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Comment by tatotato | Hacker News Reader

This is wrong. The article states Asian males earn 117% as much, which is just 17% more. This is one of the things that turns me off Hacker News, an overly strong bias in defense of white men.

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I believe in this case it was a simple misinterpretation of the terminology rather than nefarious intent.

And I believe I've been here long enough to know that is not a very good assumption to make. Allowances such as yours are usually given in defense of white men, but hardly ever given for other groups.

The HN guidelines[0] encourage users to assume good faith in interpreting the comments of others, and I think that applies well here.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

They do, but again, I've been here long enough to know that's not always the case, especially with topics like this.

Overly strong? Maybe they miswrote? Maybe they did their calculations wrong? You are assuming quiet a lot here.

Yes, you are right. But even so - the point stands. I'm not trying to defend anything, especially white men. I'm just saying this journalism is biased to portray white men in bad light.

How is the factually correct claim that white men, in the study, earn more than Black and Hispanic men, and more than women of any racial/ethnic category, painting them in a “bad light”?

Would there equally true statement that Asian men earn more than men of any other racial/ethnic category and more than women of any ethnic category be painting Asian men in a “bad light”?

I think the issue stems from the author pointing out that white male wages as statistically disconcerting with respect to the racial pay gap without raising the issue of Asian male wages as being the same.

There is no group referred to as specifically disconcerting. And both the relatively high pay of white males (in the body text) and Asian of both genders (in bold callouts on the graphics) are highlighted.

White males are the comparison baseline, but Asians couldn't be used for that because they don't have data for the first decade+.

Looking at the article again, that may be a fair interpretation. The Pew Research Center's article[0] from which one of the graphs is lifted says "white men are often used in comparisons such as this because they are the largest demographic group in the workforce". So the point of comparison seems to be on the basis of the size of the demographic rather than availability of past data.

It also notes a possible reason for the gap: among adults ages 25 and older, 53% of Asians have a bachelor’s degree or more versus only 36% of whites.

[0]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/07/01/racial-gende...

> This is one of the things that turns me off Hacker News, an overly strong bias in defense of white men.

Really? I feel the exact opposite. HN is full of articles like this, singling out white men, and claiming they are somehow either toxic or the beneficiaries of privilege.

I detest gender/identity politics, and don't think claims should be leveled against an entire group based on unrelated physical traits. This is the only reason I jump to defend "white men". If an article was posted making the same claims about another race/gender I would mount the same defense. However, those kinds of articles never show up here, because the are more obviously racist.

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