How the “what’s your current salary?” question hurts the gender pay gap

Re:How the “what’s your current salary?” question hurts the ... by lukeschlather on Friday April 29, 2016 @02:17PM (#11597628)

All the information we have is hourly wage, income, and job title. We can't know if a woman with the lower-paid job title of "Programmer Analyst" is doing the same work as a man with a job title of "Senior Software Engineer."

The "same job" is a subjective distinction, so you can't say it's entirely false; it's really a matter of opinion.

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Re:How the “what’s your current salary?” question hurts the ... by morgante on Friday April 29, 2016 @06:18PM (#11599121)

> The "same job" is a subjective distinction, so you can't say it's entirely false; it's really a matter of opinion.

No, it's not. Certainly there are some distinctions at the margins, as you note.

There are, however, some very clear distinctions. Women dominate elementary education, which I hope we can all agree is a very different job than programming (for example).

To reiterate, I don't know whether these preferences are innate or learned. In fact, I suspect it's the latter. But we shouldn't ignore them_if women were in fact paid less for doing the exact same jobs, solution would actually be a lot easier.

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