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Comment by DelaneyM | Hacker News Reader

Data collection: A+

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.

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The gap is large enough that the efficient market argument doesn't hold very much water. A 5k difference should be enough to favor one candidate over another all else equals. If firms are efficient they wouldn't be paying 20k extra for males.

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.

Says who?

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."

As far as I can tell the data does not adjust for usual hours worked or overtime beyond restricting to only full time data points. Men working more hours than women is a consistent trend across pretty much the whole world.

If efficient markets are a thing, then why are companies not saving themselves $30k/year per senior dev by exclusively hiring women?

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.

Because they can't.

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.

Your first post:

> 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.

These aren't mutually exclusive, it's a perfectly logical situation in a game theoretic sense.

But I'm not arguing either, I'm pointing out that the data does not lead to the conclusion.

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