The gender wage gap in Silicon Valley – based on AngelList data
medium.com
medium.com
How about actually making the workplace attractive to woman applicants? Things like ridding your careers page of implicit biases and bro culture, putting extra emphasis on personal as well as professional growth, attending/hosting various women-oriented events/meetups/conferences, involving your leadership with mentoring at and recruiting from places like the Hackbright Academy, etc. etc.
It costs money, it costs time, hell, it takes a long time to produce results, but you know what - it's worth it! They are an outlier, but I do like Etsy's approach (and results) to gender diversity - http://firstround.com/review/How-Etsy-Grew-their-Number-of-F....
Yeah, and do you know what the best and easiest way to make a workplace more attractive to women is?
It is to have other women in the workplace!
I know many women who are unwilling to even apply to a company if they know they would be the first or only woman on the team.
It is a chicken and egg problem. Until his company is able to get SOME women working there, it is going to be extremely difficult to attract them in the first place.
Because of this it makes a lot of business sense to prioritize hiring women if your team is extremely imbalanced.
Yes, it is a chicken and egg problem. Yes, the first couple of hires will be difficult to make. But if you don't have the framework in place to actually support these women once they join the workplace, guess what, even if you luck out into making those hires, they won't be sticking around. It's not a one-time kind of thing.
If you have X people interviewing at your company, you should hire the best person who interviews, no matter the gender.
The REAL way to go about this is to discriminate at the referral/reachout stage.
If you go to your all male engineering team and announce "We are hiring! Refer all your friends!". What you are effectively doing is discriminating against women, because you are going to receive 20 male referrals and 1 women referral. But THIS isn't illegal.
I am suggesting that you do this same but biased towards women referrals, instead of biasing it toward male referrals. You make specific, targeted efforts to get as many women as possible to apply, while not bothering with referral/reachout processes that are likely to receive male heavy applications, and THEN accept the best person who applies to the job, which will almost certainly be a woman, since instead of having a 20male-1female application ratio, you now have a 1male-20female ratio.
One way of ensuring that you get women referrals is to reach out to all of your female engineering friends, and ask THEM for referrals. Or when you are making your job postings, forward it along to the mailing list of all the women in tech meetups, facebook groups, email lists, ect.
I mean, thats what the tech industry is doing right now, but targeted at men, and they never get in trouble for it, even if it is "accidental" that the job postings only get sent to tech groups/meetups that have a 20-1 male to female ratio.
God this hit me like a sack of bricks. It's exactly what I would do and I now realize, dudes gonna have dude friends, just like how ladies are gonna have lady friends.
The truth is that fewer women than men choose to enter this profession in the first place. You may or may not agree that this state of affairs represents a "problem". Even if it does, the hiring stage is far too late to "fix" it.
Employment discrimination laws don't kick in until you have 15 employees. This guy has 10.
First of all you could have used buckets. Secondly, it doesn't seem like you have enough data judging from your charts.
Dice did a study and found that
>when you control for education, level of experience and parallel job titles, says Dice, men and women earn the same amounts.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/03/20/women-are-...
> At that point I made a decision to change this by enforcing a new hiring rule. Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team
I hope you get sued
I probably don't know what I'm talking about though.
I stopped reading after this part!
The CEO should have run this blog post, and particularly this sentence, by a lawyer. It seems pretty clear that the above statement, if reflected in actual hiring practice by the company, is in violation of Section 703(a) of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act[1]. It is also pretty easy ammunition for an employment discrimination lawsuit.
[1]https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/titlevii.cfm Section 703(a) reads "It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer...to fail or refuse to hire...because of such individual's...sex" and "to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities" because of sex
>The term “employer” means a person engaged in an industry affecting commerce who has fifteen or more employees for each working day.
FTA:
>We’re team of 10 people of which only 2 are women, only one is a developer.
However, the second part of my statement still very much applies. This blog post can easily become Exhibit A in an employment discrimination lawsuit in a year when the company has more employees, or even against a completely different company run by the same CEO in the future, to establish a pattern.
Point being, not worth the risk!
Not having women on your team usually points to a culture issue, and who wants to have a terrible work environment? It's another area where avoiding false positives is probably going to be better for you in the long run.
For instance, my wife moved to a new team that is 50℅ women, from a team where she was the only woman engineer. Her co-workers really didn't know how to interact with women. Complaining to HR would cause the team to assume it was her. When a co-worker did complain to HR, a large section of her team assumed it was her and made the workplace even less hospitable.
Plus from a business perspective if you can open your business to a pool of talent that isn't well catered to, you'll probably reap some long term benefit.
That's a problem women can solve, not one that has to be solved for them.
> Her co-workers really didn't know how to interact with women
Examples? You react to them the same way as everyone else.
If you want to shift the balance.
1. Start by mixing up your recruitment marketing and messaging to make them more appealing to your target demographic.
2. Then, consider any necessary policy changes to the workplace and culture that would turn away candidates who get a closer look.
3. Lastly, consider using your diversity preference as a tie-breaker among otherwise comparable candidates.
No illegal litmus tests necessary.
He has some interesting charts regarding how much salary is requested by people of different skill, experience, and gender.
Is it just the idea that someone was getting hiring preference that isn't 100% tied to skills that is the issue? Or is it specifically because it was women that were getting hiring preference?
The wage gap means that at a given salary level, the women is going to be better and more experienced.
If you have budgeted 120k for a software engineering position, why WOULDN'T you choose the best person for the role?
And the best person for the role at this salary point is almost certainly going to be an overqualified women who is getting underpaid at her previous job.
Yeah... no. The "wage gap" means the CEO makes more than the receptionist. For people with the same CV and same work experience women make just as much as men.
A few (relatively easy) ideas:
1. Join a few "______ in tech" email lists, and if you don't feel comfortable joining the list or it is not allowed, at least email the moderator and ask if they take job postings.
2. Send someone from your company to attend to a "____ in tech" meetup. There are a lot and they happen often. Ask people at these meetups where they get their information, what email lists they are on, etc. Then, act.
3. Interns. People have mixed thoughts on interns, fine, but the "lack of experience" trope happens because it's really hard to get that first chance. Take a chance on someone in a lower-risk way.
4. Host some kind of public-facing community event one or two times per year. Advertise it on your website and your twitter. Generally as a woman I am more comfortable attending something like this rather than cold-emailing a company for a position that I am not even sure they are hiring for. See: "Code as Craft" at Etsy. Tech-centric topic, inclusive and public-facing way to see the office, meet employees etc.
Is that a bad thing? I say this from the perspective of small businesses who typically hire family then friends, etc. In theory it may be bad as they may eventually run out of vigor and ideas... but is it bad in other ways? I have known many businesses started by immigrants where lots of the employees were family, same ethnic group, etc. but I had not though of it as "wrong" in a moral sense maybe wrong in a business sense (as I think it limited their potential, but I saw that as "their" problem, not a social problem.
Both men and women are uncomfortable negotiating up (I've heard that women are much more hesitant about this, but I don't know the research that well and never sat on the hiring side of salary negotiations), and low asks are probably the biggest mistake anyone can make: $10-20k doesn't mean shit to the manager that wants to get you on their team if you negotiate it at hiring time, but if you try to get that bump during annual raise period, that's almost impossible to achieve at any large-ish company (it means either nixing raises for other people on the team or calling in VP-level favors, which most managers don't have the ability to do).
In tech nobody is ever going to tell you to piss off for asking for $10k more than they can offer, they're just going to negotiate you down (if even that - most of the time they'll just say "yes" or split the difference). Now, if you're $50k+ out of line, that could be another matter, but that's why you do some research and don't go crazy with your ask.
The rule for contracting is more brutal, but also a bit simpler: you should always be losing a lot of business because of how high your rate is, somewhere between 25% and 50% is my rule of thumb. If clients are saying "yes" without negotiating or at least complaining, you're definitely charging too little.
Protip: you can look up top salaries at most non-profits online, they have to report them for I think the 15 highest paid employees. Pick a smallish one in your area, look at the engineers there, and you've got an anchor for senior engineering rates. Non profits might not be 100% competitive with for-profit companies, but the better ones have to be somewhat close as far as base salary (they don't offer stock or other perks, usually) if they want good people.
Here we go. (actually I stopped reading).
It also has a "guilt" aspect to it.
So, these kinds of comments have at least four ways of causing an instant eye roll by my count. Two of which, repetitive and bias parts, aren't really caused by sexism topic so much as nature of people following sites like this on a regular basis and how we respond to certain things.
Do you have any fucking idea how unfair it is to discriminate against people, people who might have had very difficult lives, because they were born a certain way and share gonads and pigmentation with people long dead who do things that don't fit today's social mores?
If you choose the see people as group members first and individuals second, I want nothing to do with you.
A white Eastern European probably faced plenty of disadvantage.
A white farmer in zimbabwe probably faced plenty of disadvantage.
The ancestors of someone of Irish heritage have probably faced plenty of institutional racism but managed to overcome it.
How many data points per graph? Really just 1 median salary a year (20x2 data points and 1k^2 pixels :)? I would have preferred just points with straight lines over the interpolated wavy line that looks fibbed. Why not more points? Why not a heat map/2d histogram instead of medians? And why not have the same axis on all the graphs?
Most of us can agree that this is a bad decision, but I've always wondered how people can end up with such tunnel vision. Men in IT has always been overrepresented, so it's not surprising that the majority of teams are mostly men. But what I wonder is why this person thinks that hiring women only will change this trend? It is in fact gender discrimination, but I believe that inspiring women to work in the IT field is the key to solve the problem. I don't think anyone wants special treatment due to their gender, but rather evaluated by their skills and experiences.
As someone else pointed out in another comment, many women feel better about working at a place that already has other women.
Analysis: needs improvement.
From the article:
> Based on the data, women are definitely undervaluing themselves in comparison to men. The gap starts around $10k/year for the first year and grows to a staggering $30k/year after 10 years of working epxeriences. [sic]
An alternative interpretation is that women are behaving entirely logically with the knowledge that their employability is maximized if they set their desired salaries lower than men with equivalent experience. Efficient markets are a thing.
I'm not saying that's my interpretation of the data, I'm just cautioning against jumping to conclusions when that conclusion is implicitly blaming the victims. It's a really great analysis and the dataset could set up a great follow-on study of causation.
I do think wages are really very much a bottom up thing in that people can collectively raise their wages by simply not accepting lower pay. Putting a (reasonably) high price on your head is not only good for you but for others like you in the labor market. Firms are not really in a great position to keep wages down, the best they can do is make sure nobody knows what anyone else makes.
No, really, you're begging the question here. "Gender bias isn't a big problem among senior developers, so it can't be such a big problem."
Everyone's always happy to wave their "misogyny" and "discrimination" flags around but, to me, the argument falls down the moment it implies that businesses hate women more than they love money.
Explicitly choosing to hire women and pay them less is not acceptable. Not hiring someone who happens to be a woman at the same rate as an equally qualified man is completely acceptable.
And I'm not alleging explicit widespread prejudice here; I'm giving a hypothesis to explain behavior caused by implicit biases.
> An alternative interpretation is that women are behaving entirely logically with the knowledge that their employability is maximized if they set their desired salaries lower than men with equivalent experience.
Me: Then why are companies not saving themselves $30k/year per senior dev by exclusively hiring women?
Your second post:
> Because they can't.
Which is it? If you can choose to hire a man over a woman who's just as good, you can choose to hire a woman over a man who's just as good and much more expensive.
But I'm not arguing either, I'm pointing out that the data does not lead to the conclusion.
I think you drew the generally correct conclusion from this:
"But I hope that it will encourage at least some women to think more about their value for an employer and next time will negotiate a better deal for themselves."
My only problem with the conclusion is that statements like this make the assumption that women are not already thinking about their value. My family owns a business that employees almost entirely women with graduate degrees. All very sharp and want to do well in their careers but having diverse interpretations of what doing well actually means to them. Your data is probably better than any I've seen to point that out since it is based on DESIRED salaries.
Some want to advance their careers primarily and while others significantly value flexibility for sake of their families. Men tend to be more singular in focus. We want to advance our careers for sake of ourselves AND our families.
The goals naturally align with a desire to advance in large part to make it easier for our wives to take a pay cut to have more time for the kids. While there are plenty of stay at home dads and role reversals today, the norm is very much the opposite...and it's going to stay that way not because of social acceptance but because of biology...unless of course men start carrying babies for 9 months, going through childbirth, recovering from childbirth, breastfeeding and everything that involves (waking up and night, pumping, freezing milk) and the bond that naturally comes from all of that. Before repeating the process for additional children.
A lot of that stuff is hardwired. I see my wife doing all of that and realize there's only so much I can do to help...but I can try to make more money to make life a little easier.
There are a WHOLE lot of women who decide they want to stop having to work for a while after they've had kids, at least for the early years but then discover that they can't afford too. Between student loans, potentially going overboard on a mortgage from two incomes, etc NOT having a job with the new expense of a child becomes almost unimaginable to handle. There's even a book about it called The Two Income Trap.
All that's to say, don't make the mistake of thinking that people are undervaluing themselves because you don't agree with what they're asking for. You never know what they really want.
It's interesting how these racist ideas get tossed about proudly here and in the US media.
But the y-axis is labeled average salary!
Totally not sexism folks. Equality at its best!