This is an example of a NYT reporter filling in context so that they don't get pubicly shamed. It seems like a lot of reporters think it's their job to stop readers from reaching the obvious conclusions of their reporting, lest a larger narrative be lost.

I don't think the context is completely unjustified. It just happens to be more complicated than this. The reason that women generally drifted into higher compensation compared to men was that their direct management chain was adjusting their compensation disproportionately (when measured in aggregate, across the company).

You could come up with a lot of explanations for this effect. Women could have been hired at lower levels than appropriate and were therefore outperforming men of the same level, for instance. Or, perhaps, there's a lot of emphasis in the company towards retaining and compensating women fairly, and the effect was that managers were primed to reflect that in their pay raises -- in other words, people were personally overcompensating for the intrinsic biases they were told that they had. Still another reason might be that women just make better engineers, in aggregate.

Google decided that the goal was "equity" here and decided to correct it, for better or worse, and yet it's false to say that we already understand the cause behind the disparity.