One way to look at it is that the disparity may be a symptom of complicated cultural biases, and we may not know the specific reasons. Since there’s nothing gender or sex related to doing the job of QA, then if the disparity actually is measurable and widespread, it does reveal cultural bias. This is currently true for nurses and for elementary school teachers in the US, for example.
It’s important to note that this can happen without individuals who have any overtly “sexist” behavior at all. It can be the result of cultural attitudes and not prejudiced hiring practices. This is why using the word “sexism” on it’s own might not be the best word for it, even if it’s technically true. Perhaps better terms are “cultural sexism”, or “cultural bias”. I’m sure there are better terms. The problem with using the bare word “sexism” is it tends to be accusatory and out people on the defensive, where the issue may literally be with all of us.
Because gender disparities are changing every year (very quickly in historical terms), and because they are different from country to country, that rules out the possibility that the cause has anything to do with intrinsic differences between men and women, it disproves the idea that there’s a “natural disposition” that is purely based on sex, at least as the primary reason for the distribution today. There might be some natural disposition, but you can’t know what it is until the known, demonstrated cultural biases have been eliminated, and the ratios of men and women settle and stop changing, and women agree that things are fair. Moreover, there is a long history of people claiming “natural dispositions” based on sex that have been subsequently proven false, which means you have the burden to demonstrate why your idea of a natural disposition is somehow different from the previous claims. To date there is no evidence to back up the idea that men & women have any differences in their interest & ability to write software based on sex. There are differences in attitudes, and differences in how many people study and seek such jobs, but those differences are linked primarily to changing social norms, i.e. cultural bias, and have never been shown to be sex based.
> It could be that men and women have natural different disposition to work in certain fields
It could also be, and happens to be more likely, that cultural biases cause sex or gender preferences. If that’s case, then the problem is that insisting there could be sex based differences, when in reality sex based differences may be too small to even measure, may be a self-reinforcing cultural bias. Instead of assuming that bias doesn’t exist and demanding someone prove that it does first, we need to be assuming it exists and actively asking the question how can we get rid of it and then prove that we got rid of it. After all, we know for a fact it used to exist in the US, we know for a fact that it exists today in certain countries, and we can’t show that it ever got completely solved, because it never did yet.
> I also don’t understand why we should strive for balance? What is wrong with each group, whether grouped by sex or race or age or whatever else being specialised in different fields on average?
You might be making assumptions here about what the goal is. The goal is to eliminate prejudices that are actively harmful. The World Health Organization, for example, talks about why it’s important to eliminate these prejudices. https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender
There is a broad trend that as women are more empowered, they are less likely to go into STEM: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
I’m rather skeptical that it’s truly “broad” in historical terms, it’s still changing much too fast. I’m skeptical that trend for 1 or 2 decades is likely to continue and not change direction again, since it’s already changed direction in the last century. Women going into STEM went way up from the 40s to the 80s. In computer science it’s gone down since the 80s in the US, while in India it’s continued going up, and even exceeded 50% one or two years. The numbers in the US vary wildly from field to field, it’s different in CS than it is in biology or math. All of this is further undeniable proof that today’s causes are primarily social and not sex based.
The deeper problem with this article is that it flirts with some vague concept of different interests between men and women without addressing the well known fact that social norms influence interests. You simply cannot separate attitudes from cultural biases, it’s not possible, and it’s either ignorant or willfully misleading to suggest otherwise.
How do you know this to be true?
> cultural bias
What definition are you using for this term?
We know for a fact that bias hasn’t been completely eliminated, because the ratios and disparities of many jobs including QA are changing quickly, they have not settled, and they are not the same from country to country. That is proof that cultural bias exists and is affecting today’s distributions. You can’t even reasonably ask the question of how to know how much a job depends on sex or gender until after you’ve eliminated cultural bias, because cultural bias masquerades as gender based preferences.
This page for cultural bias is as good any any other definition for my purposes here, which was purely to say that “cultural bias” is less inflammatory than “sexism”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_bias
I don’t understand the meaning of the term “sex bias”. So it’s completely unclear to me that it existed previously and that I want it to stop existing.
> We know for a fact that bias hasn’t been completely eliminated, because the ratios and disparities of many jobs including QA are changing quickly, they have not settled, and they are not the same from country to country. That is proof that cultural bias exists and is affecting today’s distributions. You can’t even reasonably ask the question of how to know how much a job depends on sex or gender until after you’ve eliminated cultural bias, because cultural bias masquerades as gender based preferences.
Cultural bias is about people from different cultural having different standards? What is the hypothetical ‘fix’, imposing uniform standards for judgement on everyone at all places in all times?
This and “cultural bias” and “sexism” are all pretty well established terms you can Google, and are taught in social studies and history courses.
Sex bias means a cultural bias or prejudice based on someone’s sex. I’m using sex here more or less interchangeably with gender right now, but there are times where that distinction matters.
> it’s completely unclear to me that it existed previously and that I want it to stop existing.
There’s no question about whether sex bias has existed, nor whether society wants it to stop existing. Those are facts not being debated. The primary example I had in mind when I said 100 years is women’s suffrage: the right to vote. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage) When women were legally barred from voting, or owning land, or initiating divorce, those things were sex based biases. Women gained the right to vote in the US a while ago, but it took longer before women started to appear in C-level corporate roles, that is still changing today.
> Cultural bias is about people from different cultural having different standards?
Please read the link I posted. Cultural bias is about having ingrained prejudices in large social groups. It can be, but is not primarily about people from different cultures in the sense of, say, Indians vs Americans. Indians have certain cultural biases, Americans have their own separate cultural biases. The idea that nurses should be women is an example of a cultural bias.
> What is the hypothetical ‘fix’, imposing uniform standards
The goal is to remove bias and prejudice that is hurting certain categories of people, preventing them from having equal access to opportunity to improve their lives, and to make decisions about people based on their interests and abilities, and to establish and respect some basic human rights across the board. I don’t know what you mean by “imposing uniform standards for judgement on everyone at all places in all times”, but this sounds like a straw man and that you’re skeptical. It might be described as imposing minimum uniform standards, perhaps.
I will turn your question back on you: what is the alternative you’re suggesting, do you support having different standards for men and women in QA? Why or why not? Do you support the idea that a woman developer who writes the same quality of code and works as hard and has the same level of experience as her male coworker should be paid the same amount?
I am a mind in thrall to delusion.
> Sex bias means a cultural bias or prejudice based on someone’s sex.
Using the word “prejudice” to define “bias” doesn’t help me to understand the term.
> Cultural bias is about having ingrained prejudices in large social groups.
Okay, so different people having different assumptions which they use to judge phenomena.
> The goal is to remove bias and prejudice that is hurting certain categories of people, preventing them from having equal access to opportunity to improve their lives, and to make decisions about people based on their interests and abilities, and to establish and respect some basic human rights across the board.
There are lots of things that lots of people will tell me are hurting them. Personally, I don’t care about any of them. But how do you prioritize one claimed hurt over another?
> but this sounds like a straw man and that you’re skeptical
Probably, I was just guessing.
> I will turn your question back on you: what is the alternative you’re suggesting, do you support having different standards for men and women in QA?
I don’t really care. The hiring/promoting practices of 2022 American QA departments doesn’t interest me. Let the Harvest Gods have their day.
> Do you support the idea that a woman developer who writes the same quality of code and works as hard and has the same level of experience as her male coworker should be paid the same amount?
Depends on the context. Does disqualifying the woman help me to get what I want, then I’m all for it. Otherwise, I don’t care.
Goto LinkedIn and search for QA engineers in Indian cities. I think that should be a very good proof for you
In any case, I have done the five minutes of googling you seem to want. Biases in evaluating resumes based on gender and other such factors are not new nor unknown: here is an early study from 1986[1], 1988[2], 1999[3], 2001[4], 2007[5]. Feel free to visit google scholar and look more studies by yourself.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022103186... [2] https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-3514.5... [3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018839203698 [4] https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0022-4... [5] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-23339-007
1. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Gender-and-Race-Prefer...
None of those studies support your original claim. They support the more broader claim that women are discriminated in the job market.
> Not as generalizable as controlled studies but not as worthless as you seem to think.
Sorry, a single data point, by itself, when you share it attempting to generalize, is worse than worthless, since it can be terribly misleading.
I guess for you it's a given QA jobs are "inferior" to SWE jobs. I guess you believe the articles you linked proof women tend to get "inferior" jobs just because they're women? (I haven't read the articles, although I believe this to be true).
I just can't make the jump that this applies to QA jobs (granting they are "inferior"). That would imply "inferior" jobs are always overrepresented by women, and there are counterexamples to this, by almost any definition of "inferior".
So the the question is are QA jobs lower paid or not. That's easy to check and is a pretty good (though not perfect) indicator of status. A quick Google would have shown you that this is generally the case. Funnily enough you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
Yes, that's not disputed by anyone serious.
> and get paid less even for the same jobs.
Also yes, but only if you don't account for hours worked and experience. A Harvard study found that after accounting for both the type of job and hours worked [1]. Google actually found women were paid more than male employees working the same job [2].
In short, the pay gap definitely exists in the sense that women's average pay check is less than the average man's. But there's not much evidence of discrimination in pay. Men make more because they work different jobs, work longer hours, and stay in their field for longer.
Also,
> you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
One, this isn't calling QA "inferior". Compensation is not a moral judgement of work. Pointing out the fact that coding isn't a requirement explains why there's a larger potential labor pool and thus lower pay. My first job in QA was doing manual testing, following a script of things to check on canary and staging builds. I was paid $12.50 an hour. This wasn't some moral judgement about the value of this job, it's the fact that pretty much anyone could do it so there's no reason to offer more than minimum wage.
1. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bolotnyy/files/be_genderga...
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-...
I state I believe this is true in one of my previous comments.
> So the the question is are QA jobs lower paid or not. That's easy to check and is a pretty good (though not perfect) indicator of status. A quick Google would have shown you that this is generally the case. Funnily enough you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
This could be, but you need something else to prove it, otherwise lower paying jobs with different distributions than the job market distribution are always root caused in discrimination, is this your argument? There are many high paying jobs that result in a huge selection bias with respect to employees, just because many people simply don't want to put the hours. And thus discrimination is not the whole story in these cases. It may be the case in QA teams though (or part of the story), I'm simply saying it needs more research.
Nevertheless this hasn't been my point, my point is simply a single data point by itself can't be used to account for part of the explanation.
By the way, lower salary doesn't mean "inferior", there are very high paying jobs, very stressful, that I wouldn't want, and work life balance is a huge component of a job.
A single anecdote is sufficient to merit "at least partly."
You can say it's not generally proved. But it also wasn't a universal claim.
Do you realize how absurd language would be if what you claim is true? For example:
- Is is true latino men are discriminated against when applying for florist positions?
- Yes, it happened once.
Literally any group would be "party discriminated" in every possible scenario according to how you define "at least partly".
Slightly more seriously, if someone is discriminated against for being part of a group, you don't get to appeal to the fallacy of composition applied to all groups in order to claim that there is no discrimination against that individual. Yes, yes, you're not actually writing out that argument, you're just leaving its ingredients lying around next to a naked flame.
Entirely seriously, here is your proof:
https://www.r-bloggers.com/2019/12/modeling-salary-and-gende...
Now switch to some other attempt at distraction via reducio of the actual argument.
However, a lot of people seem to think that describing reality is an insult to them, so I have to explain further - this is a result of systemic sexism starting at early childhood. It starts with what toys children are given to play with. It continues via socialization in schools. It's propagated via every surprised face when a woman shows up to learn about technology. No individual person involved in the process might have any malice at all. It's the result of entire systems of behavior, no individual part of which can be described as "the problem". You might call it systemic sexism.
You don't have to be able to explain the entire method of operation to see the result. Is there a statistical difference in outcomes between groups that isn't explained by a difference between the groups? Then there's a systemic bias at work.
Car mechanics aren't all women, even though women's hands fit much better into all those tiny spaces in the dashboard and engine bay? Sexism
Nurses aren't overwhelmingly male, despite the fact that a significant part of the job is wrangling patients, who overwhelmingly skew obese? Sexism
I chose them as two things that don't often get cited as evidence of sexism (though mechanic isn't so dirty a job, and isn't dangerous at all. I have more personal awareness if mechanics, so that's what I chose.)
What makes you think it isn’t?
Go ahead, do your study. You'd probably find that most hospitals have a slight preference for male nurses as they're trying to increase their diversity for all the practical benefits it brings. (Yes, diversity has a lot of practical benefits. Having people with a lot of different backgrounds around significantly improves the odds of having someone around who can successfully interact with a person no one else can.)
So if hospitals, theoretically, have a slight preference for male nurses in hiring right now... Why are they so uncommon? Because there are fewer candidates.
Hiring isn't "the problem". No one thing is "the problem". There's no bad guy to blame. No evil cabal. You don't need to get upset every time someone points out a systemic bias.
You aren't being accused of anything. You aren't the bad guy. But it would be nice if you acknowledged things are a bit out of whack, and helped to reduce the skew in the next generation. You don't need to fix it. It's enough to occasionally point out things could be better.
>You aren't being accused of anything. You aren't the bad guy. But it would be nice if you acknowledged things are a bit out of whack, and helped to reduce the skew in the next generation. You don't need to fix it. It's enough to occasionally point out things could be better.
But who are you to say that the way a thing is done by everyone, everywhere, is out of whack? Perhaps you (and I) just don't have full knowledge of all motives and incentives?
This whole discussion misappropriates the term 'sexism' to make it meaningless just like racism has become a meaningless term.
Also, did you know that language changes? It's not a set of rules set down in a book somewhere. (Even French, much to their dismay.) Sexism may have meant only individual men demeaning women once, but it turns out it's a good word to describe all forms of bias based on sex or gender. So use of the term expanded. This isn't misappropriation, this is how language works.
The set of all relevant characteristics to evaluate 'potential' is either infinite or approximates infinite on the scale of human lifetimes and capabilities, not least of all because 'potential' is also the evaluation of that infinite list of characteristics across an infinite list of possible uses of one's time within some moral framework that must be used to determine which is the optimal solution. The practical implication is that 'statistical alignment with potential' is a fantasy, and anyone who indulges it will spend all their time trying to figure out how to amass and analyze the relevant information (and no time accomplishing anything else), which we can hopefully acknowledge is not the best use of potential.
>Also, did you know that language changes?
Please, don't be snide.
>It's not a set of rules set down in a book somewhere. (Even French, much to their dismay.) Sexism may have meant only individual men demeaning women once, but it turns out it's a good word to describe all forms of bias based on sex or gender. So use of the term expanded. This isn't misappropriation, this is how language works.
It's a good word to describe forms of bias because its prior meaning gets people's attention, because it is a word that means something that needs to be fixed. The extent of 'systemic sexism' far outpaces 'sexism', meaning that the first use will necessarily eclipse the second, eventually taking away the shock value and, in the meantime, it removes the significance of what was once an unambiguous and damning word. It is a loss of linguistic clarity for political expedience.
This is illegal hiring bias. It doesn't matter if a company thinks it'll perform better, it's against the law. If a company finds that male salespeople make more sales, are they justified in turning away women?
People have free will, life circumnstances seperate to corporate goals and a nature.
You can track a bias towards food and water that starts from birth and runs through all of society. We don't explain the lack of people in deserts as systemic waterism. Why do we see women working voluntarily with women in some roles as sexism when it has happened since the beginning of time?
The systematic worldview breaks down when it hits the nature of people. We aren't all pawns in a corporate game 24:7, so there are many reasons for people to work they way they do. One would hope they are freely choosing their work roles and not living their lives according to the dictats of gender equality statistics.
Often perpetuated by women as well as men, so this isn't man-blaming.
And having a few token women in dev doesn't change the situation so much as it cements the status quo in place.
Presumably you wouldn't know without a study, thus you do the study.