Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

Don Quixote would be proud of those who hoist their flags in battle against evolution, biology and the laws of the universe itself.

Keep up the good fight, dear gender abolitionists, for you truly are against a formidable foe.

It's just like the feminist saying... "If men got pregnant, abortion would be available free of charge and without restriction in every town and city on earth." Women get stuck with this unrewarded and devalued specialized role.

These days both parents need to work to have a hope of affording rent/mortgage, and job stability is a thing of the past so to have two bread winners substantially reduces the risk of being completely out of an income or health insurance.

Specialization is indeed a powerful tool, but in this case it is a lower priority than security and shelter.

Socially, we might like flexibility in terms of it being a choice whether to look after the kids yourselves before they start school; for the beancounters though, they'd really like you both to be paying more income tax please, and the daycare centre to be employing more people too...

Mind you if you have another child you'd have to do that again.

But good luck getting well paid 3 days a week work for both of you.

What if men and women were to form small teams -- and divide labor between themselves however they saw fit. Such a team would be able to cover for each other -- in sickness and in health and all that jazz.

/s

After month 6, once the baby starts drinking more formula milk and eating solids, things start becoming potentially more egalitarian, since either parent can handle those.

I have very little time for the breastfeeding brigade, particularly those who think it induces some kind of superhuman immunity in their kids. It's plain wrong in my experience and only serves to perpetuate the exclusion of men and those who didn't give birth to their children.

http://www.skepticalob.com/2015/09/mothers-and-babies-commun...

It would certainly be interesting to see how often the mother was producing antibodies for things that the father wasn't (more mundane infection vectors are one of the ideas presented at my link, if baby, mother and father are all sick, you don't have much evidence of the saliva being important).

No, it's a summation of the debate behind the phrase "bottle vs breast". From a few links when Googling:

- "Deciding whether to breastfeed or use formula for your newborn?"

- "Breast vs. bottle - breast milk is the perfect food for baby, with numerous advantages over infant formula"

- "Here's help deciding if you should breastfeed your baby or bottle feed with formula."

Pretty much every discussion of "bottle vs breast" is discussing "breastmilk vs formula".

> would you say that you feel the same after eating off the floor (very clean of course) vs. in a nice setting?

Would you say that a newborn baby is capable of comprehending the difference between a 5 star restaurant compared to a 3 star one? I'm not sure applying adult opinions to newborn babies is likely to achieve much.

A young child will be nursing many times during a day, giving plenty of opportunities for a working mother to nurse their child without giving up time to work on their career. Feedings while the mother is out can be done by bottle using pumped milk, or through formula.

Sexual differences do not need to imply social advantage/disadvantage here ...

How was Lilly Ledbetter's wage disparity caused by something other than discrimination on the basis of sex? Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilly_Ledbetter :

"Initially, Ledbetter’s salary was in line with the salaries of men performing substantially similar work. Over time, however, her pay slipped in comparison to the pay of male area managers with equal or less seniority. By the end of 1997, Ledbetter was the only woman working as an area manager and the pay discrepancy between Ledbetter and her 15 male counterparts was stark: Ledbetter was paid $3,727 per month; the lowest paid male area manager received $4,286 per month, the highest paid, $5,236."

Also, "From January 1st 2016, the number of use-it-or-lose-it 'pappamånad' or 'daddy months' will increase from two to three, in an bid to push couples to share early years childcare more equally." because currently "One in four Swedish dads take no baby leave".

Mandatory parental leave is tricky. Is that a month in a row? As a self-employed person, am I prohibited from filings taxes, sending out invoices, and support questions? Or can I work one day a week?

Do you have any objective reasons why this is suboptimal? Maybe we should go the other way; for example in the Netherlands, many women (with children) choose to work part-time (because they can). So maybe the "status quo" is by choice.

No matter how you slice it, government mandated leave that doesn't apply to every single person equally will lead to discrimination. If you mandate maternity leave then companies will prefer young men to young women, and if you mandate paternity leave then companies will prefer the old to the young.

Parental leave is detrimental for every person that has it, but doesn't want it. If you're of child bearing age you're a huge risk to your employer if your resume doesn't come with a sterility test stapled to it.

FFS. We've already ceded enough control over our lives to these companies whose only agenda is to suck people dry, and then find new ways to wring even more out of them.

Businesses exist to serve people's needs and interests. People do not exist to serve businesses.

You lose the experience, and you're not going to be first in line for a promotion when you come back after 6 months. Unless you want to go full Harrison Bergeron and mandate that the employer isn't allowed to reward Alice for the work she did while Bob was on paternity leave.

Besides, if I did live in the US and the situation came up, I would be more likely to pay for my child's health insurance out of pocket than to take a $40,000 pay cut.

This varies from company to company. It isn't legally required, but the company I work for offers 6 months paid parental leave and it is encouraged you take it to spend time with your newborn/spouse and adjust to the new life. There are a lot of married couples in the office and both parents are allowed to take it together.

Most companies that my friends work for offer paid maternity leave ranging from 3 to 12 months. Generally paternal leave is the one that is never offered, or if it is offered, it's subtly discouraged against actually using it (you want that much-needed promotion now that you have a newborn, don't you? better work harder and not take time off!)

Of course there will be the resultant unintended consequences such as the price of housing rising due to more people having a little bit more to spend, seeing as housing and healthcare are both increasing much faster than incomes and inflation it is likely these two will see the windfall and end up resulting in the lower classes having even less disposable income.

That's this part of your comment: "emotional support", "accepting of other's identity", "taxing some roles and subsidizing others", "undesirable roles". Those all come out of stereotypes.

Nowadays, I see tens of young girls joining local raspberry jams for fun in the UK. My friend's daughters are playing with electrical circuits and installing switch&lamp circuit between beds to chat in Morse code. And none of this comes from pushing for forced equality-in-numbers. This is just kids getting excited about stuff, because nobody is stopping them.

I think the stereotypes played a big part for a long time and we'll see a slow rebalancing of candidates' genders. I think (and hope) the situation will be very much different in ~15 years when current kids finish universities. But I don't believe much active support can change anything for near-future graduates.

So.. either parent who care gives can get the same leave for that caregiving. Basically, do not write gender specific laws. Write laws based on parenting role, and it can apply to either gender who takes on that role.

I don't think we can try to fix the market demand for the various roles, but we can certainly fix the legal discrepancies.

The emotional support is impossible to legislate, but I think as a society we should not judge negatively men who decide to be the primary child care provider nor judge women who decide to be the breadwinner (although in most families, both parents need to be both... I am a big proponent of day care)

Yes, of course. Really, for all the talk about convoluted biases clouding people's decision-making, it's pretty telling that most of the time, they don't even manage to get past the basic challenge of actually letting the evidence lead them to a conclusion.

Isn't expecting "gender-equal expectations and opportunities" strange if you agree with "Gender-biased job preference due to genetically pre-disposed traits"?

Why would culture expect a tall thin person and a short muscular person to be equally good at basketball and weightlifting?

I often see a preference in particular young adults that pick summer jobs or education based on where they can find co-students/workers that has the same gender, age, color, economical status, and life experience as they. Is this Bad, and if so, how do we eliminate that feeling of familiarity and safety that such choice brings?

There is a yearly study in Sweden that polls peoples priority when looking for job. Highest on the list is often the social environment and co-workers, and the pay (ie, the rational argument for picking a job) is often far low on the list.

I'd argue most of the companies will be able to handle that. Especially since you have plenty of time to prepare.

Above is only the part which is different for men and women for obvious biological reasons. There is also a paternity system leave starting from 2 months after birth but this should ideally not discriminate either gender.

It's paid for by for every employee, with a ~50%/50% split between employer and employee, with the premium depending on gross income only.

You actually want insurance for this because you don't want, for example, small businesses avoiding fertile women because they "already have too many pregnancies right now". If all the employees had kids simultaneously (an irrelevant random event), it shouldn't cause a bankruptcy.

In practice, people aren't typically so fungible, but the insurance at least hedges the salary portion of the risk.

That experience shows that this information does not cause a big distraction.

Public salary helps level the power imbalance between the employer (who has more experience in negotiation and more knowledge about what people are willing to accept) and the employee, and makes it harder to hide systemic wage discrimination.

DemocracyAtWork [1] is an organization that helps companies with the legal process of collectivizing and democratizing companies. A great way to fix the taboo of sharing salaries while simultaneously equalizing gender and other identity related pay/power disparities would be to democratize the workplace business decisions.

[1] http://www.democracyatwork.info/

In the end, regardless of the taboo, keeping salaries secret only helps employers. They are playing with a full deck of cards, while you -- the employee -- aren't. Not having access to this information is detrimental. For example, you do not know if you're being short-changed.

In your scenario, Joe's employer will have to explain why Josh deserves more money. The problem here is that employers prefer to avoid confrontation, and that sometimes there just isn't any reason beyond "because Josh asked for it and you didn't" or "because I like Josh more than you". This is why hidden information empowers employers but not you -- because you simply don't know when their decisions are justified or arbitrary. By making this information public, you make it more likely that your employers will be forced to provide non-bullshit justifications.

BTW all of what you described is not unique to women. I have at least few friends that don't negotiate, don't seek alternative offers and because of that are disadvantaged when it comes to earnings. Periodic pay rise is just a device to dissuade employees from seeking their market value and appropriate compensation. The main reason for its existence is to profit from what happened to you.

It's well acknowledged that men are discriminated against in some contexts, but yes, there is no serious debate that the sexism in our society overwhelmingly targets women, and there's a reason that the movement for equality between sexes is called "feminism".

However, appearing to be a "team player" and always being in the office makes a person appear to be a hard worker. So people who put in long hours are generally rewarded with more bonuses, promotions, and retention, even if there isn't a strong correlation with their actual work output.

Where do you think gender roles come from?

The most common job in the US is truck driver. It's not software developer money but it pays better than you might expect. Truck drivers are overwhelming male and you might not see an obvious reason for that and want to blame "gender roles" or sexism.

But truck drivers get paid by the mile. So after you drive your truck to a loading dock, you're then standing around not getting paid while 20,000 pounds of freight is loaded or unloaded. You want to get back on the road doing the thing that makes you money, so the truck driver helps with the loading and unloading (which is what everybody expects you to do), and suddenly the population of truck drivers skews toward people with more physical strength which skews heavily male.

Then the truck driver is away from home all the time so the truck driver's spouse is the one who takes primary responsibility for the kids, and now we have gender roles even if society didn't start with them.

I believe I did:

>> "There are 'baked-in' DNA traits, that have emergently caused cultures to adopt those gender roles in their historical contexts."

However,

> you both have valid points and if you read carefully what you say you could agree

The only thing that I am disagreeing with him on is whether "it is safe to assume that gender roles are baked into our DNA".

Gender roles are a complex property that emerge from the interaction between our DNA, our culture and our environment.

To claim that gender roles are 'baked in' to our DNA indicates that gender roles are determined by our DNA in such a way as to be inflexible and unchanging. Assuming this is true is a dangerous assumption that is not backed up by history or science and does not encourage sexual equality.

But in regards to your hypothesis that changing society will change our (self-imposed) fitness criteria and result in a more convergent evolutionary path for both sexes, I partially agree. Partially, because 1. while evolution can and does happen on short time scales, its most prominent effects are shaped over aeons. Just because we are not hunter gatherers living in the woods today, does not mean that the evolutionary pressure that all of the generations of our ancestors underwent in those conditions can be subverted on a timescale meaningful to us.

And 2. because no matter how postmodern and liberal you think your culture is, we still need to have babies and raise them into functioning adults. If women are both gifted in this role and feel a psychological need to perform it, it makes no sense for them not to do it. That doesn't mean that women should be barred from the workplace, but it might mean that women taking less involved and prestigious roles in the workplace so that they may have more time to raise their children or look after grandchildren or what have you could be a good thing for society and not something to squawk about.

Sexual dimorphism is real. Your impotent rage and ridiculous ideologies will never change that fact. I will be greatly amused by your kind's zealous need to tilt at windmills.

But since you seem to be a levelheaded individual, I would like to seriously discuss the suppression of critical thought on Hacker News, and why moderators such as yourself enforce it ruthlessly.

Let's start with the parent comment:

>When those gender roles are all but constant across countless independently developed cultures existent over tens of thousands of years, with distribution of visible physical traits to match them, it's pretty safe to assume that they're baked into our DNA and not some random whim of western culture. Imagine how long a tribe with male caretakers and female warriors (who it cannot be argued are not on average significantly smaller and weaker than men) would survive against a tribe of male warriors and female caretakers. There are species with much less divergence in biology between males and females. We would not have evolved to have such divergence if it were not useful for our fitness to have distinct fighter/protector and caretaker roles. Indeed as K-strategists that take a very long time to mature, having dedicated caretakers was an extremely useful evolution.

There is absolutely nothing controversial about this statement to a trained biologist. In fact, you could not get through an undergraduate degree in biology if you did not understand sexual dimorphism, r/K selection theory, and the sexual specialization that results. As such, there is nothing political about the statement. It is merely a statement of the current scientific understanding of the evolutionary history of homo sapiens.

Now let's look at your response:

>This turn into generic gender-war predictably degenerated into yet another tedious spat. Perhaps elsewhere on the Internet there is a spot where people haven't had enough of these yet, but HN isn't one. Note the guidelines: "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

So, the statement of scientific consensus stated by the original comment is labelled by a moderator as "gender-war" which "predictably degenerated into yet another tedious spat." And you summarise with saying HN has had enough, and the debate is to be ended.

So I just want to be clear, which branches of evolutionary biology, and science in general, are off limits to discuss on HN? And how does censoring known science help critical thought and discussions regarding the current entrepreneurial markets in tech?

Thank you for your time.

EDIT: to address your final statement:

>It takes a lot of energy to post these responses, and it's hard to justify the investment when you're not making any effort to be civil, and when instead of open-mindedness you display only a desire to score ideological points.

It is a bold assertion that stating known science is "a desire to score ideological points." This line of thinking demonstrates more about the reader, and less about the material. Evolutionary biology is not an ideology, it is a science. Stating it does not make one an ideologue, but an empiricist.

A developing fetus literally injects behavior-changing chemicals directly into its mother's bloodstream for months before it is born. In species without strong pair-bonding, a juvenile may never get the chance to push any evolution-programmed buttons on the father to initiate a parental bond.

So my opinion is that the median human male probably does not experience emotion as strongly as the median human female, because male emotions do not affect reproductive success as strongly or as reliably as female emotions. There's no particular reason to attach any cultural importance to it. Being more or less emotional than someone else is neither good nor bad. But it does affect behavior, and therefore relative suitability for specific work roles.

Evolution does not care if you literally cry over spilled milk, or if you can continue running up the beach even after the hundred men in front of you, to whom you had grown attached in the weeks prior, get torn to shreds before your eyes. It only cares about whether you will have living descendants in the future. But your fellow humans care about that when they are deciding whether or not to hire you into a vacant position. Your emotional programming will make you more suitable for some jobs, and less suitable for others.

But that is definitely not the sole reason why some professions have something other than a 50-50 split between the sexes. It accounts for some of the difference, but nowhere near all of it.

Fuck PC culture. (Sorry, I am in a bad mood today. Irony unintended.)

> So what you are saying is that more experienced and more educated people get paid more?

The answer to that is "no." I interpret jonesb6's comment as pointing out that the survey depends on a survivorship bias.

Thus, "more experienced and more educated people get paid more" is an incorrect translation of that comment as jonesb6 was not saying that but was making a different point.