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Comment by sbov | Hacker News Reader

Did you even read the first sentence?

> The U.S. Labor Department has sued Oracle America Inc, alleging that the technology company systematically paid its white, male employees more than other workers and unlawfully favored Asian applicants in its recruiting and hiring efforts.

If you want to explain Asians being smarter as to why they are hired more I wouldn't expect them to ALSO pay white people more. Oracle is nailed either way you want to spin this.

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This could be easily explained in a lot of ways. Here's an example that makes sense intuitively to me: popular conception of Oracle among Bay Area locals I know is that they are money-grubbing assholes (similar reputation to an investment bank or something). They may attract a set of applicants that will negotiate aggressively and only accept high salaries. I'm white and I can sure as hell say I wouldn't work at Oracle for market rate. This effect may be correlated with race due to the way ideas travel through social groups, and immigration status.

I think this is at least as plausible as "bias" to explain why white applicants would be hired less and paid more.

If it's just "white males are more reluctant to work for us", then surely that would also show in them hiring more females and more non-whites than expected, as they are more willing to work for them? It's not as if you're either a white male, or you're Indian.

The evidence "group A was hired more than than group B, and the effect was statistically significant" doesn't imply we should find a significant effect when comparing any other set of groups A, B, ~A, C, C^B, etc.

It's generally hard to prove things with statistics without a randomized experiment.

My guess: they are turning an issue of H1B tech workers versus American tech workers into something else. The statistics line up for them coincidentally, and make a more compelling argument(especially in this political climate).

The pay difference can be explained by Indian nationals not demanding as high a wage to do the same work. Is it morally necessary for a company to pay groups of workers the same, even if they would accept different wages? Perhaps.

That would only account for the difference between Indians and white males. What about non-Indian women, or men that are neither Indian nor white?

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