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Comment by Snoozle | Hacker News Reader

I think that regardless of your social or political stance of anything regarding males, females, workplaces, salaries, or sexism, more data is always nice to have.

Now I'm going to figure out how to twist this into fitting my own personal world view and then make a news article about it.

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If these circles had average salaries attached to them, I'm sure the article would write itself.

Assuming you mean that men have jobs with higher average salaries, there are still implications beyond that. Do men have higher salaries because they are more likely to consider salary when choosing a job? Do women have lower salaries due to sexism? Some combination of the two? Something else?

> Something else?

Here's one more thing that might be a confounding factor - taller people have higher salaries [0], and on average men are taller than women.

Maybe just a spurious correlation [1], but still interesting to think about.

0: https://www.livescience.com/5552-taller-people-earn-money.ht...

1: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

I did notice (anecdotal) that people in management are usually taller. Taller than me I might add, and I'm a solid 6'2" (which is like... slightly above average in NL). A lot of people in management are closer to 6'6" (2 meters).

as a normie (at 5'10"), I've definitely noticed this

Makes sense. If you have to literally look up to someone when you talk to them, they are in a very solid position of power from an instinctual, "primitive brain" perspective.

I'd love to know if women as tall as men get paid closer to men's salaries, as a group.

It would be odd if hight was the only factor.

The question I would like to know is how large the height factor is to other measurable effects.

Once women start doing a job, “It just doesn’t look like it’s as important to the bottom line or requires as much skill,” said Paula England, a sociology professor at New York University. “Gender bias sneaks into those decisions.”

She is a co-author of one of the most comprehensive studies of the phenomenon, using United States census data from 1950 to 2000, when the share of women increased in many jobs. The study, which she conducted with Asaf Levanon, of the University of Haifa in Israel, and Paul Allison of the University of Pennsylvania, found that when women moved into occupations in large numbers, those jobs began paying less even after controlling for education, work experience, skills, race and geography.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over...

Is that the case? Or is it that men leave a field when the pay begins to drop? Distinguishing between cause and effect is very important in these matters. I don't see anything here to suggest the authors have established the cause and effect relationship.

> Is that the case? Or is it that men leave a field when the pay begins to drop?

Supply and demand as well. More workers willing to do a job means the offered pay can be lower. Sellers market VS buyers market.

Exactly what I came here to say. Ramp up STEM grads? Pay drops. Ramp up attorney grads? Pay drops. Ramp up workforce in a sector? Pay drops. Adding women to the marketplace for a particular job significantly increases competition for employment. As an example, if a bunch of pro-male motivational speakers went out and encouraged men who currently have very dangerous jobs to move into nursing en mass, and the spots in nursing schools weren't artificially limited (they are, in reality), the pay would drop.

Well duh, a bigger supply of workers will reduce the salary required to meet the demand for labor.

Pretty straightforward supply and demand.

When product A enters a Market dominated by B in large numbers,the Price drops. This is explained by the market being Assist.

Let's add workplace injuries and deaths per 100,000 workers while we're at it. We could get another article that writes itself, and one that's gotten way less airtime and print space than the one you're talking about.

Median salaries that is normalized to the numbers of worked hours.

And work injures/deaths.

Looking at the outliers, at least, it's not that simple. Do dental assistants get paid less than plumbers? Paralegals vs electricians?

Here, I'll give you some clickbait headlines for it. Choose at will.

Study: Workforce Is Changing, Yet Same Old Injustice Remains

Is Your Daughter Thinking of Being a Carpenter? Don't Bet On It!

The Disappearing Culture of Male Shoe Machine Operators/Tenders

The Most Male-Dominated Professions On Earth

We Set Out To Find What Jobs Are the Most "Male" - Here's What Happened Next!

This One Job Outpaced All Others For Attracting Women

Study Reveals Gender Bias in Every Single Job - Here Are Some of the Worst... And the Not-So-Bad

> Now I'm going to figure out how to twist this into fitting my own personal world view and then make a news article about it.

Not cynical enough. 5/10

Not obfuscated enough. 27/54

Data is nice, but please don't forget lots and lots of anecotes in your article!

There's a study that indicates an interesting trend: you can have articles that have hard data, have soft anecdotes, or have both. Of those, the ones that try to do both are significantly less convincing than the ones that solely focus on one approach.

I know a guy who loves articles that do both though, so YMMV.

When I see an article that starts out with a "soft anecdote" I'm immediately put off because it seems like an attempt to manipulate my emotions. That's not really necessary if you have the data to support your point, so my first inclination is your data is weak and you're trying to slip something by me.

The "soft anecdote" is for the people who are bored by hard numbers and wouldn't read to the end if they didn't want to find out how the story ends. And right at the bottom is a carousel to take them to the next similar article.

So, yes, it's an attempt to manipulate emotions, but it doesn't have to mean that the data doesn't support the overall point. A clickbaity headline isn't indicative of a bad article either, it just hints at the readership they're trying to attract.

Have a citation for that with data?

So, having spent some time trying to track it down, the best I found was [0], which wasn't nearly as strong as I suggested: "In an experiment, people read a realistic persuasive message that was relevant to them. Results showed that anecdotal evidence does not benefit from the inclusion of statistical evidence or from its intrinsic quality."

I originally heard about this from Kevin Drum [1], but I was unable to track down the actual study he alludes to.

That said, he does link to an interview [2] with... an anecdote about the use of data: "We have an experiment of helping a starving child. A certain percentage of people help [by donating money to the kid]. Then we have another condition with a different group, same child, same situation, except we put the numbers of the statistics of starvation next to her picture, and the donations dropped in half."

[0] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0163853X.2017.13...

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/08/facts-or-anecd...

[2] https://www.vox.com/explainers/2017/7/19/15925506/psychic-nu...

What about the other direction; do pure statistics benefit from the inclusion of anecdotes? I would expect that to be the case, at least in the general population; but you seem to say that it's not.

You don't have me convinced with your comment...

Remember to take the most debatable data points, assume them to be facts and overgeneralize them to show how it is an indication of something systemic.

Also in case you assume correlation jump ahead and be sure it's causation.

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