Nevertheless, She Coded
dev.to
dev.to
> Despite continued assaults on the credibility of her contributions to modern computer science as the world’s first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace coded.
Yet in reality she was very much respected in her day, and despite her challenges received widespread support. The first "assaults" on her scope of her contributions came over 100 after her death, and not some sexism she had to fight and overcome.
The "assaults" on her credibility did not happen to her during her lifetime. Even if they are proven to be true, her proven contributions are still impressive.
Please, take a moment and reflect on what is most important. Is it gender equality, or is it nitpicking the temporal sequencing of Ada Lovelace's contributions?
The facts are that women are poorly represented in the tech community[1], and do make less than men[2]. Any attempt to let women feel more accepted and bring about much needed change should be championed, not picked apart and belittled because you feel like you are personally being attacked when people are just asking for help.
1. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/05/28/google-release...
2. https://www.cnet.com/news/biggest-pay-gap-in-america-compute...
It is good to encourage women and other underrepresented groups to enter tech-just imagine how many awesome programmers we are missing out on- but I feel we can do this by being objectively accurate.
I'm with you on the underrepresented story, this is very common. But the glassdoor study has many major flaws and I don't think is really that useful. The biggest flaw is that it's only using self-reported data for location, gender, salary and job title; and it has a very broad comparison by job title that doesn't really fit when you are comparing "programmer" with "qa engineer"
https://research-content.glassdoor.com/app/uploads/sites/2/2...
And it, like most of the statistical papers surrounding the pay gap suffer from what I personally affectionately refer to as the "peanut butter spread" problem.
The implicit assumption of pay gap studies is that if you group all jobs into a category and then segment them by gender both groups should have equal distribution of some set of attributes X, Y, and Z. I can't help but feel as if looking at genders (or really any segment of society) and assuming they have "independent and identically distributed"[1] random variables is flawed.
For example, UC enrollment of undergraduate students for Engineering/CS has hovered around 14.5% for the last several years[2]. My fraternity, however, was more than half Engineering/CS majors at one point in time during my time as an undergrad at UC Davis.
One way to look at this is:
* My fraternity favored Engineering/CS majors
another way would be:
* My fraternity discriminated against non-Engineering/CS majors
But neither is actually true. The fact my fraternity had a higher percentage of Engineering/CS majors than the overall student body distribution does not imply any sort of causal influence insidious or otherwise; correlation is not causation.
Moreover, all things being equal, should my fraternity have the same distribution of majors as the overall student body?
I would argue no. Membership of a fraternity, or any other student organization for that matter, should be a personal choice. Whether it is a collection of like-minded individuals, similar majors, or similar interests that motivates you to join the choice should be yours to freely make. If that means that individual fraternities all have non-identical distributions of majors, then so be it!
Make no mistake, I am all about freedom of choice. I also am steadfastly libertarian and individual freedoms (and this applies equally when it comes to gender considerations). But I don't necessarily believe that in a Utopia-esque society where there is perfect freedom of choice that there would also be perfectly equal distributions of any sort.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_di...
[2] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrol...
One does not need to call for that in order to find the current representation of women in engineering/CS lower than desirable.
Continuing on the theme of using the sources presented in this thread: do you find it more likely that Google's worldwide tech workforce is 83% male because A) there is "no causal influence, insidious or otherwise" and there is perfect freedom of choice or because B) there are systemic factors at play?
That is the only question.
So yea, the more likely reason is C) Women don't want to become engineers as much as men do, for whatever (social/biological/cultural) reason
Willful blindness is what it is.
- http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/26/426...
- https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/the-lack-of-women-in-tech-...
Or is it merely that the pipeline being fugged doesn't mean that everything else is fine and dandy? I'd agree with that, hell yeah, and that claim matches the actual content of those links quite well. But I don't think it in any way suggests that the problem is a myth.
I also don't think the pipeline is unfixable, but that's both my day job and another rant for another day.
What I think the original comment I replied to was saying though (and what most people in the industry with hiring power that I've talked to about this have said) is that "the pipeline problem" is the main thing preventing them from hiring a diverse team. That's bullshit though; there have been a million and one studies showing implicit biases in the hiring process, for one. We definitely need to improve the pipeline — the "pipeline problem myth" I'm referring to is that that's the extent of the problem.
Look, if women are being unfairly excluded from the pipeline then fight THAT. Don't blame Google or Facebook or X company for hiring the best they can. They have "diversity consultants" on their payroll for christs sake. This isn't an issue that is gonna magically be solved in a few years. Making the "pipeline" more diverse takes years of investment and education and encouragement. What I take an issue is with people blaming these companies when they're actually doing a reasonable job of trying to become more diverse. As if these companies are the ones really holding people back. and if only they could overcome their biases they'd have a perfect diversity ratio overnight.
We know there's a pipeline problem, and we are fighting that. We don't think it's going to be solved overnight either, and critically, not just by addressing the pipeline because, as numerous stories from the tech industry have made clear recently, even when qualified women make it through that anemic pipeline, they still face individual and institutional sexism. Or have you forgotten that one of Uber's recent departures left Google after an internal sexual harassment scandal that was quietly handled?
this is in regards to Google.
" the more likely reason is that women are being filtered out of the pipeline by sexism, not some mysterious "maybe they just don't want to" handwaving."
So you're alleging that Google is judging women more harshly than men, "at all phases of hiring".
Provide a source for THAT, please.
[1] This description taken from the Wikipedia citaiton of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's characterization of Chirstina Hoff Sommers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Hoff_Sommers
That said, I find it much easier to believe that women are paid less than men, on average, than to believe otherwise. This has been the case historically since pretty much the founding of the nation. While I would certainly hope and do believe that women now make more than they have in the past, and that their pay is now approaching that of men, I think it's unreasonable to believe that we have reached "pay equity" between the sexes.
In my opinion, I would not consider pay between men and women equitable until I have seen reasonable looking studies that have proven the case. I think it would be wise to be skeptical of such studies but look forward to their being published.
It's interesting that you require data to change your assumption that there's not a problem.
I am comfortable with my assertion that I will need to see some data before I take the position that women are not paid less than men in a discriminatory fashion. In my opinion, that women are discriminated against is a historical truth. I am not trying to be insulting, but I do find it hard to believe that people disagree on this.
Exactly. Which is why it's important to look at broader aggregates and more data. In fact, when you do that, you find you end up averaging in a ton of other studies that show men being under paid, and...
Hah, right. There are no such studies. Everyone who bothers to look at this comes back with some variant of the same answer: women are underpaid. Sure, there's uncertainty at the margins, and any given evidence can always be attacked in some way. But everyone with any level of expertise or detachment at all can look at this and agree with the broad conclusion.
It's exactly like climate science denial, really. And like climate nonsense, I submit that the reason behind it has rather less to do with the "love for the truth" that the grandparent was talking about and more with... yeah.
I don't follow the logic. Someone who enters tech through such an intervention is someone taken away from another field; why do we need another awesome programmer more than we need another awesome salesperson?
I know of women who are paid more than me in tech, and I know why. I know of women who are paid less than me, and I can think of n reasons why.
As for sheer numbers, ask yourself: are there any industries where there are considerably fewer men than women? The answer is, of course, yes. Look at nursing. In the most gender-equitable societies on the planet, I'm talking the Norways and Swedens of the world, you'll see 80-90% female involvement in nursing. Look at construction. In those same societies, you will see almost the exact opposite, probably even greater disparities. Look at sales departments, I don't know a single woman who likes sales work, and I know at least a few who have given it a serious try. I'm sure there are some, but you won't convince me that it's the norm without hard data. On the flip side of that, I grew up with guys who love working with their hands in construction, and who like that it's honest work.
My intuition is that men and women(real, living individual men and women) are different in some way which drives them to prefer different work based on schedules, the way their job has them interact with people, the amount of solitary vs. collaborative work, work-life balance, and hosts of other complex differences.
As for harassment, I find it hard to believe that tech is a particularly bad place for it. I would believe you if you said that startups are prone to harassment (HR vacuum). Until I see a non-partisan study with an appreciable number of respondents, a consistent rubric for assessing individual situations, I will continue to believe what I see in person.
No CNET or USA Today article is going to convince me that it's a problem in itself that there is a statistical difference between the average yearly earnings of different cohorts. I'm sure married and unmarried people make different amounts of money on average. I'm sure people with and without kids make different amounts of money on average. Nothing about those statistics says that there is a discriminatory or unfair advantage. If you could prove that a major company is systematically underpaying women for work of equivalent holistic value, then it would be the case of the decade; this case has clearly never happened, because if it ever did, it would be an outrage, and at very least the people making this argument would be pointing at it every time they got a chance.
And I know you'll downvote this before reading it through, but maybe the first few open-minded people will get a chance to reflect. I can spare a few HN hivemind cohesion points.
Do the men employed as nurses make less money on average than their women colleagues?
This is not necessarily a good thing as unions basically underpay star performers and overpay bad performers. whether or not that is a good thing is your own opinion.
No. Male nurses make way more than female nurses, on average. A big contributor to this is that male nurses are far more likely to be CRNAs than female nurses and CRNAs are the highest-paid nurse specialty (and requires a graduate degree).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_nursing
So male registered nurses in the US appear to be a solid single digit in terms of percentage. Wikipedia says 6.6%. The internet says CRNAs are 41-43% male.
So a very small number of male nurses, and a majority of them becoming CRNAs, and so the average pay for male nurses is higher than the female average. But really, I bet the 59% female CRNAs are being paid the same.
This is the problem with looking at averages only. If men are being prefered over women in the CRNA program, there is a problem. If female CRNAs are paid less on average than male CRNAs there is a problem. But the average alone tells you nothing. It definitely doesn't give you enough information to show you which part needs fixing.
The definition of the role is at least somewhat different today. It could also have something to do with the wide availability of women who were trained typists in the '50s and '60s, as keyboards were used to punch cards/tape.
I won't purport to be an expert on exactly how that phenomenon came about, I've not seen a satisfactory explanation of it.
You're looking at the finish line and making an answer while ignoring the fact that they are placed on different courses from birth.
My argument is that you cannot expect uniform distribution of career choices either by race or gender.
You can't expect exactly 13% of cops to be african american or exactly 50% of physicists to be female.
Let's look at hispanics and asians.
Asians outnumber hispanics in STEM 9:1
Hispanics outnumber asians in History 3:1
Don't have links to hard sources at hand since I'm on mobile, but even anecdotally I think almost anyone would agree that hispanics are outnumbered by asians in STEM.
Ethnic chinese are strong in STEM not just in US, but almost anywhere. You can take any country with a significant chinese diaspora and you'll see the results are about the same.
Can you make a compelling counterargument that hispanics are brought up in a way that specifically encourages them to learn History?
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here? That culture pushes people to certain expectations? I agree.
The biological explanation is, by far, the Occam's razor null hypothesis here. To be convincing, you would need to supply compelling evidence that children who have unusually low contact with traditional societal influence early in life make less predictable employment choices. Otherwise, this is a just-so story like all the rest of them.
Or find 'male' roles in some cultures that aren't in others like programming.
I don't work in sales so perhaps someone better qualified can comment, but isn't the stereotype that the culture in sales is like that of fraternities? I can imagine how that's probably not welcoming to women, especially when the sales revolves around social relationships.
From the glassdoor wage gap study you mentioned in [2]:
> After taking into account differences in education and experience, men working at tech companies overall make 5.9 percent more than women do
From a brief scan of the study they didn't control for hours worked and they are already down to 5.9%
Since full-time men work 5% longer than full-time women[3] just adjusting for hours worked almost entirely eliminates the gap.
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/karinagness/2016/06/30/new-repo...
Edit: Sorry I put the overall adjusted US pay gap of 5.4% when I meant to put the adjusted tech pay gap of 5.9% from the glassdoor study.
Yeah, I've gone through and scanned that BLS report you linked to (actually you didn't, you linked to Forbes, but this is what they were talking about): https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf
It doesn't say what you think it does at all. This isn't a study of men vs. women working identical jobs and doing less work, this is a finding that across the entire workforce, a men's "work day" is somewhat longer than a woman's. Which is to say: Women are more likely to work part time jobs.
Please stop trying to mislead people.
From your link on the very first page:
> However, even among full-time workers (those usually working 35 hours or more per week), men worked longer than women—8.2 hours compared with 7.8 hours. (See table 4.)
Like I said this is an ~5% difference. If you don't like this particular study the results have been replicated dozens of times across a wide range of industries.
If you have some evidence that full time male tech workers work fewer hours than full time female tech workers I'd love to see it.
You can't see how working extra hours can increase productivity enough to warrant a small increase in pay?
Could you distill the overall argument?
Comparing two individuals based on hours worked is different to looking at populations.
And we aren't talking about 60-80 hour weeks (burnout zone).
Unless you are arguing women as a group are significantly more efficient compared to men?
What you did is go out through the whole world of statistics to find one value that kinda/sorta "fixes" this inconvenient finding in the direction you want. That's just baldly ridiculous cherry picking, and you should be ashamed.
You on the other hand are trying to draw conclusions that aren't backed by the data.
What you are doing is saying "No, I don't think the conclusion should be what the data says", and then you're going out and finding ("cherry picking") different data about related but not identical subjects that appears to contradict it.
Sorry, but the burden of proof is on you if you want to make a numeric argument here. And you're doing it with extraordinarily bad analysis.
Believe what you want. Just like climate change denial, there's enough uncertainty in these numbers to make any level of ostrich-headery justifiable. I just want to know why no one ever manages to show data that is "wrong" in the other direction...
The data shows there is a difference in pay.
Underpaid means less pay for the same work.
That's not the same thing. Not even close.
In fact it is intentionally misleading.
Summary with a link to the research paper, which is really good science as demonstrated with experimentation and doesn't try to sell a narrative, BTW. Worth the read. http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2016/03/ilr-school-resea...
"New research by ILR School professors Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn finds an eight percent gender wage gap that cannot be accounted for, even after controlling for observable variables that influence workers’ pay.
Gender discrimination in the workplace COULD be a cause, they suggest."
Are the programmers in question being paid by the hour? Does programmer pay within each gender correlate closely to hours worked?
All the academic studies I have seen either adjust for it explicitly or put forward a strong case on why it isn't being included.
I'd argue it's a more logical and likely explanation than sexism though.
In my opinion, the problem is twofold. First of all, this gap - whatever you think it is, 6% or 9% or 21% - it is a problem. Most Americans live pretty close to financial ruin, like it or not. 76% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck [1] and 63% of Americans are one missed paycheck away from the streets [2]. A 6% pay gap is about two paychecks. Even though it may not seem like much to a HN reader with significant savings or a safety net, this small gap spread across the whole population actually causes problems.
The second part of the problem is societal: women are discouraged from pursuing higher-paying jobs by society. This isn't the fault of the women themselves, or the people doing the hiring, but sexism and biases hidden everywhere. In my opinion, this is the best support for affirmative action: more women doing a certain job translates to more women interested in that career.
These two things combined are a double whammy that currently mean that less women work and women who do work are not always financially secure - and that's the big problem here. If you're a woman from an upper class background and have been encouraged by those around you, you may never experience any of these problems, and that's great. But if you're an average American woman, these things have a very real impact on your life.
This also explains the giant gulfs of opinion I see here on HN. Most people here are relatively wealthy - remember, if you earn more than 36k a year, you earn more than most working Americans. $70k/yr means you earn more than 75% of American workers. I'd bet the vast majority of US programmers on here earn above 70k/yr. It's easy to get caught in a bubble and say 'well the women around me seem to have no problems!' and forget about the majority of the country. At the same time, if you live in a low-income area, those two "missed" paychecks might be absolutely killer.
[0] I have a personal, unfounded feeling that it's closer to 10% - maybe 8-9% if I had to guess.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/24/pf/emergency-savings/
[2] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-are-one-payc...
I really think that point of view is both wrong and harmful.
It's true that society influences people in various ways. But you're assuming that what men do is the "default", and so if women do it less, they are discouraged.
Instead, looking at it from the women's side, perhaps it is men that are overly encouraged to do certain things. For example, men are highly overrepresented in prisons compared to women, and that's not good.
That might be an extreme example, but the fact is that many studies show that men care more about careers that make money, while women care more about making a positive difference in the world (obviously, both only on average). Given that, perhaps society pushes men too much towards tech and finance and so forth. It would be better if we nudged men instead towards nurturing professions, where you help people every day, like nursing or teaching.
In other words, society influences both genders in various ways. Any difference could be either women pushed one way or men pulled the other.
> I really think that point of view is both wrong and harmful.
> It's true that society influences people in various ways. But you're assuming that what men do is the "default", and so if women do it less, they are discouraged.
Additionally, it seems implicit in the GP's POV that money (or higher pay) is necessarily the better end goal, rather than caring for others or improving society. What if money isn't the most appropriate proxy of value and worth?
(And to be clear, I wouldn't agree with using that to "whitewash" paying someone less because "their pay should be their enjoyment")
To say women are discouraged from taking higher paying positions takes away a woman's agency. Perhaps they made an educated decision?
Also, starving people of hours is just as effective at reducing costs as lowering the hourly. I don't think it's in your favor to argue that's something that should be controlled.
I honestly don't see anything wrong with different life choices leading to different outcomes, since the same is true within genders! That is, there's nothing sexist about that fact.
The truth is the people advocating for equalizing pay when the sexes make different choices are arguing for sexism, not against sexism.
If it's not baseless, presumably you have something to offer.
However, without evidence, you are most likely wrong. Does that wrongness amount to sexism? Hard to say; my inclination says yes since you're referring to shuffling hundreds of dimensions defining employment into "life choices". Yes, that is probably a factor; culture is a powerful force. But it's also probably not the only factor; there are likely myriad explanations. Are you blind to that, or just dismissive?
A difference on that magnitude can easily be something about aggregate behavior correlated to sex, an uncontrolled for variable, or just random chance.
So let me ask you: do you have any evidence that 3-6% gap is the result of sexism instead of merely being a fact correlated to sex? (Particularly if we were to confine the data to people under 40, to control for historical biases that take time to age out.)
However, there is abundant evidence that there's a systemic divide in opportunities. This is easy to see in the aggregate and particular. That is the interesting thing in itself: if we could be assured that the gap could sexist solely for life choices, this wouldn't be an interesting topic. That's a devilishly hard thing to argue for, however, so id prefer to move forward as a society assuming that we can do more to expose opportunities to everyone, assure that people are protected in their right to follow opportunities, and that we can demonstrate the effect of the policies at moving toward an ideal of equal pay.
If we can't move towards that, perhaps our ideal, well, isn't what society wants. I doubt that we've even approached that level of confidence in our support of communities subject to subtle bias difficult to divorce from "life choices".
That being said, I think we should generally imrpove sexist behavior and systems, which hurt both sexes (albeit, in different ways).
I just think the "wage gap" is one of the least sexist fascets of modern society (if at 3-6%), and mostly represents people perpetuating a misunderstanding of statistics. So in that way, I feel like people are over-solving a mostly solved problem, which seems likely to lead to more sexism, not less.
I think that effort spent on fixing the larger issues are also likely to stabilize remaining issues with wages, and we would all be better served focusing on the large gaps in other statistics instead of the small one here.
That said, Im always happy to see new statistics that tell me Im full of shit, so if you find what you're looking for, please post it.
Otherwise, have a good night! :)
Are they?
From what I have seen the consensus is:
An overall small 3-6% wage gap after accounting for basic life choices.
Women under 30 + childless women significantly out-earning women with children + older women.
Women under 30 + childless women have almost no wage gap and in many industries are out-earning their male peers.
Life is rough for the bottom 50% of earners - male and female.
What exactly do you think the stats show?
> and the jobs that are heavily weighted towards women do not pay nearly as much.
Why are you talking about women like they are objects without agency?
My friends in game design work harder than I do and earn half what I earn.
They made a trade-off and work in a more interesting and rewarding job that pays less.
They certainly aren't oppressed and discriminated against.
Now this isn't really true at the bottom end of the scale. But it is for the middle class and up.
I do consider 3-6% damning.
If you only compare women to other women, of course you won't see a wage gap; you can blame it all on the individual.
It's this willingness to value personal views of the world to minimize the facts that allows the gap to continue. Do you really think you can reason about systemic discrimination by looking at the individual? That's as ineffable as wondering why some people win the lotto; individuals are dominated by noise, and you only see the disparity in aggregate.
Why bother commenting if you don't care about the wage gap?
You do realise the gap is just the "unexplained by standard corrections" and not "% due to sexism" right?
> Why bother commenting if you don't care about the wage gap?
I care that you are using misleading statistics to push an agenda.
At no point did I state I thought the wage gap is entirely due to sexism. although, I do argue it is evident sexism; I believe that still requires argument on your part that it's clearly not.
Why is it a foregone conclusion that the majority of women in this population worked fewer hours? A forbes study which averages across a large canvas of american workers is not a very good thing to compare to glassdoor's targetted subsection.
But by not controlling for it you reduce the studies explanative powers.
You don't get to just ignore it because it is convenient.
It doesn't even pass the "more likely than not" standard of evidence.
It also seems to me that that signal would show up weakly in the data because it wouldn't vary the immediate effect on apples-to-apples salary, only on promotions and possibly referrals.
So I think your complaint is specious and the inclusion of a totally unrelated data point from a radically different dataset is either very misguided or profoundly disingenuous.
Yes. And this makes any kind of data analysis a lot harder.
On paper I work the same number of hours as my Japanese coworkers. In reality they work more than double.
It's the same way on-call for many companies is just rolled into salary.
I've managed projects as a senior dev while the senior dev sitting next to me was purely technical. Etc etc.
The truth is two senior devs sitting right next to each other can have wildly different actual job duties.
I suspect glassdoor has taken at least some of those differences in work duties vs stated title into account.
> because it wouldn't vary the immediate effect on apples-to-apples salary,
Why wouldn't it?
Its not uncommon to stay at a certain level/title for 3-5 years.
You can't just ignore hours worked because "salary".
I come from a strong union background where you would get overtime or be able to take the time off later and where there were fairly rigid job duties. Where interviews and scoring candidates is all done in a very standardised fashion.
And oddly enough after adjusting for these explicit factors we had a very small unexplained gender pay gap. Much smaller than average for the tech industry.
Perhaps it's in our interest to make these factors explicit rather than implicit?
Because hours worked doesn't affect salary. What's more, you keep assuming that there aren't counter-examples in this dataset at all. It's just a given to you: "I read on Forbes that across all Americans women work slightly less per week" and brought that to this conversation.
But in this industry long hours are the norm, single people without family duties are the majority, and many compensation models very much incentivize long hours.
> You can't just ignore hours worked because "salary".
Unless we're talking consulting, that's exactly what Salary lets you do.
> Much smaller than average for the tech industry.
The average pay bracket difference is indeed smaller. However, it's still large enough for concern, and the other issues I listed around work culture are problems that disadvantage women more than men in modern society.
> Perhaps it's in our interest to make these factors explicit rather than implicit?
I am always in favor of transparency and more analysis but I will not let ANY interpretation of the specific data we have on hand be constantly forced off on the grounds that we could collect better data.
Saying, "Women get paid less, let's make sure that's not happening" is a call to action, not an accusation leveled at anyone specifically. If women in your organization aren't being paid less, congrats. Job done.
Let's be clear: You're effectively trying to stifle and derail the entire conversation on the grounds that it might not be happening everywhere, or that statistics might not be what popular media claims they are. That's counterproductive and frankly unwelcome. If that's your take, your take stifles the discussion here.
We can simultaneous recognize that tech is a more complicated compensation environment and also that women are reporting under-compensation. We're all adults capable of multi-tasking.
> Unless we're talking consulting, that's exactly what Salary lets you do.
We are clearly having communication issues and I'm not sure how you are addressing what I'm talking about.
My point is: Work longer -> slightly more productive -> slightly higher pay.
> You're effectively trying to stifle and derail the entire conversation
If the conversation starts from an inconclusive or flimsy premise then it should be derailed.
It is far too easy to make bad decisions based on flawed studies.
> and also that women are reporting under-compensation.
The first step is to work out if it's a real issue we could be, or should be, solving.
It could be a problem worth addressing if the gap was driven by sexism.
It could be a problem worth addressing if the small pay gap was a major contributor to women leaving the industry.
It could be a problem if the small pay gap was a strong contributor to women not entering the field.
It could be a problem if we we were seeing a rapidly widening gap.
Etc etc.
But you have to actually make a case.
And I'm telling you this is not a foregone conclusion.
> If the conversation starts from an inconclusive or flimsy premise then it should be derailed.
No. It should include both the initial position and the specific cases that inspired it and then move to a broader case. This is not customer service, these are people's lives.
> It is far too easy to make bad decisions based on flawed studies.
Are you suggesting that the decision to pay women equally, carefully audit corporate promotions, and firmly and directly punish racist and sexist harassment are actually open for debate? Is there an outcome where we might say, "Oh no, actually it's correct to pay women less for equal work?"
> The first step is to work out if it's a real issue we could be, or should be, solving.
How many individual women need to risk their careers explaining unconscionable behavior by their managers and employers HR departments before you're satisfied anyone anywhere is allowed to have this conversation? You should put that number out there.
> But you have to actually make a case.
You may not realize you're doing this, but you're actually interfering with everyone's ability to make a case by derailing every conversation and making it all about you and your (higher than any other sociological or scientific field) standards for allowing discussion.
Look at you. You're here because marketing copy for an event triggered you. You're so angry you're willing to argue that maybe pay shouldn't be equal after all.
You are broadening the conversation to look at sexism in broader society.
Let's stick to the specifics here.
> making it all about you and your (higher than any other sociological or scientific field) standards for allowing discussion.
Nonsense. Most rigorous wage gap studies control for a lot more than the GlassDoor study.
The particular data (working hours) that I'm saying should have been included is straightforward to measure and collect.
> You're so angry you're willing to argue that maybe pay shouldn't be equal after all.
A swing and a miss. It's like you aren't even trying to read what I'm writing.
No. No. No sheepmullet. You've been broadening the scope from unrelated articles to Japanese work culture whenever it suits you. It's too late for you to go, "HEY I WAS RIGHT IN THIS LIMITED CONTEXT."
Unbelievable.
> Nonsense. Most rigorous wage gap studies control for a lot more than the GlassDoor study.
Yes, because the include many more hourly, tipped and commission-based jobs. The Glassdoor dataset has almost none of those.
> The particular data (working hours) that I'm saying should have been included is straightforward to measure and collect.
Salaried jobs don't collect the data, and that's the majority of Glassdoor's data.
> A swing and a miss. It's like you aren't even trying to read what I'm writing.
Given your prior attestation you are not broadening scope despite mentioning Japan's dangerously broken work culture as a pole star, I'm wondering if YOU are reading what you're writing.
And given the moderation, you're not doing such a swell job convincing people here.
This discussion is complex and it's not entirely obvious how much of the pay gap is caused by discrimination, but this is one stupid argument.
And how to value, let's say, a developer? How do you, personally, differentiate good and bad programmers?
Where are all-women (or 95% women) companies? If you can get away with paying them less, where are all the capitalists exploiting the market inefficiency and getting rich in the process?
Hell, nowadays companies like Starbucks[0] routinely put social causes first, profits second. So where are these companies?
[0] https://www.starbucks.com/blog/an-open-letter-from-howard-sc...
And the point is that we don't seem to see such companies. All the major tech companies have similar percentages of women, despite all of them trying very hard to increase those numbers.
Evidence? First, "pricing is information". Second, Uber et al, and the continuing follies of the tech industry demonstrating systemic sexism. Third, continued use of the word "meritocracy" despite repeated demonstrations that tech firms practice a particularly narrow form of geek clubhousing. Bottom line: no one's actually rational enough to exploit what's really a fairly transparent, backhanded attempt to say that women are paid less because they're worth less. We just tell ourselves that we are.
Perhaps this is an opportunity for VCs because people certainly love money more than sexism.
One way to understand the effects of systemic "isms" is that the targets have to continually deal with a headwind that others don't, and the cumulative effect of this is like compound interest. The supposed meritocracy of technology that's blindly present in the download screen hides all the non-meritocratic context leading up to it.
Nevertheless there do exist profitable apps written by low caste Indians living on a few dollars a day and having virtually no social welfare safety net.
Do you honestly believe that women in the US have it worse than those men?
I do not see enough evidence that your systemic "isms" can explain the lack of bootstrapped female founders and entrepreneurs in the US.
We have no problem understanding how subtly performance enhancing drugs in sports can make huge differences over the long term. Why are we sceptical that performance degrading circumstances are as consequential?
Do all the daughters of upper middle class software engineers do not exist? That's among tech leaders' families in the US.
So where are they? Or is it that they have seen their fathers' jobs and decided they want no part of it?
Efforts to reduce imbalance (regardless of demographic) is necessary to overcome location bias, and the bigger the pool, the higher the tide for all boats.
If you're "labor", stop thinking that you're at war with other demographics.
Thing is, you can do it right and do it wrong. Effort for the sake of effort means little, it's not the thought that counts but results.
https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/download/fedora_content...
When President Bush piloted his No Child Left Behind act, one of the underlying goals was to close racial and class gaps in educational standards, therefore, improving opportunity for disadvantaged groups but not guaranteeing ideal results.
Justice Clarence Thomas, the only current black Supreme Court judge, took a strong stance against race‐based affirmative action as it establishes “a cult of victimization” that permeates leniency on and faulty judgment of black students and workers in admissions and employment processes.
He believes this strengthens stereotypes and requires special, preferential treatment of the black community in order to make up for past oppression.
...
This sentiment is spreading, and a continual decline in academic achievement of black students will most certainly propel these sentiments throughout the country. The American Civil Rights Institute founder, Ward Connerly [who's african american], said he is “not against policies that address ongoing disparities in income, educational opportunities or other factors, but they should not be race based.” Policy reform is now addressing the achievement gap between black and white students in hopes that solving the underlying issue between black underachievement will lead to natural, unregulated increase in black enrollment in universities and, ultimately, employment.
If recent raises / salaries in the tech industry outside of Silicon Valley are any guide, companies love to save money on salaries. So I honestly have no idea why all the men I work with haven't been replaced by women being paid 95% or whatever the claimed pay gap is. And remember, this is in the US, where you can legally be let go because your boss doesn't like the color of your shoes.
According to wikipedia, "the average female's unadjusted annual salary has been cited as being 78% of the average male salary", so you can save a lot.
Would you be more likely to hire a man than a women for an engineering role? Take the harvard implicit gender bias test for one answer: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html
If they are equally good, there's a good chance I'll choose the cheaper one.
Source: I did a bunch of them for my PhD, but my reading of the literature stopped in 2014.
Seeing sexism everywhere is not helping the fight against remaining actual sexism.
(In case you are unaware, I appear to be the highest ranked openly female member here. I strongly suspect I really am because I have been saying that for a couple of years or so and no one has shot me down yet with "Nope!!! THIS member is openly female AND on the leaderboard, you dumbass!!!!!")
Also, the origin of the quote 'Nevertheless, she persisted' is from a completely non-gendered context, where a woman persisted in breaking the non-gendered rules of the US Congress.
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-cant-silicon-...
http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/20/9179853/tech-diversity-sco...
https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/thought-on-diversity...
Why don't I ever see it being discussed on HN?
But just because you don't ever see it discussed on HN doesn't mean that it isn't. Try out the HN search engine:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=racism&sort=byPopularity&prefi...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=african%20american&sort=byPopu...
Here's a discussion last year on the YC blog post that was titled, "YC Open Office Hours for Black and Hispanic Founders"
Many of us, myself included, fight on behalf of a lot of underrepresented groups on HN as best we can.
I'm sorry if you haven't seen it, but I assure you some people here are trying.
Weasel words. The discussion happens, it is out there, you can find it. Who is to blame if you ignore it?
http://www.blackgirlscode.com/ https://www.devcolor.org/
I remember reading this particular blog entry via HN: https://blog.devcolor.org/on-being-a-black-man-42ecb7946fe0
The disparity you're talking about could be because there are more women in tech (just underrepresented in C-level roles or whatever it might be) likely to speak up, whereas black people are underrepresented in tech full stop?
In the meantime, I note that you could have chosen, in response to a post on International Women's Day, to show appreciation to black _women_ and latina _women_ in tech, and recognize the issues that they face on all of these fronts. You chose not to do so. Hence it seems to me like your purpose here might be to draw attention away from those women, because you don't think they need your support or solidarity. Was that your intent?
Thanks, I was looking for a way to call people disingenuous without actually using the term, since it's apparently become a no-no word on HN.
What a shame that most of the top comments here are boring, stand-up-for-the-vulnerable types agreed with by the majority— "women face difficulties in tech, and we should help them whenever we can"—while the downvoted posts are the ones trying (not necessarily successfully) to arrive at politically incorrect truths.
I sometimes write about such topics, but can't get much traction. A few of my pieces have gotten a few thousand page views, mostly on HN, but most of what I write is largely ignored. If you want something meatier, you might enjoy my personal blog.
Best.
Additionally, why don't we speak about rights of minorities on this forum. I don't think xor meant anything negative by this. A good question to ask but I guess not today?
Rising tides raise all boats or something like that.
Btw I was just summarizing the various points brought up in other comments for the person who asked.
Yo, you post here. You're factually, actively posting and could post about rights of minorities, too. So I'm asking you: why don't you post about these things? Why is it something only brought up as an ideal in a discussion that's about something else, but not something done by you on its own without outside consensus or approval? What has stopped you so far?
Think a lot about this for the rest of your life. Seriously. I have, and it's revealed a lot of truths I was too stubborn to see about myself. I feel dumb for not being introspective, thoughtful, and self-critical about my own set ways and behavior at a younger age. I thought I was, but I was in my own world, rarely challenging myself on new information.
Do soldiers reason when given orders?
Do sheep flock alone?
This forum, like most places is no different. Regardless of what you are trying to say, best to just stfu because there will be another person awaiting to single their virtues.
Also, 99% of stats on the internet are bullshit, including this one.
Take everything with a grain of salt and just be a nice person. That's my motto. In addition to don't raise pitch forks when I hear a stat
Happy woman's day.
Treatment of women as full-fledged peers is definitely something that needs better attention in our industry.
I recently saw this surface on HN in the basement of this thread, discussing the appointment of Jennifer Widom as the dean of Stanford Engineering. Many posters speculated, without knowledge of her credentials, that she was unqualified compared to her male peers and only selected because she's a woman.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13779165
I don't know how it escapes them that this attitude is the literal definition of sexism, and that women in tech have to fight this constantly.
I saw it happen all the time in engineering school. I even occasionally see it in workplace. So many of my female classmates and coworkers are talked down to, discouraged and have their skills written off by their male counterparts (nevertheless, they persist). No wonder the share of women in STEM fields dwindles, the culture can be absolutely toxic.
I don't doubt that many people are honestly being unintentionally sexist. But it's on everyone to constructively call out this behavior and support a healthier culture in the school and workplace. At the very least, why would one want to write off the ideas and talent of half the population?
> It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.
It's really very true.
https://dev.to/thepracticaldev/nevertheless-she-coded/commen...
> The first thing I coded was an Everquest 7-page website in plain-old HTML. I was 15 and I had figured out HTML from right-clicking and wondering if 'View Source' was how it was made.
I went into computer engineering because I loved video games and wanted to write games. I believe my one of my first webpages was a Final Fantasy fanpage with Microsoft FrontPage, uploaded to my dad's Prodigy web space. I don't know what the actual stats are in terms of girls playing video games, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a correlation between that childhood activity and a later interest in programming.
"women face continued pay disparity"
Seeing this statement tells me immediately that the author is grinding an ax.
In some fields of engineering (EE, for example), women actually get paid more (104% last I checked). And, when you control for experience, time off for family, etc., pay disparities in most tech fields almost disappear.
Complaining about discrimination or harassment? Sure, go for it. Lack of child care and having undue burden with family health issues? The stats back you up.
However, attempting to promulgate something which is not true hurts the overall movement when there is so much that is true and needs to be fixed.
So what you're saying is there are pay disparities in most tech fields.
Aka, women face continued pay disparity.
As you can see, you disagree with the commenter I was responding to. They think women only get paid more in "some" fields, not most.
The original comment is both inconsistent with itself, and your comment.
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/goldin_aeapres...
I think she's said that once all factors are accounted for there is still a 6-7% pay gap that they can't yet account for.
That's a big "etc" to throw around - do you mind elaborating?
What else beyond time off for family could possibly be in this list to the degree that pay disparities disappear?
Based on my casual research, the correct answer to "what's the gender pay gap" is to sidetrack into a half-hour discussion on what you're controlling for and whether it's appropriate to control for that.
For example, professions where flexible schedules are rare see the wage gap grow for women between their 20s and 30s (compared to professions where flexible schedules are more common). This is likely because that's around the age where people have children and women are expected to handle a disproportionate measure of childrearing duties.
Is that something you try to control for? If you're looking for direct, hiring-manager-discriminating-against-you sexism, then yes, you control for it. If you're looking for the wide variety of subtle ways women are discriminated against, you don't.
From what I've found, if you're looking for the sort of direct sexism of hiring managers paying less to _exactly_ the same person for _exactly_ the same work, you come out with a 3-10% wage gap.
If, on the other hand, you're looking for the wide variety of systematic ways women are prevented from getting equal pay, you get 10-30%. Some of those ways can be addressed at the individual level, some at the company level, and some at the societal level.
[0] http://www.payscale.com/data-packages/gender-pay-gap/women-i... [1] http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-0323-pay...
EDIT: Use similar term for both genders.
Okay, so spoiler alert, I'm grinding an axe right now.
It's completely ridiculous to imply that analysts are not normalizing for hours worked. That's one of the most basic things they do, and you really should provide proof in the form of a study that both published its methodology and has been done in the last 5 years that didn't account for this, setting aside that one clickbait publicity stunt from Glassdoor. People keep citing other studies that "don't do this" and it's not true, or point to the national average and say that extends to knowledge work and that's absurd.
"The pay gap" is not simply lockstep salary progression. It was just the most obviously unfair and lowest-hanging fruit. That's only the start of it. The fact that women are often passed over for promotion because industries frown on maternity leave, the fact that harassment leaves women with fewer mentorship opportunities, the fact that many environments treat interviews like hazing, all these things add up to create aforementioned gap.
Your quote up at the top is the root of the pay gap. It's your belief that someone who works a reasonable sum of hours but then goes to have a child should be paid less. You believe that someone who takes time off for a reasonable work-life balance or a family emergency should be paid less. That attitude is bad for everyone, but it's especially bad for women in much of western society's current form.
And yes, there are still places where women DO get paid less for the same work. That is not done yet. And until it's so rare that it's unheard of, we're going to keep pointing it out.
It's your belief that someone who works a reasonable sum of hours but then goes to have a child should be paid less.
The question isn't whether someone who takes time off to raise a child should be paid less, it is whether someone with more overall work experience should be paid more. My wife took 10 years off to raise kids. Is she entitled to the exact same salary as a co-worker who continuously worked for that time, increasing their skills? What about a 5 year gap? 1 year?
> when controllable variables are accounted for, such as job position, total hours worked, number of children, and the frequency at which unpaid leave is taken, in addition to other factors, a United States Department of Labor study, conducted by the CONSAD Research Group, found in 2008 that the gap can be brought down from 23% to between 4.8% and 7.1%.
It's not 77 cents on the dollar, but it's still significant.
Also, if you want to control for time off and experience, you should also control for the second-order factors of involuntarily taking time off or involuntarily having lower-quality experience. If you leave a company because of harassment and don't immediately find a new job, you'll have a gap on your resume that probably translates to lower long-term salary. If you don't get the job out of college you're qualified for because of bias in the hiring process, you'll be a little bit behind in your whole career.
If women are making 77 cents on the dollar because they're more likely to be rejected from higher-paying jobs but making the same as men in lower-paying jobs, or because the glass ceiling is keeping them out of the C-suite but wages are the same if you exclude the C-suite, or whatever, that's still a problem worth fixing! The ways in which you'd fix it are different, so it's important to get this data, but there's still something to fix.
This blog post from the Department of Labor has a bunch of links to other research: https://blog.dol.gov/2012/06/07/myth-busting-the-pay-gap
From that perspective, the answer should be, "Yes they do deserve equal pay for equal work, why is that so challenging?"
So yes, if someone takes 10 years off to raise children or to go yachting around the world or to help sick children, they will probably not command the same salary that their (otherwise identical) co-worker who stayed in the field for those 10 years would command, because they likely won't be capable of "equal work". Anyone doing anything else would be systematically overpaying their workers, and are likely to be out-competed by companies paying market wages.
I'm confused by your patronizing tone. You seem to think I don't know that this is common practice.
See, the point of the prior post was: I disagree with this premise. The question should be, "How well does this person do the job" not "how well does this person match my preconceptions about how an expert in this job should look." This is especially the case in the world of software and software products, where we're notoriously bad at identifying talent and educating people.
Anyone who's designed tech interviews with a high technical standard can tell you that years worked is at best a weak signal.
And people use experience and continued employment as proxy. Sorry, companies have not figured out a better method in general.
If you only look at women who never married and never had children the pay gap is tiny.
In fact, according to a different video also by Christina Hoff Sommers the 77 cents on the dollar pay gap oft cited is no more than a blanket calculation using Census data.[1] This is seemingly confirmed by the Washington Post.[2] In fact, the Washington Post seems to indicate that the 77 cent figure doesn't correct even for weekly/hourly wage metrics much less hours worked.
As a whole I think you might find the Christina Hoff Sommers videos interesting to watch. Although they are "classical liberal"/libertarian leaning right (considering the American Enterprise Institute is a conservative think-tank I am not too surprised by this).
But I also wanted to ask some things about your points:
> the fact that many environments treat interviews like hazing
> someone who works a reasonable sum of hours but then goes to have a child should be paid less
> someone who takes time off for a reasonable work-life balance or a family emergency should be paid less
These aren't really gender specific so I am struggling to see how they would contribute to a gender pay gap. Perhaps you could elaborate?
> The fact that women are often passed over for promotion because industries frown on maternity leave
> the fact that harassment leaves women with fewer mentorship opportunities
I would be interested to read any sources you have that could give me some insight into these dynamics. These are points I haven't read about before and I wasn't even aware they have been examined to any degree.
Personally I tend to be more Libertarian and am very pro-"choice".
I don't think being skeptical of the dubious statistics surrounding the gender pay gap makes someone misogynistic or anti-feminist...so I would encourage you to try and keep an open mind before labeling someone so just because they express reservations about the wage gap and the statistics behind it.
[1] https://youtu.be/1oqyrflOQFc
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/04/...
Whether her points are validate or not, the rules were followed as they would have been with any man.
If she wants to get her opinion out, she can hold a press conference outside the Senate or simply call Maddow, like she did- a friendly audience that would allow her to speak as long as they had time for.
The Senate has rules, and those rules are fairly enforced regardless of gender. Tying a movement to the perceived unfairness of a fair enforcement seems to me to be unwise.
Later that same night, a male senator from Oregon read the complete letter that Warren was trying to read from the floor of the senate.
For example, the inclusion of Elizabeth Warren and McConnell's line. What McConnell did (attempt to shut down resistance of the opposite party) was wrong-headed and undemocratic, but the only thing it had to do with gender was the use of a pronoun (edit: yodon is right).
Nobody would have paid much attention to it if he'd said "nevertheless he persisted", but a partisan attack was made into something about gender when there's no reason to believe it was so.
What does it really have to do with coding, anyway? It's inclusion says more about the author's goals than it does about the topic.
If that were true, then why were the several men who spoke after her, and read the exact same letter, not disciplined?
I also don't like how the article equates programming and its value system of efficiency and beauty as factors of value and correctness with the political aspect of Senator's Warren actions that uses a different value system. If you agree with Warren, then this article makes more sense because you think Warren was right, but was stopped. If you disagree with Warren, then you may think that she broke whatever rules of the Senate and was properly stopped.
Finally, I don't like how it equates all of these awesome female and non-binary programmer examples of success with Senator Warren's failure. She was stopped and Sessions was confirmed as attorney general. It would be cool if there was a better example that resulted in success, like Senator Warren's own story of how she became a senator.
And I read the "Nevertheless, she coded" as more of a global She, as in there are still women in computer science pushing for equality even in the face of the obstacles that women in tech have encountered in the past.
During this time, I've seen Web design positions attract females applicants by about a two-thirds majority, whereas Web development positions attract only one in twenty (if that). And yet, those who have applied seem to fit into two distinct categories of undesirables:
First, the designer, with a design degree, who learned to code from some two-week academy that now feels the need to apply for a position well beyond their skill level. Or second, the mathematics major (or similar) who feels their knowledge of topics only related to programming in general is satisfactory enough to hit the ground running as a Web developer of all things...
So I'll be happy to discuss the potential of a wage gap if I ever seem to hire a true female Web developer.
All companies I worked for routinely hired guys like that assuming they will learn on the job. Most did, some did not. In any case, many professional programmers I see studied mathematics, physics or something similar and then changed career.
Edited to add: it is possible that your company can not afford a bit longer learning curve in the beginning. Did not wanted to make it sound like I am accusing you.
I actually thought that big difference between men and women is that men assume they can do tech by default, apply for jobs even as they have minimum qualification or experience and it oftentimes works out.
That is exactly my point and what I would have replied, otherwise. I just cannot spend that level of non-billable time teaching.
You clearly have not decided this is important to you, which is your choice. However, because you choose not to pursue it, you are now concluding that you are entirely blameless for your objectively abysmal performance in hiring women. That is not a valid conclusion.
My experience is that once I chose to prioritize hiring women, a bunch of my own hidden biases, assumptions and yes, values, became clear. I realized that I had missed opportunities to hire women in the past. I realized that I had connected values I shared with people I hired as objectively "good" when in fact they just matched mine. I have a high opinion of my skills, so it's perhaps natural that I would do so, but in the end it actively hurt my abilities to recruit a diverse workforce. It was actually quite painful to realize I was the reason for not hiring women in many cases.
The other thing to realize is women, like all humans, have their own biases, and instinctively suss out those organizations that are seriously hiring women, and avoid those that don't. So until you decide that you want to recruit women, and succeed in doing so, you will continue to have a terrible record for hiring women.
> You decide that it is a top priority to have a diverse workforce ...
> You will find ways to attract, grow, and retain diverse talent ...
> You clearly have not decided this is important to you ...
> You choose not to pursue it ...
> You are now concluding that you are entirely blameless ...
> I chose to prioritize hiring women ...
> I realized that I had missed opportunities ...
> I realized that I had connected values I shared with people I hired as objectively "good" ...
> I have a high opinion of my skills ...
> I was the reason for not hiring women ...
In truth, your real issue is that you project your own failures in an amazingly presumptuous manner.
Whereas I merely left a comment detailing my factual observations regarding hiring for a specific type of position advertised equally to both men and women on services like LinkedIn and Craigslist.
Humans just don't care enough about intelligence unfortunately. Everyone knows about Neil Armstrong though.
The lack of cited sources in articles like these leads people to bolster or criticize particular studies that they have read or heard about, usually without referencing those. Many of these studies are either flawed or contain assumptions that some people don't agree with, so this ends up going nowhere also.
Are there any really good studies on this topic that we may discuss as a common point of reference? Once that take into account all the facts, and don't start with assumptions like the following:
1. There should be equal numbers of men and women in tech (or there is some other ratio that is preferred or correct). 2. Women and men in tech should - on average - be paid the same.
Some people have these assumptions as part of their personal belief systems, but they entail a whole bunch of other assumptions that are not prima facie true.
One other huge weakness in these kinds of studies is that they measure the things that are easy to measure; things like education and experience. If companies are hiring compensating employees rationally, they would use these only as heuristics, and have some measure of how much an individual employee would contribute to the company as the determining factor.
Measuring job skill, as well as all the other skills that go into being a good employee is really hard, but until a study tries to actually do this, they are coming up with conclusions that aren't at all useful in the real world.
It's true. The earliest "computers" were overwhelmingly women.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer#Wartime_computi...
So I can imagine that you just bail if you aren't conditioned to put up with that kind of crap.
In some ways, not much different to today
here we go...
I would imagine it's really hard to measure the pay gap between programmers because there are literally coders that are 2x or 5x more productive than other coders. So I don't think it's as simple as checking all the people with "programmer" in their title by gender.
There should be a statistical paper with a proper analysis somewhere, I'll try looking for it.
Loads of other evidence of a pay gap is trivially available. I won't entertain the ignorance articulated here on that. You can Google. But I will add an aside that is less obvious.
It's entirely possible to have perfectly even pay between every member of your team and still have an overall pay gap if you don't have good diversity in the upper levels of your organization. Many otherwise very good and well-meaning organizations fall prey to this.
My position for example, as a distributed systems engineer, is very hard to get into. You don't learn about it in college, you don't find a ton of great books about it, and the field changes rapidly using terms and concepts that were only recently overturned. The way I got into it: a pair of very smart men decided to mentor me when I was younger.
But were it not for that apprenticeship/mentorship, I would not be in the field. Women claim they have fewer opportunities for this and that follows with my observations. Therefore, my (higher paying and more in-demand) position is more difficult for many women to acquire.
The methodology: https://www.glassdoor.com/research/how-we-analyzed-the-gende...
I didn't find the editorializing in the cnet article very helpful.
Well, yes, not all programmers are the same, nor are all definitions and valuations of the title "Programmer" -- which is partly why good data on the subject of "pay disparity" is hard to come by. But I'm arguing that even in some dream world where this data exists, merit would be a very tricky variable to incorporate. As you said, programmers who are 5x, or even 2x, are not paid by multiple-of-productivity. The fact that they aren't isn't so much a reflection of unfairness, but the reality that productivity of a programmer is not at all easy to quantify, and even if it were, not at all constant.
The corollary of great programmers not being paid great wages is that there are some shitty programmers are not paid shitty wages. It's possible to accept that there isn't a pay disparity between males and females for a given job at a given company, while believing is that there's a greater tolerance for non-shitty wages to male shitty programmers.
We found that adjusting for a number of factors (profession, experience, education, etc.) the pay gap actually closes significantly.
That isn't to say some companies don't have pay gap, but it is largely overblown and often dissimilar pay is a result of other factors.
tl;dr 70 cents on the dollar is not a real thing when you use your data correctly (at least in USA).
It's better than it's made out to be, but that there still is a gap is not right.
Ehhh you're really gonna need to show me this study, including detailed descriptions of the male and female cohorts showing that every male and female pair in the study are exactly the same age, have the same amount of experience, exact same education level, and work for the same company. Otherwise you can't really claim that the only difference is gender, now can you?
The problem is, you can't come up with such a study. Furthermore, the idea that companies are paying women with "exactly the same" skills as men in "exactly the same" positions up to 20% less doesn't make any sense at all. Why would I ever hire a man in that case? I'd rather save 20% off the top. And if I had no choice but to hire a man, why would I pay 20% over the market rate? And how is it that this conspiracy to pay women less exists in every company, in every industry, in every country in the world?
I don't think people typically perceive the issues facing women result from conscious bias. While there are some cases of blatant sexism, my impression is that people consider the more difficult and (hopefully) more common issue to be unconscious bias.
Why do these "other factors" push down the pay rate of women by almost 30%? If these other factors were random noise you'd expect them to affect both genders approximately equally.
The fact that men work more hours or that women take on more childcare duties does not mean that the pay gap doesn't exist. All it means that it's caused by cultural factors.
I do agree that having an earnings gap is a problem that should be addressed (especially with regard to superannuation). The problem is when we are told that there is a pay gap and that it is due to sexism in the workplace - disallowing discussion of the cultural factors that you highlighted.
"Adjusting for profession" ignores the cultural context of terms like "pay gap" -- we come from a world where women couldn't work certain jobs at all.
Imagine that doctors and nurses were paid the same. Would you still think that?
Other than salary, neither being a doctor or a nurse is "better". One is more technical, the other involves more personal contact, but neither of those is better, just different.
The same is true for Software Engineers and Test Engineers. It's snobbery to say one is better.
We should be lobbying to get nurses paid more.
(Seriously, I'm starting to wonder if I should give up the QA profession for good, even though I prefer it to being a developer.)
I'm all for having more male nurses and more female doctors and SWEs. I think this is a necessary step to solving the pay inequity gap.
It's not obvious to me that nurses should be paid the same hourly rate as doctors and software engineers. My understanding is that it's cheaper to get the education to become a nurse versus being a doctor. But I'm not an expert in this field.
Do you know whether your equally skilled female colleagues are making less money than you? Have you asked?
There is systemic pay discrimination in development jobs here in Australia so I can only assume it is similar in the US.
there are a million parameters you can compare people on and determine who makes more money in life.
good looking people make more on average too.
If you're bad at negotiation it has nothing to do with being a man or woman. Are we supposed to nationalize or socialize individual negotiations?
1. Women are expected (societally) to be more accommodating and compliant throughout most aspects of their lives, meaning they have less practice and comfort negotiating.
2. Even when women do negotiate, they end up being penalized for it, probably because of the expectations mentioned in point 1. See http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/lean-out-th.... Underlying study is here: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/cfawis/bowles.pdf
I did see something in the article you noted that I'd like to question though:
> that is, when their credentials have already been screened and they are in the interview phase—the focus shifts away from their competence and toward their social skills. That effect is absent for male candidates.
I think it's possible that this is not hiring managers trying to screw over candidates or make it harder for women, but it's a likely bias from past experiences based on a team environment where men and women differ because of our inherent differences.
Anecdotally, I've only seen women get nasty with other women to the point where it brews and stews and becomes problematic in a team environment. If women don't like men - they seem to navigate that better, perhaps because of your point in #1. Nonetheless, if men don't like other men - many times they'll blow up on each other but it doesn't linger. I've been in physical fights with great friends of mine, we've said nasty things, and in most cases the next day we let it go.
Just in the last couple years, I've had to let go several senior women because they were causing stress and anxiety with other women employees. From my experience - it's more likely I'll have a cultural issue with a female (with other females) and it's more likely I'll fire a man due to competence. Navigating cultural problems is much harder than making a decision based on lack of production. Everyone generally understands when people are fired from incompetence.
That being said - everyone has their own biases. It's not supposed to enter the picture in hiring but these considerations are often more subtle and are usually in consideration of one's current team and culture they wish to preserve. If you have some really strong personalities, male or female, you might be expressing concerns about social skills because you're trying to avoid a potential clash, not because you're out to get women. I wouldn't hire a male drill sergeant to work with my team which is more laid back and collaborative either.
What is the cause of the negotiation skills gap? It seems unlikely to me that one gender is just innately better at it than another, and more likely that there's a cultural issue at play with regards to how we treat women.
> Do you know whether your equally skilled female colleagues are making less money than you?
BS argument.
Feb 8, 2017 was a Wednesday, not a Tuesday.
I had heard wage gap wasn't an accurate disparity in software engineering jobs. Like there isnt a cabal of people at every company conspiring against equally qualified candidates based on gender.
In HIRED's report it seemed more common that people underbid themselves, and more often than not the company still gave people higher offers if they had underbid but these were still lower offers than for people that bid higher or overbid.
Lets work on it but we have to get the discussion right first. I think villifying a sexist boogeyman isn't going to get us anywhere if a persistent reality is more nuanced.
> I think villifying a sexist boogeyman isn't going to get us anywhere
I don't think anyone is denying that sexist rhetoric exists, or that a pay gap exists. It could be "vilifying a sexist boogeyman" to say that one is primarily caused by the other, and it's fair to criticize articles that say that. But I don't think this article says anything like that. I think it addresses them separately.
I like the cause: awareness of gender discrimination, harassment and awareness of contributions in the workforce.
I think the wage gap is tangential to these circumstances, when there is evidence to the contrary for equally qualified individuals in software engineering roles. This isn't saying that gender based averages won't reveal the existence of a gap, it is saying that the current discussion misses the mark, as if this is a form of harassment that is either deliberate or unconscious bias that people simply aren't aware of, when there are other circumstances that are more nuanced and likely more prevalent, in the field of "coding".
It's not PC to suggest that the source of the problem may be with women themselves and their interests.
If we tell them they're victims enough then they'll believe it. There is evidence of this in other things for instance refugees who are told that they're victims are less likely to integrate.
I'm more focused on pointing out that we're all equal. If you're a woman on my team, I'm incredibly sorry but I'm not going to celebrate your feminity any more than I'd celebrate my other colleagues manliness. You do your job and I'll reward everyone with good pay, a bonus and a cake or two.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13821991 and marked it off-topic.
I haven't seen people using the same arguments as me before.
Unless you're referring to my refugee sentence which has, at least some, connections to reality[0]
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13826005 and marked it off-topic.
"Pay gap is fake" "Prove it" Cites stuff "Unrelated/invalid" *Conversation derails
Scrollinf half way, i saw this easily 5 times.
It's as if people stick to their beliefs despite any arguments that are made.