobs in the warehouse, they responded to the effect of "it's a less pleasant job, you'd have to pay me a lot more money to do it." Yet the UK mandated equal wages on account of the fact that more retail workers were women, and market rate wages created a net pay disparity (though women and men in the same roles were paid the same).
The intended implication of the presented statistic is obvious, but the actual disparity is impossible to realize without context on the types of positions being included in the statistic.
