> "I believe men and women should get equal pay for equal work. "
> I believe that it's insane to suggest anything else.
Sure, but in the real world how do you do that? First there's a problem with the metrics. Do you consider yearly pay, per-hour, bi-monthly, on the results (per-project)? With each method comes caveats, as not everyone works the same number of hours, results can depend on your work and abilities but also on a good serving of luck, etc. Then there's the fact that in a lot of places pay calculation depends on your overall experience and on your seniority in the place, meaning that things get hairy pretty quick if you're trying to compare pay between 2 people of different ages and/or who weren't hired at the same time. So the only way really is to make it retroactive, i.e. in the end of the, say, year, you crunch the numbers, with a lot of equivalent-this and compensatory-that (to account for holidays, number of worked hours, position in the local food chain, performance reviews etc) and you can tell if you've been paying fat black redhead women less than fit blond white men (or any other 2 categories that you may want to compare).
Then you can retroactively make adjustment "attention all blue-eyed staff, please head to your local HR office immediately for a 2% pay cut. Thank you for your cooperation" or sumfin' (OK, not really, what you would do is tweak the raises for the upcoming year I guess, and hope that things will equilibrate).
Not as easy-peasy as it may seem at first.