How often do you encounter people with exactly identical skills and experience?

For that matter, how often do you know what your colleagues get paid? I'm used to environments where everyone is paid differently for essentially arbitrary reasons.

I've worked in environments where 6-8 people in a team have largely similar skill sets and all shared wage info. Not much difference besides how many end of year pay reviews they had stuck around to see.

My experience is personal and anecdotal so largely meaningless by itself hence the question to a wider audience

My experience has mostly been people get paid what they can negotiate before they accept the job. I've seen people with the same job title have around 25%-50% difference in salary.

Does this mean that negotiations in salary will go away ? It's not just salary either, some people might negotiate more holiday days, sick days, flexi-time etc than others.

Reddit banned salary negotiations because women were worse at negotiating.

Saying "women are worse at negotiating" is really not the whole story. Women are less likely to negotiate, and less likely to negotiate in ways that are most effective for men, but it's not because women are bad at negotiating, but rather that women are punished for attempting to negotiate. A woman who attempts to use the same negotiation strategies that are effective for men is likely to be considered abrasive, hostile, "not a team player", etc. and is more likely to be passed over for promotion, to be given an even smaller salary / raise, or to be dismissed altogether.

Women's approach to negotiating is effective and rational given the constraints, even though from the outside it may seem like women are bad at negotiating.

I can't tell if this would end up pulling down male salaries rather than pushing up female salaries?

Evidence is that as more women enter a field, or start gaining visibility, salaries typically go down. This is why people assume "women choose lower paying roles" - the reality is that people see any jobs that women do as less valuable and compensation over time adjusts to meet that belief.

I think it's just women entering the field double the workforce and thus bring down the compensation for the work.

Like lawyers and doctors?

It just results in negotiations over what job title you get. At least that is what I would expect.

Yes, there is both an adjusted and unadjusted gender pay gap.

I always wonder - if there is such a huge gap, why don't folks just employ women, since they're cheaper and do the same work?

Isn't that the question to be answered in order to really understand what's going on?

Otherwise I bet I can always find, for any company, a subset of people that are underpaid relative to the rest, be it related to age, gender, race, sexual preferences, employment history, ZIP code, whatever.

No, there isn't. The gap is between different professions, not intra-professional. Where it is intra-professional, men tend to work more hours, and women tend to preference conditions over monetary remuneration (i.e. flexibility over pay, extraneous benefits over direct compensation etc etc). Just to be clear, extra time off is remuneration, as are things like on-site day care centres, but they aren't ever counted in pay gap studies (that I have seen anyway).

Add to that that Lesbians make more than straight women[1] - and gay men less than straight men [2][3] - and there is a bit more at play.

The problem is that any time there is something men do better than women - like negotiate pay - rather than bring women up to the male standard (teach women to negotiate better), people want to hamstring men (no pay negotiation). Anti-worker policies and pro-gender policies are often indistinguishable, if only to me personally, and in my more cynical moments think this is a business conspiracy to deflate wages to female levels, not increase wages to male levels.

[1] http://bigthink.com/dollars-and-sex/what-explains-the-lesbia...

[2] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-232X.2009....

[3] https://joeclark.org/gaymoney/findings/

It's possible to pay everyone equally - especially when you just pay everyone less.

If you disclose what everyone earns at every level, it's easy to then let all your employees pull everyone hold themselves accountable to the same level.

A bit like crabs in a bucket...

There isn't a huge gap, not for the same job/title combination (there are cases where the gap does exist for the same job, but it's typically less than 10%). The gap widely most widely reported, the 70% figure, is primarily caused because of the genders holding different jobs, where the average pay for female-dominated jobs is less than the average pay for male-dominated jobs.

So... this is light on details into their analysis, but Laszlo Block [formerly of Google - where I work fwiw], claimed "In 2015 we added 8,214 employees to Google. And the women we hired, on average, received a 30 percent bigger salary increase upon joining the company, compared to men."

If you accepted his claim that Google does pay genders equitably, then this would indicate a large pay disparity outside of Google.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/04...

> If you accepted his claim that Google does pay genders equitably, then this would indicate a large pay disparity outside of Google.

Or it would indicate a successful outreach program at Google for women by which they were successful at getting qualified women not currently working in tech to apply; this doesn't necessarily imply a like-duties gender pay gap.

Could it indicate discrimination against men at Google?

There's a lot of variables which are not being taken into account there. If you hired a person from outside SV, and another from within SV, you immediately have a 40-50% difference in salary increases. Or, if you hire one person out of an advertising company and another out of a software company, the difference will be quite large.

It's also a bit of a weasely statement - to quote Penn & Teller, they are lying with numbers - since it doesn't mention the current difference in wages.

10% adjusted is pretty large. Even sub-10% usually works out to a couple of thousand each year.

Yes, it's large, but it's also only practically visible when you can see all of the wages for all companies. Pay gaps between individuals in the same company - regardless of gender - can be much larger than 10%, since your wage (in the US) depends more on your wage at your last job than your actual skill level.

Perhaps it is due to "family costs" being carried disproportionately by women.

Leaving early to pick up kids, staying home when kids are sick, etc. Even though typical gender roles are becoming less typical, they may still result in differential output from the perspective of an employer.

Thomas Sowell (a while ago) showed a dramatic difference in salary between all women, and women who had never married, suggesting that a huge component of the pay gap was due to household and family expectations.

I imagine there is more recent research on this exact theory, but I'm not aware of it.

But if a man earns enough to pay for the needs of his wife in addition to his own, that means he is paid much more than her. I wouldn't deduce that from the man's total compensation, since it essentially is an expense like any other.

Childcare / alimony is not an expense like any other because in many legislations you cannot really decided to stop paying that expense, see e.g. [1]. In the US you typically go to prison pretty swiftly if you refuse to pay.

[1] http://www.realworlddivorce.com/

Perhaps the same biases that might influence career progression/pay-rise discussions could also influence hiring decisions?

Though I agree with your secondary assertion.

The belief that a woman with the same experience, skill, etc. is a worse performer would lead to a lower salary for women. That's the whole point of contention.

And we should probably let go of the idea that markets are rational.

> one wonders why none of them leads by example and hires woman only.

Because that's blatantly, bright-line illegal?

Sounds like a rationalisation.

Plenty of places have no problem hiring (almost) only women, e.g. kindergarden, waitresses, art galleries, medical sociologists, stewardesses.

In any case I doubt this would be illegal in every legislation. In the US men are not a "protected group".

Where there is a will there is a (legal) way! I imagine that a company could legally load up with women to the max, compensate with differential hiring: e.g. only hiring female programmers, compensate with lower paid male drivers/cleaners. Or use outsourcing.

I'm sure if Dorsey, Zuckerberg, Pichai etc really belived that women are underpaid vis-a-vis their contribution, they could easily make it happen. Indeed, they are now so powerful they could get their army of lobbyists to change the law.

Action speaks louder than words.

> Plenty of places have no problem hiring (almost) only women, e.g. kindergarden, waitresses, art galleries, medical sociologists, stewardesses.

Yes, there's plenty of kinds of jobs men don't apply for at nearly the rate women do. That's certainly not the case for programming jobs.

> In any case I doubnt this would be illegal in every legislation. In the US men are not a "protected group"

This is simply factually incorrect; in employment, sex—not just one sex—is a protected class, federally [0] and separately under most state laws, as well. About the only assymetric protected class in employment is age, where discrimination is only protected against when it is against those over 40.

[0] https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sex.cfm

> there's plenty of kinds of jobs men don't apply for at nearly the rate women do.

There's plenty of kinds of jobs Women don't apply for at nearly the rate men do.

> There's plenty of kinds of jobs Women don't apply for at nearly the rate men do.

Yes, but that's not germane to the discussion.

> The structural core of feminist argument patterns is

...also not germane to the present discussion, though it perhaps is relevant to some post far uphtread or off to the side somewhere.

A company adopting a policy of hiring only women for technical positions is a bright line violation of federal (and, in California, also state) employment law. The fact a number of industries that aren't tech are nearly exclusively female (largely because of applicant patterns) does not change this. The fact that some industries are male dominated, in part for similar reasons, really has nothing at all do with this one way or the other. The nature of feminist argument patterns is even more completely irrelevant.

Daycares in the USA get away with it, and, sadly, a lot of parents are very happy about it. Look at the gender % for daycares and elementary school. This is actually a rather larger problem since we are not properly providing young boys with role models.

> Daycares in the USA get away with it,

With a policy of hiring only women, or with being a field of mostly female solo operators without employees, with nearly 100% of applicants for places that do hire employees being female?

Because the two things aren't equivalent in the law.

By hiring only women as a policy. People overlook it, and a lot of parents don't want their children changed by a man. Plus, insurance companies mysteriously raise rates when men are on staff. My college friend started a daycare for his church and encountered all this fun, and I had to deal with some of these issues when we were running daycares (excuse me, Early Childhood Education centers) in the 90's.

I would imagine after rejection after rejection men would find something else (insurance was my friends out). It still amazes me how many industries insurance companies seem to influence the hiring in.

Do the insurance companies ask about the gender of a daycares staff?

The one my friend dealt with got a list so they could do their own background check, plus it was pretty obvious to the rep it was a guy asking for the quote this time as opposed to the first quote.

You may consider it "improper", but actually young boys are provided with plenty of role models, they just happen to be female.

If you reverse the sexes in your response then there would be outrage. Boys need to see men interacting with men and women to pick up on the social cues.

How can the paygap truly not exist when there are so many wealthy, right-wing, male sexist types in HN, Silicon Valley and any industry really?

Maybe you shouldn't rely on a thought-experiment when you can do data: Adjusted paygaps consistenly range between 4-7%.

Say, the SJW publication Fortune:

http://fortune.com/2016/04/12/myth-gender-wage-gap/

Or the left-wing washington post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/business/women-...

Pretty sure there are lots of left wing hardcore feminist types in Silicon Valley as well.

You have to be careful, though. It's possible to control for too many variables such that your set of confounders itself is a predictor of sex. This is a technique I've seen used by people who try to deny the existence of a pay gap. It's FUD.

> set of confounders itself is a predictor of sex. This is a technique I've seen used by people who try to deny the existence of a pay gap.

This doesn't seem invalid? If for example 'wanting to spend more time at home'/'cares about team fit more than salary' is a predictor of gender, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be excluded from analysis.

What we care about is whether the pay difference is because of people treating women unfairly. If a different trait causes lower salaries in both men and women, but is more common among women, the problem is not a gender pay gap.

This is what I'm talking about:

http://www.separatinghyperplanes.com/2014/12/no-you-cant-con...

https://www.vox.com/2014/4/9/5597392/fancy-math-cant-erase-t...

The second article I vaguely agree with, except that the fact that pay gap exists isn't really interesting - what is interesting is why it exists.

For example suppose women on average don't care about money as much as men do, and take jobs with different benefits (like more free time). In such a situation, you would observe a gender pay gap. But the pay gap wouldn't be bad, or something that we need to fix. It would just be a difference in preferences, and a woman who does care about money as much as an average man could expect to earn as much as a man.

The article itself talks about how a significant part of the gender pay gap is the higher willingness/better fit of men to take dangerous, difficult, but well paid jobs in natural resource extraction. This... sounds like not a problem to me?

The unadjusted paygap is still caused by sexism.

That needs to be shown. There are many ways an unadjusted paygap might exist without any discrimination being involved - for example simpson's paradox.

gender disparity can be because a female colleague might not ask for a pay rise as readily as a male.