From the glassdoor wage gap study you mentioned in [2]:
> After taking into account differences in education and experience, men working at tech companies overall make 5.9 percent more than women do
From a brief scan of the study they didn't control for hours worked and they are already down to 5.9%
Since full-time men work 5% longer than full-time women[3] just adjusting for hours worked almost entirely eliminates the gap.
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/karinagness/2016/06/30/new-repo...
Edit: Sorry I put the overall adjusted US pay gap of 5.4% when I meant to put the adjusted tech pay gap of 5.9% from the glassdoor study.
Yeah, I've gone through and scanned that BLS report you linked to (actually you didn't, you linked to Forbes, but this is what they were talking about): https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf
It doesn't say what you think it does at all. This isn't a study of men vs. women working identical jobs and doing less work, this is a finding that across the entire workforce, a men's "work day" is somewhat longer than a woman's. Which is to say: Women are more likely to work part time jobs.
Please stop trying to mislead people.
From your link on the very first page:
> However, even among full-time workers (those usually working 35 hours or more per week), men worked longer than women—8.2 hours compared with 7.8 hours. (See table 4.)
Like I said this is an ~5% difference. If you don't like this particular study the results have been replicated dozens of times across a wide range of industries.
If you have some evidence that full time male tech workers work fewer hours than full time female tech workers I'd love to see it.
You can't see how working extra hours can increase productivity enough to warrant a small increase in pay?
Could you distill the overall argument?
Comparing two individuals based on hours worked is different to looking at populations.
And we aren't talking about 60-80 hour weeks (burnout zone).
Unless you are arguing women as a group are significantly more efficient compared to men?
What you did is go out through the whole world of statistics to find one value that kinda/sorta "fixes" this inconvenient finding in the direction you want. That's just baldly ridiculous cherry picking, and you should be ashamed.
You on the other hand are trying to draw conclusions that aren't backed by the data.
What you are doing is saying "No, I don't think the conclusion should be what the data says", and then you're going out and finding ("cherry picking") different data about related but not identical subjects that appears to contradict it.
Sorry, but the burden of proof is on you if you want to make a numeric argument here. And you're doing it with extraordinarily bad analysis.
Summary with a link to the research paper, which is really good science as demonstrated with experimentation and doesn't try to sell a narrative, BTW. Worth the read. http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2016/03/ilr-school-resea...
"New research by ILR School professors Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn finds an eight percent gender wage gap that cannot be accounted for, even after controlling for observable variables that influence workers’ pay.
Gender discrimination in the workplace COULD be a cause, they suggest."
The data shows there is a difference in pay.
Underpaid means less pay for the same work.
That's not the same thing. Not even close.
In fact it is intentionally misleading.
Believe what you want. Just like climate change denial, there's enough uncertainty in these numbers to make any level of ostrich-headery justifiable. I just want to know why no one ever manages to show data that is "wrong" in the other direction...
Also, starving people of hours is just as effective at reducing costs as lowering the hourly. I don't think it's in your favor to argue that's something that should be controlled.
Are they?
From what I have seen the consensus is:
An overall small 3-6% wage gap after accounting for basic life choices.
Women under 30 + childless women significantly out-earning women with children + older women.
Women under 30 + childless women have almost no wage gap and in many industries are out-earning their male peers.
Life is rough for the bottom 50% of earners - male and female.
What exactly do you think the stats show?
> and the jobs that are heavily weighted towards women do not pay nearly as much.
Why are you talking about women like they are objects without agency?
My friends in game design work harder than I do and earn half what I earn.
They made a trade-off and work in a more interesting and rewarding job that pays less.
They certainly aren't oppressed and discriminated against.
Now this isn't really true at the bottom end of the scale. But it is for the middle class and up.
I do consider 3-6% damning.
If you only compare women to other women, of course you won't see a wage gap; you can blame it all on the individual.
It's this willingness to value personal views of the world to minimize the facts that allows the gap to continue. Do you really think you can reason about systemic discrimination by looking at the individual? That's as ineffable as wondering why some people win the lotto; individuals are dominated by noise, and you only see the disparity in aggregate.
Why bother commenting if you don't care about the wage gap?
You do realise the gap is just the "unexplained by standard corrections" and not "% due to sexism" right?
> Why bother commenting if you don't care about the wage gap?
I care that you are using misleading statistics to push an agenda.
At no point did I state I thought the wage gap is entirely due to sexism. although, I do argue it is evident sexism; I believe that still requires argument on your part that it's clearly not.
I honestly don't see anything wrong with different life choices leading to different outcomes, since the same is true within genders! That is, there's nothing sexist about that fact.
The truth is the people advocating for equalizing pay when the sexes make different choices are arguing for sexism, not against sexism.
If it's not baseless, presumably you have something to offer.
However, without evidence, you are most likely wrong. Does that wrongness amount to sexism? Hard to say; my inclination says yes since you're referring to shuffling hundreds of dimensions defining employment into "life choices". Yes, that is probably a factor; culture is a powerful force. But it's also probably not the only factor; there are likely myriad explanations. Are you blind to that, or just dismissive?
A difference on that magnitude can easily be something about aggregate behavior correlated to sex, an uncontrolled for variable, or just random chance.
So let me ask you: do you have any evidence that 3-6% gap is the result of sexism instead of merely being a fact correlated to sex? (Particularly if we were to confine the data to people under 40, to control for historical biases that take time to age out.)
However, there is abundant evidence that there's a systemic divide in opportunities. This is easy to see in the aggregate and particular. That is the interesting thing in itself: if we could be assured that the gap could sexist solely for life choices, this wouldn't be an interesting topic. That's a devilishly hard thing to argue for, however, so id prefer to move forward as a society assuming that we can do more to expose opportunities to everyone, assure that people are protected in their right to follow opportunities, and that we can demonstrate the effect of the policies at moving toward an ideal of equal pay.
If we can't move towards that, perhaps our ideal, well, isn't what society wants. I doubt that we've even approached that level of confidence in our support of communities subject to subtle bias difficult to divorce from "life choices".
That being said, I think we should generally imrpove sexist behavior and systems, which hurt both sexes (albeit, in different ways).
I just think the "wage gap" is one of the least sexist fascets of modern society (if at 3-6%), and mostly represents people perpetuating a misunderstanding of statistics. So in that way, I feel like people are over-solving a mostly solved problem, which seems likely to lead to more sexism, not less.
I think that effort spent on fixing the larger issues are also likely to stabilize remaining issues with wages, and we would all be better served focusing on the large gaps in other statistics instead of the small one here.
That said, Im always happy to see new statistics that tell me Im full of shit, so if you find what you're looking for, please post it.
Otherwise, have a good night! :)
Are the programmers in question being paid by the hour? Does programmer pay within each gender correlate closely to hours worked?
All the academic studies I have seen either adjust for it explicitly or put forward a strong case on why it isn't being included.
I'd argue it's a more logical and likely explanation than sexism though.
Why is it a foregone conclusion that the majority of women in this population worked fewer hours? A forbes study which averages across a large canvas of american workers is not a very good thing to compare to glassdoor's targetted subsection.
But by not controlling for it you reduce the studies explanative powers.
You don't get to just ignore it because it is convenient.
It doesn't even pass the "more likely than not" standard of evidence.
It also seems to me that that signal would show up weakly in the data because it wouldn't vary the immediate effect on apples-to-apples salary, only on promotions and possibly referrals.
So I think your complaint is specious and the inclusion of a totally unrelated data point from a radically different dataset is either very misguided or profoundly disingenuous.
Yes. And this makes any kind of data analysis a lot harder.
On paper I work the same number of hours as my Japanese coworkers. In reality they work more than double.
It's the same way on-call for many companies is just rolled into salary.
I've managed projects as a senior dev while the senior dev sitting next to me was purely technical. Etc etc.
The truth is two senior devs sitting right next to each other can have wildly different actual job duties.
I suspect glassdoor has taken at least some of those differences in work duties vs stated title into account.
> because it wouldn't vary the immediate effect on apples-to-apples salary,
Why wouldn't it?
Its not uncommon to stay at a certain level/title for 3-5 years.
You can't just ignore hours worked because "salary".
I come from a strong union background where you would get overtime or be able to take the time off later and where there were fairly rigid job duties. Where interviews and scoring candidates is all done in a very standardised fashion.
And oddly enough after adjusting for these explicit factors we had a very small unexplained gender pay gap. Much smaller than average for the tech industry.
Perhaps it's in our interest to make these factors explicit rather than implicit?
Because hours worked doesn't affect salary. What's more, you keep assuming that there aren't counter-examples in this dataset at all. It's just a given to you: "I read on Forbes that across all Americans women work slightly less per week" and brought that to this conversation.
But in this industry long hours are the norm, single people without family duties are the majority, and many compensation models very much incentivize long hours.
> You can't just ignore hours worked because "salary".
Unless we're talking consulting, that's exactly what Salary lets you do.
> Much smaller than average for the tech industry.
The average pay bracket difference is indeed smaller. However, it's still large enough for concern, and the other issues I listed around work culture are problems that disadvantage women more than men in modern society.
> Perhaps it's in our interest to make these factors explicit rather than implicit?
I am always in favor of transparency and more analysis but I will not let ANY interpretation of the specific data we have on hand be constantly forced off on the grounds that we could collect better data.
Saying, "Women get paid less, let's make sure that's not happening" is a call to action, not an accusation leveled at anyone specifically. If women in your organization aren't being paid less, congrats. Job done.
Let's be clear: You're effectively trying to stifle and derail the entire conversation on the grounds that it might not be happening everywhere, or that statistics might not be what popular media claims they are. That's counterproductive and frankly unwelcome. If that's your take, your take stifles the discussion here.
We can simultaneous recognize that tech is a more complicated compensation environment and also that women are reporting under-compensation. We're all adults capable of multi-tasking.
> Unless we're talking consulting, that's exactly what Salary lets you do.
We are clearly having communication issues and I'm not sure how you are addressing what I'm talking about.
My point is: Work longer -> slightly more productive -> slightly higher pay.
> You're effectively trying to stifle and derail the entire conversation
If the conversation starts from an inconclusive or flimsy premise then it should be derailed.
It is far too easy to make bad decisions based on flawed studies.
> and also that women are reporting under-compensation.
The first step is to work out if it's a real issue we could be, or should be, solving.
It could be a problem worth addressing if the gap was driven by sexism.
It could be a problem worth addressing if the small pay gap was a major contributor to women leaving the industry.
It could be a problem if the small pay gap was a strong contributor to women not entering the field.
It could be a problem if we we were seeing a rapidly widening gap.
Etc etc.
But you have to actually make a case.
And I'm telling you this is not a foregone conclusion.
> If the conversation starts from an inconclusive or flimsy premise then it should be derailed.
No. It should include both the initial position and the specific cases that inspired it and then move to a broader case. This is not customer service, these are people's lives.
> It is far too easy to make bad decisions based on flawed studies.
Are you suggesting that the decision to pay women equally, carefully audit corporate promotions, and firmly and directly punish racist and sexist harassment are actually open for debate? Is there an outcome where we might say, "Oh no, actually it's correct to pay women less for equal work?"
> The first step is to work out if it's a real issue we could be, or should be, solving.
How many individual women need to risk their careers explaining unconscionable behavior by their managers and employers HR departments before you're satisfied anyone anywhere is allowed to have this conversation? You should put that number out there.
> But you have to actually make a case.
You may not realize you're doing this, but you're actually interfering with everyone's ability to make a case by derailing every conversation and making it all about you and your (higher than any other sociological or scientific field) standards for allowing discussion.
Look at you. You're here because marketing copy for an event triggered you. You're so angry you're willing to argue that maybe pay shouldn't be equal after all.
You are broadening the conversation to look at sexism in broader society.
Let's stick to the specifics here.
> making it all about you and your (higher than any other sociological or scientific field) standards for allowing discussion.
Nonsense. Most rigorous wage gap studies control for a lot more than the GlassDoor study.
The particular data (working hours) that I'm saying should have been included is straightforward to measure and collect.
> You're so angry you're willing to argue that maybe pay shouldn't be equal after all.
A swing and a miss. It's like you aren't even trying to read what I'm writing.
No. No. No sheepmullet. You've been broadening the scope from unrelated articles to Japanese work culture whenever it suits you. It's too late for you to go, "HEY I WAS RIGHT IN THIS LIMITED CONTEXT."
Unbelievable.
> Nonsense. Most rigorous wage gap studies control for a lot more than the GlassDoor study.
Yes, because the include many more hourly, tipped and commission-based jobs. The Glassdoor dataset has almost none of those.
> The particular data (working hours) that I'm saying should have been included is straightforward to measure and collect.
Salaried jobs don't collect the data, and that's the majority of Glassdoor's data.
> A swing and a miss. It's like you aren't even trying to read what I'm writing.
Given your prior attestation you are not broadening scope despite mentioning Japan's dangerously broken work culture as a pole star, I'm wondering if YOU are reading what you're writing.
And given the moderation, you're not doing such a swell job convincing people here.
In my opinion, the problem is twofold. First of all, this gap - whatever you think it is, 6% or 9% or 21% - it is a problem. Most Americans live pretty close to financial ruin, like it or not. 76% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck [1] and 63% of Americans are one missed paycheck away from the streets [2]. A 6% pay gap is about two paychecks. Even though it may not seem like much to a HN reader with significant savings or a safety net, this small gap spread across the whole population actually causes problems.
The second part of the problem is societal: women are discouraged from pursuing higher-paying jobs by society. This isn't the fault of the women themselves, or the people doing the hiring, but sexism and biases hidden everywhere. In my opinion, this is the best support for affirmative action: more women doing a certain job translates to more women interested in that career.
These two things combined are a double whammy that currently mean that less women work and women who do work are not always financially secure - and that's the big problem here. If you're a woman from an upper class background and have been encouraged by those around you, you may never experience any of these problems, and that's great. But if you're an average American woman, these things have a very real impact on your life.
This also explains the giant gulfs of opinion I see here on HN. Most people here are relatively wealthy - remember, if you earn more than 36k a year, you earn more than most working Americans. $70k/yr means you earn more than 75% of American workers. I'd bet the vast majority of US programmers on here earn above 70k/yr. It's easy to get caught in a bubble and say 'well the women around me seem to have no problems!' and forget about the majority of the country. At the same time, if you live in a low-income area, those two "missed" paychecks might be absolutely killer.
[0] I have a personal, unfounded feeling that it's closer to 10% - maybe 8-9% if I had to guess.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/24/pf/emergency-savings/
[2] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-are-one-payc...
I really think that point of view is both wrong and harmful.
It's true that society influences people in various ways. But you're assuming that what men do is the "default", and so if women do it less, they are discouraged.
Instead, looking at it from the women's side, perhaps it is men that are overly encouraged to do certain things. For example, men are highly overrepresented in prisons compared to women, and that's not good.
That might be an extreme example, but the fact is that many studies show that men care more about careers that make money, while women care more about making a positive difference in the world (obviously, both only on average). Given that, perhaps society pushes men too much towards tech and finance and so forth. It would be better if we nudged men instead towards nurturing professions, where you help people every day, like nursing or teaching.
In other words, society influences both genders in various ways. Any difference could be either women pushed one way or men pulled the other.
> I really think that point of view is both wrong and harmful.
> It's true that society influences people in various ways. But you're assuming that what men do is the "default", and so if women do it less, they are discouraged.
Additionally, it seems implicit in the GP's POV that money (or higher pay) is necessarily the better end goal, rather than caring for others or improving society. What if money isn't the most appropriate proxy of value and worth?
(And to be clear, I wouldn't agree with using that to "whitewash" paying someone less because "their pay should be their enjoyment")
To say women are discouraged from taking higher paying positions takes away a woman's agency. Perhaps they made an educated decision?
It is good to encourage women and other underrepresented groups to enter tech-just imagine how many awesome programmers we are missing out on- but I feel we can do this by being objectively accurate.
I'm with you on the underrepresented story, this is very common. But the glassdoor study has many major flaws and I don't think is really that useful. The biggest flaw is that it's only using self-reported data for location, gender, salary and job title; and it has a very broad comparison by job title that doesn't really fit when you are comparing "programmer" with "qa engineer"
That said, I find it much easier to believe that women are paid less than men, on average, than to believe otherwise. This has been the case historically since pretty much the founding of the nation. While I would certainly hope and do believe that women now make more than they have in the past, and that their pay is now approaching that of men, I think it's unreasonable to believe that we have reached "pay equity" between the sexes.
In my opinion, I would not consider pay between men and women equitable until I have seen reasonable looking studies that have proven the case. I think it would be wise to be skeptical of such studies but look forward to their being published.
It's interesting that you require data to change your assumption that there's not a problem.
I am comfortable with my assertion that I will need to see some data before I take the position that women are not paid less than men in a discriminatory fashion. In my opinion, that women are discriminated against is a historical truth. I am not trying to be insulting, but I do find it hard to believe that people disagree on this.
Exactly. Which is why it's important to look at broader aggregates and more data. In fact, when you do that, you find you end up averaging in a ton of other studies that show men being under paid, and...
Hah, right. There are no such studies. Everyone who bothers to look at this comes back with some variant of the same answer: women are underpaid. Sure, there's uncertainty at the margins, and any given evidence can always be attacked in some way. But everyone with any level of expertise or detachment at all can look at this and agree with the broad conclusion.
It's exactly like climate science denial, really. And like climate nonsense, I submit that the reason behind it has rather less to do with the "love for the truth" that the grandparent was talking about and more with... yeah.
https://research-content.glassdoor.com/app/uploads/sites/2/2...
And it, like most of the statistical papers surrounding the pay gap suffer from what I personally affectionately refer to as the "peanut butter spread" problem.
The implicit assumption of pay gap studies is that if you group all jobs into a category and then segment them by gender both groups should have equal distribution of some set of attributes X, Y, and Z. I can't help but feel as if looking at genders (or really any segment of society) and assuming they have "independent and identically distributed"[1] random variables is flawed.
For example, UC enrollment of undergraduate students for Engineering/CS has hovered around 14.5% for the last several years[2]. My fraternity, however, was more than half Engineering/CS majors at one point in time during my time as an undergrad at UC Davis.
One way to look at this is:
* My fraternity favored Engineering/CS majors
another way would be:
* My fraternity discriminated against non-Engineering/CS majors
But neither is actually true. The fact my fraternity had a higher percentage of Engineering/CS majors than the overall student body distribution does not imply any sort of causal influence insidious or otherwise; correlation is not causation.
Moreover, all things being equal, should my fraternity have the same distribution of majors as the overall student body?
I would argue no. Membership of a fraternity, or any other student organization for that matter, should be a personal choice. Whether it is a collection of like-minded individuals, similar majors, or similar interests that motivates you to join the choice should be yours to freely make. If that means that individual fraternities all have non-identical distributions of majors, then so be it!
Make no mistake, I am all about freedom of choice. I also am steadfastly libertarian and individual freedoms (and this applies equally when it comes to gender considerations). But I don't necessarily believe that in a Utopia-esque society where there is perfect freedom of choice that there would also be perfectly equal distributions of any sort.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_di...
[2] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrol...
One does not need to call for that in order to find the current representation of women in engineering/CS lower than desirable.
Continuing on the theme of using the sources presented in this thread: do you find it more likely that Google's worldwide tech workforce is 83% male because A) there is "no causal influence, insidious or otherwise" and there is perfect freedom of choice or because B) there are systemic factors at play?
That is the only question.
[1] This description taken from the Wikipedia citaiton of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's characterization of Chirstina Hoff Sommers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Hoff_Sommers
So yea, the more likely reason is C) Women don't want to become engineers as much as men do, for whatever (social/biological/cultural) reason
Look, if women are being unfairly excluded from the pipeline then fight THAT. Don't blame Google or Facebook or X company for hiring the best they can. They have "diversity consultants" on their payroll for christs sake. This isn't an issue that is gonna magically be solved in a few years. Making the "pipeline" more diverse takes years of investment and education and encouragement. What I take an issue is with people blaming these companies when they're actually doing a reasonable job of trying to become more diverse. As if these companies are the ones really holding people back. and if only they could overcome their biases they'd have a perfect diversity ratio overnight.
We know there's a pipeline problem, and we are fighting that. We don't think it's going to be solved overnight either, and critically, not just by addressing the pipeline because, as numerous stories from the tech industry have made clear recently, even when qualified women make it through that anemic pipeline, they still face individual and institutional sexism. Or have you forgotten that one of Uber's recent departures left Google after an internal sexual harassment scandal that was quietly handled?
this is in regards to Google.
" the more likely reason is that women are being filtered out of the pipeline by sexism, not some mysterious "maybe they just don't want to" handwaving."
So you're alleging that Google is judging women more harshly than men, "at all phases of hiring".
Provide a source for THAT, please.
Willful blindness is what it is.
- http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/26/426...
- https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/the-lack-of-women-in-tech-...
Or is it merely that the pipeline being fugged doesn't mean that everything else is fine and dandy? I'd agree with that, hell yeah, and that claim matches the actual content of those links quite well. But I don't think it in any way suggests that the problem is a myth.
I also don't think the pipeline is unfixable, but that's both my day job and another rant for another day.
What I think the original comment I replied to was saying though (and what most people in the industry with hiring power that I've talked to about this have said) is that "the pipeline problem" is the main thing preventing them from hiring a diverse team. That's bullshit though; there have been a million and one studies showing implicit biases in the hiring process, for one. We definitely need to improve the pipeline — the "pipeline problem myth" I'm referring to is that that's the extent of the problem.
I don't follow the logic. Someone who enters tech through such an intervention is someone taken away from another field; why do we need another awesome programmer more than we need another awesome salesperson?
Seeing sexism everywhere is not helping the fight against remaining actual sexism.
If recent raises / salaries in the tech industry outside of Silicon Valley are any guide, companies love to save money on salaries. So I honestly have no idea why all the men I work with haven't been replaced by women being paid 95% or whatever the claimed pay gap is. And remember, this is in the US, where you can legally be let go because your boss doesn't like the color of your shoes.
According to wikipedia, "the average female's unadjusted annual salary has been cited as being 78% of the average male salary", so you can save a lot.
Would you be more likely to hire a man than a women for an engineering role? Take the harvard implicit gender bias test for one answer: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html
Source: I did a bunch of them for my PhD, but my reading of the literature stopped in 2014.
77 cents on the dollar is a huge discount. Any company that exploited this would gain an enormous advantage. So even if nearly everyone is somehow blinded by their biases, surely at least one company somewhere is smart enough to discount their biases and collect 23% in savings. Where are they?
Is it possible that some company out there with unscrupulous management has already tried moneyballing the job market this way, and found it didn't work?
If they are equally good, there's a good chance I'll choose the cheaper one.
This discussion is complex and it's not entirely obvious how much of the pay gap is caused by discrimination, but this is one stupid argument.
Where are all-women (or 95% women) companies? If you can get away with paying them less, where are all the capitalists exploiting the market inefficiency and getting rich in the process?
Hell, nowadays companies like Starbucks[0] routinely put social causes first, profits second. So where are these companies?
[0] https://www.starbucks.com/blog/an-open-letter-from-howard-sc...
And the point is that we don't seem to see such companies. All the major tech companies have similar percentages of women, despite all of them trying very hard to increase those numbers.
Evidence? First, "pricing is information". Second, Uber et al, and the continuing follies of the tech industry demonstrating systemic sexism. Third, continued use of the word "meritocracy" despite repeated demonstrations that tech firms practice a particularly narrow form of geek clubhousing. Bottom line: no one's actually rational enough to exploit what's really a fairly transparent, backhanded attempt to say that women are paid less because they're worth less. We just tell ourselves that we are.
Perhaps this is an opportunity for VCs because people certainly love money more than sexism.
One way to understand the effects of systemic "isms" is that the targets have to continually deal with a headwind that others don't, and the cumulative effect of this is like compound interest. The supposed meritocracy of technology that's blindly present in the download screen hides all the non-meritocratic context leading up to it.
Nevertheless there do exist profitable apps written by low caste Indians living on a few dollars a day and having virtually no social welfare safety net.
Do you honestly believe that women in the US have it worse than those men?
I do not see enough evidence that your systemic "isms" can explain the lack of bootstrapped female founders and entrepreneurs in the US.
We have no problem understanding how subtly performance enhancing drugs in sports can make huge differences over the long term. Why are we sceptical that performance degrading circumstances are as consequential?
Do all the daughters of upper middle class software engineers do not exist? That's among tech leaders' families in the US.
So where are they? Or is it that they have seen their fathers' jobs and decided they want no part of it?
Efforts to reduce imbalance (regardless of demographic) is necessary to overcome location bias, and the bigger the pool, the higher the tide for all boats.
If you're "labor", stop thinking that you're at war with other demographics.
Thing is, you can do it right and do it wrong. Effort for the sake of effort means little, it's not the thought that counts but results.
https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/download/fedora_content...
When President Bush piloted his No Child Left Behind act, one of the underlying goals was to close racial and class gaps in educational standards, therefore, improving opportunity for disadvantaged groups but not guaranteeing ideal results.
Justice Clarence Thomas, the only current black Supreme Court judge, took a strong stance against race‐based affirmative action as it establishes “a cult of victimization” that permeates leniency on and faulty judgment of black students and workers in admissions and employment processes.
He believes this strengthens stereotypes and requires special, preferential treatment of the black community in order to make up for past oppression.
...
This sentiment is spreading, and a continual decline in academic achievement of black students will most certainly propel these sentiments throughout the country. The American Civil Rights Institute founder, Ward Connerly [who's african american], said he is “not against policies that address ongoing disparities in income, educational opportunities or other factors, but they should not be race based.” Policy reform is now addressing the achievement gap between black and white students in hopes that solving the underlying issue between black underachievement will lead to natural, unregulated increase in black enrollment in universities and, ultimately, employment.
Say people do have widespread, subconscious biases against women. 23% in savings is enormous. If it really exists, someone out there is going to try super, super hard to exploit it while all the other suckers are stupidly paying 100/77 times more than they have to. Are you saying that despite this opportunity, no one has succeeded, because we're all too stupid to view women equally—every last one of us? If not, where is that clever company?
A more likely explanation is that the people already tried doing this, and found that the opportunity they were trying to exploit didn't exist.
And how to value, let's say, a developer? How do you, personally, differentiate good and bad programmers?
I know of women who are paid more than me in tech, and I know why. I know of women who are paid less than me, and I can think of n reasons why.
As for sheer numbers, ask yourself: are there any industries where there are considerably fewer men than women? The answer is, of course, yes. Look at nursing. In the most gender-equitable societies on the planet, I'm talking the Norways and Swedens of the world, you'll see 80-90% female involvement in nursing. Look at construction. In those same societies, you will see almost the exact opposite, probably even greater disparities. Look at sales departments, I don't know a single woman who likes sales work, and I know at least a few who have given it a serious try. I'm sure there are some, but you won't convince me that it's the norm without hard data. On the flip side of that, I grew up with guys who love working with their hands in construction, and who like that it's honest work.
My intuition is that men and women(real, living individual men and women) are different in some way which drives them to prefer different work based on schedules, the way their job has them interact with people, the amount of solitary vs. collaborative work, work-life balance, and hosts of other complex differences.
As for harassment, I find it hard to believe that tech is a particularly bad place for it. I would believe you if you said that startups are prone to harassment (HR vacuum). Until I see a non-partisan study with an appreciable number of respondents, a consistent rubric for assessing individual situations, I will continue to believe what I see in person.
No CNET or USA Today article is going to convince me that it's a problem in itself that there is a statistical difference between the average yearly earnings of different cohorts. I'm sure married and unmarried people make different amounts of money on average. I'm sure people with and without kids make different amounts of money on average. Nothing about those statistics says that there is a discriminatory or unfair advantage. If you could prove that a major company is systematically underpaying women for work of equivalent holistic value, then it would be the case of the decade; this case has clearly never happened, because if it ever did, it would be an outrage, and at very least the people making this argument would be pointing at it every time they got a chance.
And I know you'll downvote this before reading it through, but maybe the first few open-minded people will get a chance to reflect. I can spare a few HN hivemind cohesion points.
Do the men employed as nurses make less money on average than their women colleagues?
This is not necessarily a good thing as unions basically underpay star performers and overpay bad performers. whether or not that is a good thing is your own opinion.
No. Male nurses make way more than female nurses, on average. A big contributor to this is that male nurses are far more likely to be CRNAs than female nurses and CRNAs are the highest-paid nurse specialty (and requires a graduate degree).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_nursing
So male registered nurses in the US appear to be a solid single digit in terms of percentage. Wikipedia says 6.6%. The internet says CRNAs are 41-43% male.
So a very small number of male nurses, and a majority of them becoming CRNAs, and so the average pay for male nurses is higher than the female average. But really, I bet the 59% female CRNAs are being paid the same.
This is the problem with looking at averages only. If men are being prefered over women in the CRNA program, there is a problem. If female CRNAs are paid less on average than male CRNAs there is a problem. But the average alone tells you nothing. It definitely doesn't give you enough information to show you which part needs fixing.
You're looking at the finish line and making an answer while ignoring the fact that they are placed on different courses from birth.
The biological explanation is, by far, the Occam's razor null hypothesis here. To be convincing, you would need to supply compelling evidence that children who have unusually low contact with traditional societal influence early in life make less predictable employment choices. Otherwise, this is a just-so story like all the rest of them.
Or find 'male' roles in some cultures that aren't in others like programming.
My argument is that you cannot expect uniform distribution of career choices either by race or gender.
You can't expect exactly 13% of cops to be african american or exactly 50% of physicists to be female.
Let's look at hispanics and asians.
Asians outnumber hispanics in STEM 9:1
Hispanics outnumber asians in History 3:1
Don't have links to hard sources at hand since I'm on mobile, but even anecdotally I think almost anyone would agree that hispanics are outnumbered by asians in STEM.
Ethnic chinese are strong in STEM not just in US, but almost anywhere. You can take any country with a significant chinese diaspora and you'll see the results are about the same.
Can you make a compelling counterargument that hispanics are brought up in a way that specifically encourages them to learn History?
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here? That culture pushes people to certain expectations? I agree.
The definition of the role is at least somewhat different today. It could also have something to do with the wide availability of women who were trained typists in the '50s and '60s, as keyboards were used to punch cards/tape.
I won't purport to be an expert on exactly how that phenomenon came about, I've not seen a satisfactory explanation of it.
I don't work in sales so perhaps someone better qualified can comment, but isn't the stereotype that the culture in sales is like that of fraternities? I can imagine how that's probably not welcoming to women, especially when the sales revolves around social relationships.
The facts are that women are poorly represented in the tech community[1], and do make less than men[2]. Any attempt to let women feel more accepted and bring about much needed change should be championed, not picked apart and belittled because you feel like you are personally being attacked when people are just asking for help.
1. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/05/28/google-release...
2. https://www.cnet.com/news/biggest-pay-gap-in-america-compute...