Social construct. Look at Asian countries that by all accounts have less gender quality than the west but have more women science graduates. India is double the U.K. on that metric.

The fact that Sweden has skewed representation doesn't capture what I call the "princesses and fairies" problem. Just because society doesn't explicitly discriminate against women doesn't mean that it's not telling women that they should be interested in princesses and fairies instead of legos. My daughter, four, is the only one of a few girls in the STEM programs I signed her up for at summer camp. This is entirely parents projecting gender norms onto their kids.

My mom grew up in bangladesh in the 1960s. She majored in chemistry as did several of her sisters. The expectation was that an upper class woman would be educated so she could marry well, not for work. But the western gender norm about women being suited for certain professions doesn't exist.

> that by all accounts have less gender quality

> than the west but have more women science

> graduates. India is double the U.K. on that metric.

How do you conclude "social construct" from that data? When external pressures are greater, gender differences equalize. When external constraints fall away, gender differences are allowed to express themselves. So it is no surprise that self-segregation is pretty much directly and positively correlated to measures of societal progress and gender equality. Just to repeat that: the more egalitarian and progressive the society, the more the genders self-segregate in the workplace.

Here's a quote from a BBC article asking "Why is Russia so good at encouraging women into tech?" The answer is in the article: necessity.

"Most of the girls we talked to from other countries had a slightly playful approach to Stem, whereas in Russia, even the very youngest were extremely focused on the fact that their future employment opportunities were more likely to be rooted in Stem subjects." -- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39579321

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010....

"Most importantly and contra predictions, we showed that economically developed and more gender equal countries have a lower overall level of mathematics anxiety, and yet a larger national sex difference in mathematics anxiety relative to less developed countries."

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

"Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N = 17,637)."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18179326

"What might be surprising to most people, as we shall see, is the specific pattern of cross-national variation in the gender gap in authority. To cite just one example, in the United States, the probability of a man in the labor force occupying an "upper" or "top" management position is 1.8 times greater than the probability of a woman occupying such a position, whereas in Sweden, the probability for men is 4.2 times greater than for women."

https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Published%20writing/CC-C9.p...

Your move.

India has massive and pervasive poverty and tech especially is seen as a way out of poverty. Many programmers there earn 5x the average wage.

Comparing that to the UK where programmers are not paid particularly well compared to other professions is disingenuous.

In my whole life I haven't faced a single situation where parents literally force a doll on their daughter instead of a Lego Kit. You are over stating the whole problem.

>>This is entirely parents projecting gender norms onto their kids.

Kids are not bots that you train them. Acceptance into peer groups is a major factor, and most kids gravitate to what friends around them are doing, or they go to friends whose area of interest attracts them.

Also I'm not a great fan of forcing things on kids. People should do what they are interested in, else it creates meaningless pressure and kids are generally slotted and forced to make up to unrealistic expectations from parents.

Here in India, this is a huge problem where every single parent wants their kids to get into STEM. Most don't want to and when they do bad at school and exams, they have to face routine humiliation among social circles and peer groups as losers. Many are driven to suicide. These people will do way better in other walks of life and must be allowed to.

>>The expectation was that an upper class woman would be educated so she could marry well, not for work.

As an Indian where social norms are similar to an extent this is not only ok, but rather even preferable.

If you look at how life unfolds here, there is massive pressure on men to be efficient and provide for their families to the best of their abilities. This not easy, forget about all this empowerment new age talk, in reality most men slog away whole life, working insane hours, doing weekends and working very difficult conditions to make it happen.

This is hard for women to do for many reasons beyond the scope of this discussion. Given this, financial security becomes way more important than making up to virtue signaling from other people. Hence marrying a rich spouse that can provide for life is more important than making careers in our culture.

For most men here, things don't feel like freedom and empowerment. Its a swim through an ocean of hellfire to provide for families.

I would be more than happy to sit at home and be oppressed. And let women have all this empowerment. But deep down everybody knows what the real deal is, which is why no one signs up for something like this.

>>Kids are not bots that you train them. Acceptance into peer groups is a major factor, and most kids gravitate to what friends around them are doing, or they go to friends whose area of interest attracts them.

US female, born in 1977. By the time I reached sentient age, my mother had bought, and encouraged relatives to buy for me, literally dozens of dolls, because she had decided at my birth that I would "collect" dolls. I was never very interested in the dolls and she never "forced" me to play with them, but the expectation was nonetheless clear.

For my slightly younger brother, Transformers and Star Wars figures were bought. I played with his toys and preferred them to my own "girl" toys, but it never occurred to me to ask my parents to buy "boy" toys for me. I think they would have if I had asked, but the environment I (and they) grew up in was such that I (and they) were incapable of conceiving of the possibility.

And of course other girls at my elementary school had grown up in the same environment, so all I learned from my peer group/friends was to be interested in stereotypically girly things.

I agree that "society" is such a vague term as to be almost useless, but it doesn't make sense to assume all this behavior is based on conscious decisions by people truly aware of their own preferences (and the alternatives among which they can select a preference).

Perhaps money is still a better motivator than gender equal society.

The problem is, even if they didn't do that what about parents who grew up thinking that and then project it on their kids? What about TV and other media consumption that shows stereotypical roles?

It's hard to account for and eliminate all types of gender roles because many are more subtle and / or "normal" to most people who grew up with it.

A quick anecdote: my daughter, who loves science and computers, was playing 'house' with her classmates in preschool when several children told her she had to play the role of mommy while they go out and work in this pretend scenario they created. This made my daughter think "I want to be a boy because girls can't have cool jobs". Those kids she was playing with weren't ever told this is how things had to be but they all had stay-at-home moms so they just assumed it was normal and how things are supposed to be. My wife is also a stay-at-home mom which likely helped reinforce it regardless of how much encouragement we both give our daughter.

So everything influences kids. It's hard to control for all of these variables.

Parents claim they've learned nature trumps nurture. They gave girl firetrucks, found her tucking the firetruck to bed. Parents conclude it's the nurturing feminity.

Psych asks "who tucks her to bed every night?". Oops.

At the end of the day, part of being a good adult and parent in 2017 is not just accepting whatever constructs * you feel "society" is shoving down your throat. Think critically to form your own principles and beliefs, and act on them (so long as they are within the bounds law). Obviously this is easier said than done, and also there are probably places on earth where this isn't feasible. But I feel that in most of the developed world it is.

* not you rayiner, I mean you third person (I'm not accusing you of being a bad adult/parent!)

It reveals, as in a piece of data that wasn't typically part of the conversation, that some groups ask for less to begin with while the employer offers them more. But this 'more' amount is still less than employees that asked for more than that to begin with.

The average of black candidates, and women candidates, simply asked for less than the average of white male candidates. Got offered more, took the 'generous' offer and retroactively find out they are on the lower side of the pay gap, again on average.

Much of the discussion seems to place a blame squarely on employers, describing a cabal of shadowy prejudiced men in the board room ensuring someone gets 30% less or 30% more just because. And I think that is not an entirely productive discussion, if all the reactionary HR training fails to find this while other aspects aren't even discussed at all.

Nobody says that. It's the larger society, which also teaches black people and women to ask for less

group 1 is told they are talented and that the test is hard group 2 is told if they work hard they wil prevail

that was the gist, but I could be getting the wording wrong. The work-hard group did much better at the test than the talented group. I'm going from memory here and will try to find the test to post here. But don't you think it is valuable to prepare those who might have a tougher time with knowledge about how discrimination operates within our institutions that confer power for situations they may face and that certain strategies are better (based upon data from history) than others in understanding the basis of these? When one understands how the opposing army operates, one can create a more effective and hopefully victorious strategy. Especially if one is told that winning battle strategies productively use insider knowlege of one's opponents strengths and weknesses in an innovative and sustained counter-measure.

I agree that the phenomenon is much more complex than conspiratorial movie villains, and it's unproductive to simplify things that way (often out of anger). But I'll add some complexity to what you said: They would be wise to ask for less because that is what the market will bear, due to widespread discrimination.

It seems beyond debate that discrimination is widespread, though again I agree we need to understand that simple statement in detail. The black, female, Latino, etc. candidates would have to be deaf and blind not to be aware of it, and would need unusual courage to try to ignore it.

Anecdotally, I was at dinner with a retired female biologist. She was discussing the challenges of being a female scientist in her generation, and how today's women in science take their opportunities for granted. Later in the meal, she told me that women are naturally worse at math and computer science, and that males of northern European ancestry are naturally superior (which flies in the face of even current discriminatory hiring in IT). It wasn't anything I haven't heard before, unfortunately; even in my personal experience, explicit discrimination is not so rare as to be shocking.

I believe this is a very weird ponderation. The whole point is that capitalists don't do that because there is sexism among them. They are ignoring rational evidence because they have a preconceived idea that women are worse employees. If capitalists were actually these rational straw man devoided of human flaws, we wouldn't have sexism at all.

So this line of thinking is basically saying: if there wasnt sexism we wouldn't have sexism.

A more practical way of making my point. In past decades black athletes werent admitted in competitive sports teams. Would you say that you believe that wasnt racism because if it was, team owners would be tripping themselves to hire talented black athletes that were being ignored by most teams? No, they werent because they were racists. It took a lot of civil right activism to give black athletes the same access to sports jobs as white athletes. And today we know for a fact that black athletes werent worse athletes back then.

Why are today employers more enlightened that past team owners?

There are, believe it or not, women entrepreneurs (and btw the very conservative Poland is leading the rankings[1]), so even if all male employers were in fact equally sexist, that would just mean female-led companies would out-compete them.

[1] http://wbj.pl/poland-high-in-global-women-entrepreneur-leade...

But you're right, there should be _some_ data-driven company with an analyst that would say something like: "Oh hey. We're getting as much productivity out of men and women, but the women are cheaper. Let's keep one guy on to manage and interrupt them and fire the rest."

Business books for ages are trying to give the "formula" to make a business success (and no one succeeded). It is irrealistic to assume that a company with undoubtably better hiring practices would necessarily and immediatelly (or in a short term) beat the competitors with worse hiring practices.

This even assuming the company would be hiring more productive employees. If the assumption is that it is the same productivity but less cost (as it is in the case we are discussing), the impact at the bottomline is even more diluted.

EDIT: I would add that if the impact was such straightforward and objectively measured it would be much easier to fight it as a society. This (how subjective is to measure productivity and business impact of knowledge workers) is the may reason why we are discussing pay gap as a gender issue and not still voting rights)

There must be at least one example of an all female company you can point to with clear advantage over mixed-gender competition if the pay gap is at all real, and certainly if it’s over 30% as claimed by, among others, president Obama.

Either the pay gap is too small to matter, or it simply does not exist. So far all evidence favors the latter.

This shouldn’t be surprising—after all wage discrimination has been illegal in United States for over 40 years.

The claim that there’s some widespread corruption, perhaps even a conspiracy, should be treated as any other extraordinary claim. With extraordinary skepticism.

I do not have an opinion If there is or there is not a pay gap (I do have the opinion that sexism is a real problem at workplaces regardless of the pay gap). But I dont think the argument "if there was, someone would benefit from it" is reasonable.

Hardly. It just requires that enough men are sexist to discourage women from entering a field in large numbers. One abusive person in a position of power can have a hugely disproportionate impact.

> For example in Sweden, which is doing it's best to increase gender equality, sex differences between men and women maximized http://jamda.ub.gu.se/bitstream/1/833/1/scb_eng_2014.pdf

It’s more likely women simply prefer different occupations, and auto-select for their own happiness.

Should we disregard either sex’s happiness in relentless pursuit of outcome equality?

wouldn't this imply they would avoid hiring much, if any? why bother hiring people you don't feel are worth hiring?

> No, they werent because they were racists.

racists hire people they're biased against all the time if there is some advantage in doing so.

i'm more inclined to believe the circumstance you speak of was avoidance of socioeconomic consequences. there was a time when having a team with too many black athletes (heaven forbid mostly, or even all black) would tank your ticket sales.

> Why are today employers more enlightened that past team owners?

well, it helps that it doesn't hurt ticket sales.

> they werent because they were racists

It's more complex than that, and it's important to understand the mechanisms: My poor understanding is that racism was (and is to a great degree) a social norm, and as social science and life experience will tell you, humans are hardwired to follow social norms. Think of the common phenomenon of large numbers believing the same erroneous fact (as an easy example, in matters of science) - did they all coincidentally reach the same conclusion, or just follow the norm of their social networks. We unconsciously accept and assume norms, we hardly notice them (they are the everyday 'normal', after all), and to challenge them is to make yourself an outcast, which is dangerous and against human nature. Who even wants to be the only one going against the group in a meeting, much less challenging centuries of culture and your entire community?

I'm not excusing the actions of those team owners at all. But I would guess that there were a few advocates of racial discrimination and many who went along with the established norm. To veer OT: IMHO, standing up to those norms is a responsibility of all of us - if you silently acquiesce, you support them as norms in everyone else's eyes. By speaking you may not change the world by yourself, but consider how it looks from someone else who is questioning the 'norm' in their mind but afraid to speak up, just like you: Seeing one other person speaking out may look insufficient, but it's leaves a far stronger impression than if nobody says a thing, and that one person is more likely to yield two or three speaking out next time.

Large companies, on the other hand, have to hire thousands of people a year; and for jobs that are not much fun and which often require considerable training. The effect often has been to reduce discrimination. To take examples from an earlier era -- many immigrant populations in the US found their way into one or another industry this way.

Notably they did not find their way into every industry equally; and some minorities have benefitted less from this effect; but it did happen. The comparable effect would be that we should see some industries adapting to the lower cost of women's labor in something -- though probably not the most elite (posh and desirable) industries.

The way women selects men is heavily weighted towards how much the man earns. According to dating statistics from dating sites, its the biggest single strongest attribute to predict if a message sent from a man will give positive response. This can also be seen in surveys around the globe, like one which said that 90% of women in china would not consider dating a man who earn less than the median income.

So if this incentive based explanation is true, lets make some test by making some predictions. If its true then we should see that boys during adolescence think in a higher rate than girls about selecting a profession based on earning potential. We should also see a higher number of young non-married men around the age of 20 trying to enter the work force as early as possible in order to improve their own status and impress the opposite sex. Those men should be more eager to get higher wages and attempt more risky ventures in order to compete with other men. The need and risk taking for higher wages would be correlated to how much other peers of the same sex earn in their perceived environment.

Increase pay in women dominated professions would lower the earning difference, but it would not change the incentives. In order to get that we would need to change our culture so that either women stopped prioritizing earning when selecting a mate, in which men would loose that incentive, or men need to prioritizing earning when selecting a mate, in which women would get that incentive applied on them.

4/5 women in China are married by age 30. By ages 35-39 only 4.6% are unmarried. I guess eventually they all settle?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_nu#Culture_and_statistic...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_theory

It's possible that society better equips men for job searching in general, and too much focus is placed on the very moment of agreeing to a salary.

I think all of this points to women not attaining the same rank/position as the key factor in gender differences, not a discriminatory pay gap.

but there is also another side. women that i have worked with have used social norms to ask for more. like in some conversation make a joke about how they deserve promotion and pay incrase, like hehe im such a great team member/worker i deserve a pay incrase, wink wink, and such comments multiple times. I never heard a man use this method. If its from a man then he asks to speak to you and directly says what he wants.

So the data from the article corroborates that idea.

Here's another claim I've heard many times and never seen refuted (or even challenged): Tall men are paid more than short men (extending into non-physical work such as programming.)

A company that recognizes this should hire a bunch of short programmers at a discount and trounce their competition...but they don't.

I'd suggest these factors:

1. Despite the fact that short men get paid less, you can't just take a tall candidate, find a shorter one with equivalent skills, and hire him at a discount. Finding and identifying the optimal fit for a job is already beyond our abilities--adding in this extra restriction just isn't feasible.

2. This bias isn't an explicit bias like "I hate short people". It's a subconscious "I feel better about this candidate". Our decisions are based on black box gut feelings, so offsetting our subconscious bias is extremely difficult.

3. Tall men might actually be more effective in programming jobs, simply because we afford them higher status as a society--that adds value in a job that involves working with other people...such as programming.

Suppose 3 is true--I suspect it is. Even if I overcome my bias and hiring challenges to get past 1 and 2, 3 means the rational thing for me to do when hiring is to pay the extra for tall programmers, because in our society, they'll perform better.

But an alternative universe where no one has this bias in the first place will result result in a more optimal allocation of resources.

There are times where you can get an advantage by overcoming a bias others experience, but there are times where you can't and the only fix is to fix society at large. (Maybe I can just fix that bias in every one of my employees, but limiting myself to the small set of people who lack a pervasive bias means reducing my talent pool--probably so much that it offsets the competitive gain I get.)

Part of the reason they get paid more is that they actually are smarter and healthier. Height correlates with good health and a well nutritioned childhood.

More detail here: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-fin...

There are some observations (sorry, don't have the links right now) that typical salaries for careers such as teaching and primary care medicine have decreased as they've transitioned from being male-dominated to female-dominated.

Of course. What did you think would happen when a field gets an oversupply of new employees who aren't pay-sensitive?

As an aside why do you think big tech companies are pushing for more women in tech? Because nerds and women don't focus on pay as much as men in general do.

Further women choose teachers, based on a number of studies, because they want to be home in the summer with their children and because they want to nurture. The one thing that most school systems do that is go is they have a pay matrix that determines pay on a step system where education and years of experience determine your pay scale and gender is not a factor. The downside to this pay system is that high performers make the same as sub par performers.

The problem is that "thing" work often scales better than linearly while "people" work does not. You can't really socially engineer yourself out of that reality.

if the answer is "no" for women or any other particular group then it just proves the point of the article, i.e. there's barely a pay gap when factoring in exact job responsibilities.

Job title*

Which means that there is still a well-paying-job-title gap between the sexes

Therefore the market forces are different or nonexistent, who hires a $500,000/year rock star grade school teacher? Even if such a thing exists and has real impact.

But the market is clearly there - plenty of people here pay $25-$30k/year for private school. With a small class size of 10-15 students that's $250k-$450k/year.

On top of that most people here pay maybe $10-$15k to schools via property tax. So that's another $100k-$150k.

There are already metrics for teacher performance (at its crudest: What's the average grade going in and out of the teacher's class?) which could be used to determine salary. (And maybe it is in some places.)

As for why capitalists don't trip over themselves to hire only women to increase their profits, well, what makes you think they don't, at least in industries where margins are low and there isn't a strong counteracting social force? Take a look at the gender ratio in the notoriously low-margin garment industry, for example.

There has been a lot written on these topics, if you look around. You can learn a lot very quickly if you move beyond the realm of HN comments. =) That might make it easier to decide what to believe.

Something to consider, though I can't back it up: Perhaps the whole method of determining salary, the negotiation process, is a social construct. I mean, it is a social construct almost by definition, but maybe that process, and many other constructs of the business world, are creations of an era when business was populated by men and when therefore the processes and customs naturally were based on the way men interact.

Sometimes I try to think of it this way: If the business world had been populated only by women for generations, and if men were now trying to break in, how would things be different? Perhaps an aggressive negotiating style would be unprofessional, and people would say that men don't get equal salaries not because of discrimination, but because they don't represent themselves well.

Invert this: what explains capitalists paying women 25% less for the same skills? Why aren't the salaries of men decreased in light of actual proof that the work can be done for less?

Spot on. Decades of outsourcing should have convinced everyone that businesses are not out to help the working class white man.

Profits above all.

That is not what the article said.

2. "women in general are more agreeable than men"

???

3. "women tend to care about people while men care about things"

???

"For example, women are often found to be more agreeable than men (Feingold, 1994; Costa et al., 2001). This means that women, on average, are more nurturing, tender-minded, and altruistic more often and to a greater extent than men."

"For the people–things dimension of interests, the results in Table 1 are clear, strong, and unambiguous. Men tend to be much more thing-oriented and much less people-oriented than women (mean d = 1.18, a ‘very large’ difference, according to Hyde (2005) verbal designations"

[1] http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x

THis is not how it works. at all. There's not some cabal taht decided they should pay women less. Instead, the larger culture prootes behaviors and attitudes and devalues others that, as a consequence, lead to women getting paid less. Those are unconscious biases that influence hiring or promoting decisions. One example: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09585192.2015.107...

> I find it useful to be different than other people, I believe I can make use of my unique cultural background in my work

So the recruiters in that study decided candidates that make an explicit issue of their ethnicity in their CL would not be the perfect fit for a team (they were asked to select for coherence). What a bunch of racists!