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Comment by air7 | Hacker News Reader

I keep wondering what is the economical explanation for the existence of the gender pay gap?

Assuming women and men employees are (generally speaking) equally skilled yet differently compensated (for whatever reason), rational employers would actually prefer to hire women over men. Just like with any other purchase, all things being equal, cheaper is better.

Perhaps "old" companies with a "tradition" might have a status-quo bias, but new startups/smart CEOs that really try to minimize their burn rate would obviously see this.

Over time more and more women employees would be sought after more then men, which would eventually lead to an equilibrium and remove the pay gap.

So why hasn't this happened (yet)?

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> So why hasn't this happened (yet)?

A possible explanation is that men, in the aggregate, are more motivated by compensation and willing to put up with more hardship or danger in exchange for more money.

There are a lot of jobs that pay a lot of money because they're dangerous, like working on an oil platform. Suppose those people get paid $90,000 whereas below average tech workers get paid $70,000 and above average tech workers get paid $100,000+. If you're a below average male tech worker who is in it for the money, maybe you take the oil job instead for the extra $20,000/year. The equivalent women take the $70,000/year non-dangerous job, causing the male average for "tech jobs" to be higher than the female average.

It's also possible that more men than women are willing to work longer hours or jobs with less flexible hours in exchange for a higher salary. Employers rationally pay people willing to do that more than people who aren't.

> A possible explanation is that men, in the aggregate, are...

Ironically, thats the type of talk that can get you fired from Google. We have to be able to address the reasons if we want a solution, even if it hurts your sensibilities.

That to me is the answer to this question: So why hasn't this happened (yet)?

>It's also possible that more men than women are willing to work longer hours

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf

Because it's more complicated that. Hiring decisions, career progression decisions, salary decisions are not made by an algorithm trying to balance the sheets. They're made by humans with biases.

It seems that the most likely explanation for the pay gap is the gap in dedication and energy spent at work. Until recently, many studies had found a bias against hiring women women in education and tech. But once corrected for lifestyle/marital status (i.e. single men without children compared against single women without children, etc), we observe the opposite picture. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4418903/pdf/pna...

"rational employers"

Well there's your problem.

Humans are mostly irrational. Massively so. Rationality isn't the default state, it's not to be expected, it's a rare and precious jewel.

So many nerds dismiss the idea of systematic bias because "rational people wouldn't do that." This is true. It's also true that leprechauns wouldn't do that. Both statements are equally tied to reality.

Except that the "systematic" bias only seems to be happening in some fields, and ironically in a field that kind of relies on rationality, or at least logic.

Obviously, it's because everybody in that field is either a frat boy or evil, and there can be no other explanation /s

Implying programmers are systematically rational in all areas of life? Have you ever met any programmers?

The alternative is not that everybody in that field is a frat boy or evil. It's that they're... human.

We are all biased. The only differences are a matter of degree, and whether or not we acknowledge it.

> We are all biased. The only differences are a matter of degree, and whether or not we acknowledge it.

That should even out then, right? Or is bias somehow not normally distributed?

I'm happy to call BS on "bias" and "irrational" explanations - sounds like something you make up when you want to dismiss something and can't be arsed to come up with a proper explanation.

There are preferences for prettiness/beauty and especially tallness. They are biologically routed, well documented, and have good predictive power. I guess you could call that a bias. From looking at high competency fields such as doctors or lawyers, there doesn't seem to be a gender bias, neither biologically, nor culturally.

So which systematic bias are you proposing that would employers to act so irrationally, but yet somehow opt for the more expensive labour cost. Even if e.g. a CEO is racist, he's not going to lose sleep over offshoring jobs. Is gender different, if so why/why not?

On the flip side, if it is a systematic bias like tallness, do we have an obligation to combat it? Height doesn't get nearly the same treatment. Either way, the "bias"/"irrationality" argument is lazy and incomplete.

Remember when black people were terribly oppressed in the South, so big companies rationally took advantage of this to hire labor for cheap and out-compete others, thereby ending racial discrimination through the power of economic rationality?

Do you seriously suggest that bias should be evenly distributed? For every person biased against women in some field, there's another person equally biased against men?

After all of these discussions about this topic on HN, I'm starting to wonder if HN actually has users posting from a parallel universe. Because some of the things being described don't match the one I live in at all.

> Remember when black peoples were terribly oppressed in the South

Actually I don't remember, I wasn't alive or in the US for that. But from my understanding, calling that "bias" is a bit of an understatement.

> For every person biased against women in some field

What bias and which people? A general anti-women bias in society? In all men? White men? Only in tech? Only men in tech against women in tech? Any specifics at all for your hypothesis?

Fact is, there are fewer women than men doing CS degrees, about 20% AFAIK. That seems broadly to carry over to the ratio of genders in tech roles. Women seem to earn less than men. We don't really know why either is the case, but people are working hard to "correct" that, even though we have no idea what correct looks like. Some people think 50% would be good, because that's roughly the ratio in the general population. Looking at other majors and fields, 50% sometimes happens, sometimes doesn't.

Maybe there are better ways to approach this than to claim everybody is prejudice - maybe that's true, but is it constructive? Why is the ratio in tech disproportionate? Why is the ratio in veterinarians disproportionate? Are these equally important issues? Are they getting the same amount of coverage?

At the moment, it seems that all the nuance we've got is a hammer, and publications like the New York Times are sure reporting on a lot of nails.

Bonus question: Is Big Bang Theory good or bad for the tech industry, and do you think it will increase, decrease, or have no effect on gender ratios in tech?

You ought to remember, because it still happens today. Take a resume and put a typically black name at the top, and your chances of getting an interview plummet compared to a typically white name.

There's a lot of reporting on nails because there are a ton of nails. Gender bias has been a thing literally since before recorded history. There are blatant examples quite recently, too. Until the 1970s, it was routine for banks to refuse to issue credit cards to women without their husbands' permission. Am I to believe that his problem, which is literally thousands of years old (probably more) has been solved in the past 40 years?

I have no idea about Big Bang Theory, never saw it.

Companies actually do irrational things all the time.

Have you seen how many people on here report they have to change jobs to get a raise? Or how often companies will spend $200 worth of employees' time on bureaucracy before replacing a $100 broken chair?

Because the "pay gap" comes from the fact that men and women in aggregate make different choices with respect to how they develop their human capital. When you compare groups of men and women who make the same choices with regard to their careers and what to study, the gap disappears.

In the case about 20% of college graduates who studied Computer Science are female, and about the same proportion are seen employed as Software Engineers in the industry. Those women are not any cheaper than their male counterparts, because they're just as qualified.

Why women and men make different choices in aggregate, as well as if any of that is problematic, are topics of further debate that I don't think we have concrete answers to yet.

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