This is an argument that I have yet to see being addressed to my satisfaction.

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 So I honestly have no idea why all the men I work with haven't been replaced by women being paid 95% or whatever the claimed pay gap is.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.

Because there aren't enough women applying. At my previous job, I interviewed 50+ people, and fewer than 10% were women. For the record, I advocated strongly for most of them, and contributed to several being hired, including one of the best engineers I've met. Companies have a hard time hiring enough software people in general, and there are many more men applying for software jobs than women. If there were some untapped pool of female engineers all looking for jobs, believe me, that pool would get tapped. It just doesn't exist.

So is the argument that while companies can expect to save money on the whole whenever they hire women, not enough women apply? If so, women should have a much easier time finding work than men but get paid less. Is that what's happening?

> 95% or whatever the claimed pay gap is

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.

Because paying women less goes hand in hand with seeing them as not being comparable to male hires?

Precisely the question. Why indeed?

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

Implicit association tests probably don't work. Sources may be found at https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/25/devoodooifying-psychol...

Well, it's a little more complicated than that. They have extremely high state-specific variance, so it's difficult to show predictive validity. They have definitely been associated with particular sets of outcomes in non-gendered/racial contexts, where you would expect the studies to be easier to run.

Source: I did a bunch of them for my PhD, but my reading of the literature stopped in 2014.

The suggestion here is that even though companies can save a bunch of money by flooding their workforces with women, they are all too obtuse to do so.

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?

> Would you be more likely to hire a man than a women for an engineering role?

If they are equally good, there's a good chance I'll choose the cheaper one.

Indeed, that's what we like to tell ourselves. But is that actually what's happening? Did you take the test?

Happening what? 100% equal candidates that differ only by gender? No, it's never happening.

Can you do an implicit test when it's nature is made explicit?

Because women are subconsciously undervalued as workers.

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.

There are software companies composed of all men (or 95% men if we want to be a bit more relaxed). Successful ones - as in making profit.

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...

If women are underpaid because they're (consciously or not) undervalued as workers by entrepreneurs, then those same entrepreneurs are unlikely to visualize a net salary savings. You're basically saying: if women are as good as men but you can pay them less, why not hire women? And the answer is that the same factors that lead to women being underpaid lead to not seeing them as interchangeable hire with males.

I could be wrong, but I think the point that the poster was making was this: Sure, maybe women are undervalued on average, but that's just on average. Assuming women are both paid less, and undervalued, then together that creates a double opportunity for an employer that can see through the undervaluing, and rationally hires mostly women because they are just as good but cost less.

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.

I think your characterization of the op's point is correct. My point remains: The same sexism leading to underpaying women or directing them into less compensated roles, should also tend to obscure, for decision makers, the "rational" idea that there's a double opportunity there.

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.

But is the sexism so pervasive it would prevent women from starting companies and making an app? The meritocracy of technology means that people downloading your app have no idea who the coders are, or what their genders are.

Perhaps this is an opportunity for VCs because people certainly love money more than sexism.

Prevent? No. Continually add friction at all stages, from conceptualizing, staffing, funding, and interacting with the larger techsphere while competing for earned media, virality, etc.? Yes, absolutely, with predictable effects.

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.

> 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.

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.

When you can find a few examples of some group succeeding or being where the vast majority of their group are not, it's called "tokenism", and it's a self-defeating argument. Is it common for low caste Indians with no security to successfully bootstrap profitable apps? Are they a significant constituency amongst tech leaders in India? Rags-to-riches stories only prove something is possible, not that it's normal.

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?

If you want a significant constituency I'll give you one.

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?

Regarding "exploitation", I suspect that it is because employment markets are inefficient and non-fungible (based on location and many, many other factors, including culture and reputation) and that if a company's metric is hiring talent at the 90th percentile, then they may more quickly hit a limit where their ability to fill 90th percentile job salaries strips their ability to access talent in non-majority groups.

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.

> 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.

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.

Dismissing this argument with "because women are undervalued" amounts to saying that every company thus far has been too obtuse to manage their biases and collect 23% in discounts.

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.

What do you mean by "subconsciously undervalued"? Do you have studies that show it? What about participation in opensource? Side projects? StackOverflow profiles? - none of these can be affected by "subconscious undervaluation".

And how to value, let's say, a developer? How do you, personally, differentiate good and bad programmers?