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Comment by thehardsphere | Hacker News Reader

Actually, it is how the world works. If there was really a gender pay gap for women who are doing the exact same work as men with the exact same experience as men, then it would be trivial for employers to reduce their costs by only hiring women. Yet, nobody ever does this.

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Your argument hinges on the assumption that (a) employers can easily determine the relative "value" of an employee and (b) that employers then make rational decisions based on that data.

I don't think either is likely.

Really? Do you think people are wildly overpaid by their employers?

It is true that in a purely rational system, there would be no pay gap (controlling for ability and impact).

But guess what...

Corporations are rational.

They care about one thing, dollars. If you are making them money, they will keep you no matter what. If you are not making them money, they will get rid of you. Pretty rational I think.

That's just ludicrous. Corporations routinely do astoundingly stupid, financially damaging things for all sorts of reasons.

Seconded I have seen many occasions of outstandingly dumb decisions

As my sibling post states, you're being silly here.

Corporations are run by people, and they draw on a huge variety of sources to make their decisions. Including, obviously, some that are not rational.

There's no pay gap?

Your conclusion is, then, that all people are rational?

No. Rationality has very little to do with it. How rational the participants are doesn't itself change the fact that there is a competitive labor market and that salary offers thus must be competitive.

If women choose to forgo higher salaries in favor of something else, that's a different issue and it doesn't immediately mean that they are being "irrational", it just means they favor different things than men do.

The rationality of the players is central to any argument you make in the line of "there is a competitive labor market and that salary offers thus must be competitive".

If the hiring managers (of any gender) have an irrational bias towards thinking that women are not as effective as their male counterparts, this will affect the respective pay scales even within a competitive market.

Note that I'm not providing evidence or making a claim about the gender pay gap. I'm just saying that the claims you've made have many possible consistent explanations, including irrational bias against women.

This is a nice argument that I actually believe myself, but you could counter it by saying that, due to sexism, even when women and men do exactly the same work, the males' result are valued more. Hiring managers don't have to be perfectly rational, they could be (unconsciously) sexist.

You could counter with that, but you'd be redefining what we're talking about away from whether or not similar men and women are paid the same to something far more nebulous and difficult to measure.

And rationality of any one particular hiring manager isn't going to make a big difference; they still need to compete with every other hiring manager in the labor market and must offer something competitive accordingly.

No, they'd be redefining it to something more analogous to the real world.

We were discussing salary differences between men and women who do the same work and have made the same choices. Salaries exist in "the real world," so you're going to have to try harder to change the topic to whatever it is you want to talk about instead.

This thread suddenly became gold. Don't you dare die on me, thread!

I'm glad I made your day :D

Yeah, I was ready to pop some popcorn.

Life is so good when rational arguments can hit a higher pitch than the virtue signals. ;)

Single, childless women make 8% more than single, childless men across the country, and as much as 20% more in some cities. This only changes when they have children or when they work fewer hours.

But don't let facts stop you from repeating the same tired lies that have been debunked for years

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/09/...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EK6Y1X_xa4

More: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/114055529676/my-verdict-on-gend...

It contains links to many more sources at the end.

Please keep your tone civil. It's one of the factors that keeps HN discussions worthwhile.

we are talking like for like jobs and id prefer a less biased source the ONS for example) than right wing thing tanks

the gender pay gap was just another myth created by the Chinese....

No it isn't I know one large uk tech company that is Terified of its gender pay gap becoming public.

Like wise the BBC being forced to disclose pay rates for talent some Male presenters have taken pay cuts btw

Individual companies having a gender pay gap doesn't mean the market has a gender pay gap. And if you work at one of those companies and are told that you can't be given a raise because of the internal, secret gender pay gap, you should quit that company and find a new job.

I mean, even if it's true that particular company is paying its women worse than its men, and even if legislation means they can't quickly fix it (I don't know how onerous this legislation is in the U.K.), the proper response on the part of any employee who is given these excuses ought to be "Look, that sounds like you have a difficult problem, but that isn't my problem. My problem is that my salary is $X when it should be $X+Y." Because at the end of the day their excuses aren't going to change the fact that they can either fix your problem or not, and if they don't fix your problem somebody else in the labor market can.

Even when this company has > 100,000 emploees and has individual divisions with more engineers than Google

What does the company's size have to do with whether or not you are being paid the amount of money you want?

Because they set industry standards for pay which is why the pay suppression cartel was so important

FWIW in the UK the pay gap favours young women I gather; it changes over somewhere around the time a lot of women take a career break (32 IIRC, will try and trace the source).

It's interesting because younger women hear the USA stats and complain about how they're being hard done by.

The same dynamics happen in USA. The statistics people report in the USA in the media are aggregates between all men and all women, which is why they're misleading.

In both cases, it's because women choose to leave the labor force for a while, which makes them no longer like the men who made similar choices as them up until that point.

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