Unless advocates of buying local are sourcing everything locally themselves, their appeal amounts to asking you to impoverish yourself for their benefit on the basis of geographic proximity alone, and that's nonsense.
Thoughts on the Gender Pay Gap
This is not an exhaustive repository of research on the gender pay gap, but it does help to highlight an important principle: individual choices made by free people who have a range of preferences result in outcomes different from that which third-party onlookers might want or expect.
Some Links
Some of these aren't especially recent, but...