It's going to be easy to find problems with any study with which you disagree. I want to be clear: studies that are trying to distill something with this vast a number of moving parts will never be entirely satisfactory to everyone. The issues are simply too complicated.

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.

That's pretty fatalistic, there are many quality studies that people disagree with. The soundness of a paper isn't based on whether you agree with it or disagree with it, it is based on the methods and the data.

It's interesting that you require data to change your assumption that there's not a problem.

I think it is easy to nitpick studies, especially when they are trying to measure something that is this complicated. While the soundness of the paper should be grounded in the methods and the data, it is far too easy for an individual to discount it's value based on a perceived mistake in method. The more complex the methods, the more polarizing the results, the more this is the case. For this particular issue, I think the methods by definition need to be fairly complex.

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.

While you see it as a historical truth this is something that is patently false in my daily life. Sorry I don't substitute historical truth for modern truth! I don't deny the existence of sexism.

I think that is a good thing. Still, it is likely that your experience might fall in the "anecdote" category. It is a big country!

Certainly possible. Another issue I have is that I regularly see good responses to these sorts of studies linked above pointing out valid flaws and yet none-the-less I'm expected to take this issue seriously. I just don't view it as a legitimate issue, not that I'm unwilling to.

I ask out of curiosity. If the wage gap studies were peer reviewed and found to be false, would you accept this?

Yes, I would accept that.

> It's going to be easy to find problems with any study with which you disagree.

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.

To build off your comment, I went ahead and found the glassdoor study:

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...

You're building a strawman. No one is calling for "a Utopia-esque society where there is perfect freedom of choice [and] perfectly equal distributions of any sort."

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.

Not sure I am in a position to say it is or is not a straw man argument since I am the one who made it...but it is more or less a fairly well known "classical liberal"/libertarian[1] position:

https://youtu.be/QcDrE5YvqTs

[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

oh please, google did their own study. They want to hire more females than any company but the conclusion was that there aren't enough women in the engineering pipeline.

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

Given a multitude of other results showing that equalizing for pipeline problems shows women competing equally with men, 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.

Oh and your claim that they're being filtered out by sexism doesn't qualify as handwaving?

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 have voluminous statistical evidence that women are judged more harshly than men in all phases of hiring when the only differentiator is being perceived as a woman. That's not handwaving, that's decades of study. Handwaving is "for whatever (social/biological/cultural) reason".

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?

Stick to your original point.

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.

And they hate being doctors too. Except they don't. And deconstruction of what was a frankly pervasive culture of sexism in medicine and law has resulted in much higher participation of the second sex in these fields.

Willful blindness is what it is.

well there are definitely cultural and sexist factors holding women out of STEM, that I agree with. What's the solution then?

There's been plenty written about how "the pipeline problem" is a myth:

- http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/26/426...

- https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/the-lack-of-women-in-tech-...

Is your claim that the pipeline is not completely fugged? Because there are very clear numbers indicating that it is, starting very early, at the K-12 level.

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.

Sorry, in retrospect that was very unclear. I agree with your second statement. There are definitely fewer women and people of color even applying for STEM jobs, although there are so many other factors such as quality of education, harassment, visibility of role models, etc that I think calling it "the pipeline problem" is an oversimplification.

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.

> It is good to encourage women and other underrepresented groups to enter tech-just imagine how many awesome programmers we are missing out on

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?

You bring up a fair point that the study is not perfect. I would be interested to find a better study, but to be honest I'm not sure where I would be able to find one... I'll see if I can find a more objective one after work.