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.

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.

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.

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.

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.