My solution would be to treat women like soldiers going to war with a twist Company continues to pay for their salaries up to 2 years for each partner or 4 years for a single woman.

The concern I have (no qualms from me from making this happen so don't assume that the negative) is that long term the goal will be to take all wages to the lower salaries of the demographics instead of raising them all up to the highest.

The big question though is for folks that don't have kids, have worked their entire lives and don't get the benefit of having their kids education funded for them. (think K-12). Also on the flip side, I can always tell you the extra compensation from a work side (I appreciate the energy burn on the family side) where work was dumped on me because I was single.

How do companies ensure fairness in work effort and achievement to salary.

E.g. one work situation was in professional services were travel was required. I had a consultant who was hard working, but did not like traveling (a requirement. I took his extra weeks on the road and covered for him and only had him show during "required" visual times with the customer to allow him to raise a family while doing so.

I had to burn 20-30 hours of my week traveling on top of a 60-70 billable hour workload. He billed 40 as did his wife (who actually worked on the same projects as he did).

They were both paid equally BTW .... the PMs and myself as technical leads made sure of that, but in the long term when layoffs came up they were always at risk .... no matter the quality of their work.