I'd like to defend HopeFox here.

Whenever the people around you treat something as a moral issue, I think it's wise to consider it that way yourself. When somebody says "I have a terminal value that says 'I want my society to have X/~X', and therefore I will vote to ban it", it's usually time to decide how valuable you consider X/~X to be.

You might decide that the given thing is morally neutral, but you can't easily evade the question. And my strong sense is that a large fraction of the public in the US and other western countries does consider wage equality a moral issue. There may be deep disagreement about whether equality of gender outcome is good or bad, but the question is certainly on the table.

My experience has been that gender is a problematic subject in nearly any social setting. But it's worth at least tiptoeing slowly towards it, since it won't become less problematic in the near future if we don't at least accustom ourselves to thinking about it.