That only works if the aggregate pay gap was a sum of individual, job-level pay gaps, but it’s not and it never was. It was mostly that the avg woman worked different jobs than the avg man. When you factor out career choice and years of experience and such the result is that men and women in the same job working the same hours were already earning at near-parity. So if individual firms enforced a gender equality norm, that might affect, say, 5% of the pay gap (and would that even be bad? Different pay for same work seems wrong), but not enough to resolve it like we’ve seen. And yea my point isn’t that DEI isn’t real or often very stupid and bad, but merely that it doesn’t explain why young women earn approx the same as young men now.