If they make less than men, why don't companies hire women alone? Don't they want to save money on salaries?
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 So I honestly have no idea why all the men I work with haven't been replaced by women being paid 95% or whatever the claimed pay gap is.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
Source: I did a bunch of them for my PhD, but my reading of the literature stopped in 2014.
If they are equally good, there's a good chance I'll choose the cheaper one.
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.
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.
And how to value, let's say, a developer? How do you, personally, differentiate good and bad programmers?