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Comment by dvfjsdhgfv | Hacker News Reader

> Also it's interesting that women placed compensation at 4th in "Differences in Assessing Jobs by Gender", but if you point that fact as a contributing factor for the pay gap you can be labeled as sexist.

How can you be labeled sexist if you point out a simple fact?

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You already know the answer to this. The context of your fact-based statement is where it's meaning (and any offence/labeling) is derived from, not the fact itself, and in this case the person you are responding to is adding an additional fact without citation:

This is the "simple" fact:

> Women placed compensation at 4th in "Differences in Assessing Jobs by Gender" in a StackOverflow survey targeted at people (mostly developers) who use stackoverflow

This is the additional fact that has been added:

> [that fact is] a contributing factor for the pay gap

And then the phrase

> you can be labeled as sexist

is added, which of course can be applied to anything anyone ever says about anything gender related.

If you deliberately add unsubstantiated information to a fact you will probably be called out for it, and rightly so (IMO).

Because there is context beyond "simple facts". A "simple fact" doesn't necessarily mean what the person presenting it thinks it means. There are other factors that go into this "simple fact" that may or may not be mentioned by the person presenting it.

So while the fact itself may be true, the causation could be different from the implied causation by the presenter. For example I'm sure you noticed that women skew younger on this survey. If people are earlier in their career perhaps experience and culture matter more than pay. People later in their careers have families to worry about, so they want more pay and care less about culture and languages.

I'm not saying I'm correct in this assessment, but what I'm getting at is there needs to be greater context around "facts" beyond the first thing that pops into your mind. Facts can be twisted in many ways to hurt people, be more critical of the things people say on the internet.

It jumped at me because many feminists say that "women care less than men about compensation" is an excuse from the patriarchy to pay women less.

So the survey data may be a hint that it's not entirely a myth.

My personal experience would be that developers are bad at (or hate) negotiating salaries anyway :)

See this thread, for example.

Ask Damore.

Yes, he clearly only pointed out facts and nothing else. This is a fair and honest assessment of what happened.

You must be new to the internet. Hacker News has strong moderation so its one of the best asshole corner of the internet, but make no mistake, you are still in an asshole corner of the internet where you conform or are silenced.

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