Study shows salaries of young women 8% higher than men in peer group (2010)
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It's interesting itself that more women graduate than men. But equal pay means equal pay for people with similar qualifications doing similar jobs. This comparison means nothing to me.
At some point the nurses union in Denmark argued that their education was roughly the same length as that of an engineer, so they should be paid the same on that basic. Completely ignoring that engineers spend five years at the university vs. the 3.5 years for nursing school and that engineers are pay wildly different salaries bases on their field of work.
In my mind, equal pay is for people doing the exact same job, and the exact same number of hours, but that just my interpretation. Many will use the equal pay term to advocate for a pay rise, because they feel that their line of work is underpaid.
If someone believe that they should be better compensated, just say that, don't hide it behind "equal pay". One issue of cause it that people don't understand economy, it not necessarily about the hours you work, the responsibility you have, but about the profit you generate for your employer.
I find that hard to quantify in many professional settings. Say Sally and Tim are both project managers. They have basically the same education and experience levels. But Sally has more tact and is more organized. So she gets all the complicated and risky projects. Should Tim and Sally make the same? I'd argue, no.
I'm with you here, but I think you also missed another point: at the same level of productivity. Equal hours at work doesn't mean equal productivity.
Ideally maybe, but it's just market forces. How much does an employer want you and how hard are you to get and retain?
They slice and dice budgets in many different ways to ensure that the overall business can maximize profits/productivity.
So if the contract specifies that the company gets paid $200/hr for developer labor up to 40 hr/week, you pay the developers $50/hr to $67/hr by the rule of thumb. If there were no support staff, they would each have to spend 2 hours a week on personnel management, which couldn't be billed to the contract. So an HR employee could support 25 other employees, since they can do the same work in 90 minutes (and still have to do the personnel management for themselves). Cleaning saves the specialists 30 minutes a week, so each supporting up to 119 other employees, since they can do the same work in 20 minutes (and still have to clean their own workspace). A manager saves each developer 8 hours a week, but can handle 10 developers (or 5 managers), since they can do that management work in half the time (and someone else manages them). The CEO is an otherwise uncounted manager of managers, paid out of the owner's share, so the first 5 managers don't require an additional manager to manage them.
You add as many support employees as are necessary to ensure that the employees directly measurable as making money spend all their working hours on making money, instead of something else. They get paid out of the fraction you didn't already pay to the revenue employee, and then the owners take what's left over. The closer you get to optimal productivity, the more calculations you have to do to get even better.
This would all go into a very complicated spreadsheet that changes the numbers based on how many direct-revenue employees there are, and how much support staff. Then I'd add a fudge factor so that if a measurable employee quits, nobody gets an automatic pay cut. This requires a lot of speculative hiring and firing in different categories. Everyone has to be paid according to the maximum they could be paid, if there were one more of them.
In this hypothetical, 20 developers have 2 managers, 1 HR, and 1 cleaner. Weekly revenue is $160k. Developers get $53333 of that, for $2667 each at $67/hr. Managers could get up to $10667 of that, for $5333 each at $133/hr. The HR person can get up to $2667, for $67/hr. The cleaner gets up to $667, for $17/hr. But the managers are operating at capacity, one more developer would require one more manager, for 3 managers over 21 developers, maxing out at $93/hr. So you target that instead. The same speculative calculation for the HR person means that one more developer adds one more manager, which puts the only HR employee at their workload limit of 26 (21+3+1+1). One more developer would require one more HR (22+3+2+1), which maxes out at $37/hr, so that's what you pay the one you have. You wouldn't need another cleaner until 102 developers (102+13+5+2), which would be as much as $43/hr. You never see cleaners paid that much, though, because cleaners have more competition as less-skilled labor, and they never hit the maximum any given company could afford to pay them. So you end up with payroll of about $63k/week, leaving $97k/week to pay the building lease, utilities, depreciation, taxes, etc. with the remainder to the owners.
I have a more simple view on this: the job market is just like any other market, with supply and demand. Those are the factors that will determine the price.
Exactly this. At a fundamental level every individual has an infinite number of "dimensions" (in ML parlance) associated with him, and "equal pay" people or groups will try and convince you that expected pay should be the same over a certain subset of dimensions while ignoring all the others. Invariably they will pick the most beneficial to that particular person or influence group. They will give you arguments from moral, while forgetting to mention that like in any midly complex problem, data bias and confounding variables are of paramount importance.
So "equal pay" means whatever you want it to mean because try and you may, you will never have a model with the full infinite set of dimensions that the real world has. Having to pick you pick the ones you want, a choice that others will attack.
You might argue that a specific study or meta-analysis contains a bias or misinterpretation, but only if you've actually examined their methodology, data, and reasoning. You cannot argue that all studies of complex topics are invalid simply because their topics are complex.
This simply means it's not rigorous. See Omitted-variable bias - from [1]: The bias results in the model attributing the effect of the missing variables to the estimated effects of the included variables. For example, including gender but not education or hours worked will result in attributing pay differences to gender, but including all relevant variables shows that's gender is irrelevant.
This doesn't mean statistics is useless.
This is the meaning of the phrase "the map is not the territory". All models are flawed, but some are useful.
If you take a random sample of studies you can make a statistical analysis. You don't need to examine every cow to make an argument that there are no pink cows, but you do need to do a random sample. And that's if you only want to meet the highest standards of evidence. Much lower standards can be far easier to meet.
Your comparison of this problem with pink cows shows that you haven't given it two seconds thought. Estimating the number of pink cows in the world is a very simple problem. Determining pay gap is a very very complex problem that starts with defining what the question really is and associated fights between different interest groups which might prefer one or another definition, then goes on to the (social, privacy, and rights) problem of obtaining the data, and moving on into with the data analysis itself which is just hellish if you want to have any semblance of rigour, and finally policy take aways from the analysis which hinges crucially on how you defined the question initially.
Stop adding to the noise please.
If by 'estimating' you mean a scientific study that tries to answer the question, then it isn't simple at all. First we need a rigorous definition of pink cows. If I dye my cow pink, does that count? What if other people don't agree with my definition? A pig whose skin is pink is considered pink, so should I only rely on hair color? And what counts as pink? Are we only going with stereotypical hot pink? There is a red cow, but it is a really brownish red. Would a brownish pink be enough to qualify as a pink cow?
So once we solved all those problems, we need to come up with a methodology, and it likely won't be the same everywhere. We could make the problem a lot simpler by reducing our search space to say, only cows on ranches in the state of Montana. But to do a global sampling isn't easy.
>associated fights between different interest groups which might prefer one or another definition
To my knowledge (and with no peer reviewed research to back up my view), there is no groups who have a political stake in what counts as a pink cow. So for that reason it is simpler because there aren't political complications.
But you seem to be confusing something. You appear to be talking about studying wage gap. I was talking about studying studies of wage gaps.
So for my plan, it would work like this:
Taking all the studies of wage gap in the last n years, pick x at random. For each of these, determine if each one does or does not account for some factor that impacts pay regardless of gender (say height of employee). You can then compute what percentage of studies took this factor into account.
Then you repeat this with a few other factors, each time repicking the studies investigated. From those percentages, you can determine how often your selection of factors are taken into account, and from that you might be able to make the argument that the data is biased enough to not be usable.
Doesn't replication crisis prove 'that all studies of complex topics are invalid simply because their topics are complex.'
The replication crisis is a result of the misuse or misunderstanding of the statistics, and the current nature of journals.
I agree with that phrase, and I acknowledge that it's a problem, but you're jumping into conclusions about what I was trying to say. I wasn't trying to say "we don't have complete information, so we should do nothing." Read on:
> you are rationalizing away the preponderance of evidence which shows that, yep, any way you cut it, there's a gender wage gap.
No, that's is precisely my point. It is NOT true that any way you cut it there's a gender gap. If you let me cut it how I want it I can have the gap be anything I want by carefully (as an example) picking which of the omitted variables I adjust for sampling bias and which ones I don't[0]. That is what I was trying to say.
[0] And lets not talk about confounding variables, that problem is at least an order of magnitud harder even than sampling/population bias.
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/...
Surely the right response to a study which challenges your existing worldview would be "Hmm, that's interesting - I wonder what is driving that?" rather than "The equal pay people or groups will always try to convince you..."
* A lot of unavoidable angst as people of less worth to the business are proven to be paid less in no uncertain terms.
* More internal strife as people jockey for identifiable rank within the organization based upon their salaries. "Why is Sue paid $10k more than I am? Sue wasn't at her desk all week last week while I was here busting my butt."
* Eventually, many managers and organizations would just sidestep the battle by paying everyone the same thing based upon easy-to-identify metrics like seniority. As a result, the people with more value to the business will find jobs at companies that pay them according to a better measure of their bottom-line worth. With no one left but the lowest-common-denominator employees, the company flounders and fails.In most fields, there are already companies which pay wildly different amounts for the same jobs, so the people contributing more in those similar roles are already highly incentivized to leave for higher-paying pastures.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9907147
Looking further, it appears that Sweden has decreased the amount of transparency by requiring that people make specific requests that notify the taxpayer of the request.
http://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-salaries-freely-availa...
Apparently, there were issues. I'd like to see this experiment run for a longer period of time in more culturally diverse environments, though.
You wouldn’t have to negotiate a better salary if it would be obvious that you are underpaid.
I have people who work on my teams who are absolutely fantastic and, while already well-paid, probably should make more. I have other people on my team, with the same title, same education, same on-paper responsibilities, same city, same years of experience, who might be below the median pay and are still overpaid based on my estimation of their contributions relative to their peers.
You can't look only at a spreadsheet and determine that it's "obvious that you are underpaid", IMO.
This is 100% a red herring as far as pay transparency is concerned anyway. If you're not being unfair you have no reason to hide anything.
It actually extends to the whole market, too - if all salaries are transparent, then an RN makes x. They can't make more than that, anywhere they go. It gives a floor, sure - if they get hired, they'll get paid the same as everyone else; it just also makes a ceiling, and, I believe, may slow income growth in general.
So I'd see your point as already happening, companies have already capped salaries, except for executives, who basically set their own salaries.
I love seeing this statement. It's true but the people who post it never follow up evaluating whether or not productivity growth has far out-paced the rise in living standards. If productivity growth has been exponential while the rise in living standards has been linear that's a sign that there's a problem regardless of whether or not living standards have risen.
That means that transparency works _for_ you, not against you.
Think of it like this. Will you be willing to post your entire web browsing history to a publicly available archive regularly? It will help prevent a lot of illegal activity if everyone agreed to do that.
And of course, this applies not just to people but to most complex entities or ideas. The problem is, when dealing with humans, even intelligent ones, good luck getting them accept this approach when it interferes with their political/emotional/fiscal beliefs or desires. For reference, see recent discussions here on topics like trade tariffs.
In addition, women are usually the primary caregiver and disproportionately spend more time doing domestic labour (raising children, taking care of the home) which they are not compensated financially for. Women (or whomever is the primary caregiver in a family or does more domestic labor at home) should be paid more for fewer hours in the workplace.
More explanation, for anyone who wants it, is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16402648, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16185062, and plenty more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
Yes. And if more people want to become engineers, and if becoming an engineer is easier, then engineers will end up getting less money than nurses.
I mean... the more fun a job is, the more people will want to do it despite getting little money, right?
> In addition, women are usually the primary caregiver and disproportionately spend more time doing domestic labour (raising children, taking care of the home) which they are not compensated financially for.
I recall reading some statistics that (in germany) 80% of domestic spending is done by women. Seems about right.
> Women should be paid more for fewer hours in the workplace.
Uh. That's outright discrimination there. Either against men or against childless people.
Biology has already discriminated and made her life hard, should we make it worse? Should we make having children as difficult as possible for our fellow citizens?
Paternal leave is important too.
I think you have to work a bit more to support that assertion. I'm not opposed to the idea of some kind of compensation for home-makers, but putting that on employers seems backwards. Why should that not be a form of social support?
This experiment has been tried and it failed miserably, read up on the Soviet Union.
Why should anyone be compensated anything for routine life-management work? What you're asking is akin to saying everyone should be paid to sleep. Sleeping, bathing, eating, maintaining the home -- these are all parts of functioning as a human. Taking care of children is a function of having chosen to have offspring - I would say it's a voluntary hobby, even.
Under a plan where people are being paid unequal amounts simply for being alive, that's where it's wrong.
And that's the fault of the employer . . . how? If they have a child, it shouldn't be subsidized by their employer. Everyone in the West could abstain from having children for three generations and immigrants would make up the numbers - there's no need for most people to have children.
Pregnancy is a natural consequence of sex. There's no such thing as a truly unexpected pregnancy. Undesired and unplanned perhaps, but not unexpected. In the event it does happen, there are options for either continuing or ending the pregnancy, I still see no reason why anyone should be compensated for voluntarily choosing to continue the pregnancy.
However, given the "women earn ~70 cents for every dollar a man earns" rhetoric we traditionally hear about unequal pay, which compares female earnings to male earnings outright without controlling for education, qualifications, or the "same job"[1], it would seem this comparison is done in the same spirit.
1. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jan/...
At the end of the day, the problem is that most people (voters) wouldn't even begin to understand or appreciate the distinction between demagoguery and intellectual integrity.
Of course it doesn't seem the government would be interested in having such an educated populace.
I agree completely, but would education really fix the 20% gender pay gap myth?
I find it very difficult to believe that most of the people who continually reinforce this myth actually believe it to be true. They simply can't all be that ill-educated and/or stupid. And yet the same articles appear in the media every single year. It's become one of those taboo subjects where dogma trumps facts.
The worst part is that it stifles discussion of the earnings gap that actually does exist, and stops us from having meaningful conversations about society's expectations of both men and women.
That is totally irrelevant to their decision process. People keep repeating these statistics because it's useful to make others believe that women are discriminated against in the workplace.
I have to admit, conversations about critical thought in society invariably make me depressed.
I've met several people who treat my tendency to value critical thought as if it's nothing more than a quirky personality trait, and acting based on emotions and feelings is just as valid. It's infuriating.
This analysis doesn't show us that woman make more given equal background/education/etc. However, it does provide the interesting information that women (of that age group) are generally better educated. If we take out of it the desire to find out why they're better educated (and ways we can balance it out), we're better off.
The same is true of studies that show women are paid less, but then the real reason (behind the results highlighted in that study) is that they tend to take lower paying jobs [1]. Sure, you can't take out of that "employers aren't paying them enough", but you can take out of it "why are women generally in the lower paying jobs?", and look for ways to change that fact.
[1] I'm not saying there is or is not a gender gap for equal jobs, just discussing the useful takeaways of studies that ignore the difference in jobs when analyzing the gender gap.
The latter is at least a possibility.
I would argue it is because female-dominated professions tend to have schooling requirements, by law. Male-dominated professions are less apt to.
Anecdotally speaking, I was able to start as a software developer, a male-dominated profession, when I was in high school and soon moved into doing it full time after that. As a result, I do not rank well when measured by my schooling. I later started farming and it did not require schooling either. Both jobs only required the desire to do them. In contrast, a female in my cohort interested in nursing, a female-dominated profession, would legally be prevented from doing so until completing many years of post-secondary schooling. And if that person wants to become a teacher, another female dominated career, later in life even more legal schooling requirements are necessary.
On the assumption that females have more schooling because they have to, in order to pursue the careers they want to do. Is the correction in easing the legal requirements for these jobs, or is the correction to enforce more stringent legal requirements on male-dominated jobs?
And you would base this off what data? Surely we shouldnt just be using our guts here.
The data that shows that female-dominated professions are more apt to have legal requirements.
> Surely we shouldnt just be using our guts here.
Well, why not? We're not writing formal research papers here. Only writing comments for personal pleasure in our spare time.
Not according to the UK government: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/gender-pay-gap-reporting-overvie...
This is a wonderful example of a double standard: when a study finds that men earn more than women, people say it doesn't matter that they aren't working in the same jobs because (as they say) discrimination keeps women from getting those jobs, but when women earn more then men, it's fine and dandy because they aren't working in the same jobs or experience levels, so no discrimination exists.
The gender distribution for the top 0.2% doesn't matter since most men and women will never reach that income.
You can have equal or better qualifications than someone else with less or no degrees.
Just not formal qualifications...
If you're comparing degreed vs non-degreed folks, how is the comparison in the peer group?
Collecting data and drawing conclusions is much easier than contrasting assumptions for the sake of understanding the underlying issues, yet the former seems much more prevalent in public discourse.
It is then regurgitated argumentum ad nauseam and any statistical (read fair and scientific) analysis of the study and its bias are attacked as anti-something, racist, misogynist etc. It is academically and morally corrupt and cannot and should not be allowed. The academic community should be vocally standing against this practice but being that they are afraid to be called a name or slur they swallow it.
People have put their political subscription above everything else and it is sickening.
Agreed.
Do you believe men don't have access to jobs in the field of nursing? On average, women outnumber men 9.5 to 1 in nursing in the US. [0]
[0] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/human-capital-and-risk...
Furthermore I think it’s telling that you being up nursing, a not particularly lucrative field, as a female dominated one. It’s not a secret that the most scrutiny is going to those fields that are the more lucrative/powerful as discrimination in such fields serves to keep wealth/influence concentrated in whiter, maler hands.
I would bet that if one looked at the drop rates of male nurse students it will look very similar to that of female programming students. If one looked at the reason cited why they decide to drop it will align to very similar answer, where the minority will cite an increase self-doubt and low support. If one looked at the rate people leave the field after working the first year, again we will likely find identical reason for programmers where many will citing clashing work culture as a top reason for leaving the profession. Looking at those staying after 3-4 year, again there is a similar pattern where the minority will move towards specialization (sub groups of the profession) where there is a higher ratio of members of the minority.
We have medical specializations which have a gender segregation that is above 99%, where for every person of the minority gender there is several hundreds of the majority. Why do such extreme segregation exist where both men and women has equal access to the same profession?
In the technology field, I have studied engineering in France, where the top school were only accessible through an anonymous competitive exam. There is very little room for discrimination there. Just math and physics exercises on an anonymous piece of paper. But both the candidates and the students who were selected were 80% male. Of course recruiters end up hiring 80% male engineers, how could it be not the case? But that’s not discrimination.
Why is it meaningless? It used to be unjust that all doctors and lawyers were men. It was just understood that the wage gap then was downstream from career and employment gaps.
Money is NOT everything.
Alternately, they could also just learn how to validate and be with women's emotions (and their own).
That would mean unlearning every single thing society tells us not to do. I would ask you listen to this: https://www.npr.org/2018/03/19/594719471/guys-we-have-a-prob...
Humans are emotional creatures, modern men get that beaten out of them. If you're female I'd ask that you talk to some of the men you know and ask them if they've been emotional around women in the past and how that went. This is a societal problem and if we keep treating men as both the problem and the source of their own problem, its never going to change.
As it stands I highly doubt anything will change in America in my generation or the next two at the very least. Until it becomes a problem that can't be ignored this will continue to be ignored.
I slept with tons of women and also couldn't sustain a "relationship" once any sort of actual intimacy was demanded of me.
Finally, after being at the brink of suicide, I realized that my emotions were deeply valuable things and that I needed to develop a relationship with them -- all of them, and stop trying to run from sadness or rage or jealousy or rejection.
Once that internal process reached a critical mass, I then began the work of retraining my nervous system to be oriented towards people who were more secure and able to be with others honest expression of emotion. This meant telling the truth and often feeling like shit when people did, in fact, reject me.
I regained my ability to feel, however, along with my ability to be with others feelings.
Now, I'm engaged to an incredible woman and have a coaching practice full of all sorts of folks seeking guidance on how to have real relationships. Some of my clients read HN, others run the companies you work for, star in the movies you stream or build the products you use.
It's hard work, but highly recommended and required if we are going to emerge into a new paradigm of human relating.
Gratuitous engagement video shot with drones on a remote tropical island that we are planning to turn into a village for visionaries like all of you here ;) >>
Wealth for men is the single highest factor when predicting response rate for male profiles in dating sites (according to the data I have read). Wealth and earning rates of married men correlated to the rate in which their spouse will file for divorce. Men and wealth has a similar relation as women and appearance.
Men as a single group has as much ability to stop being evaluated for their wealth as women as a single group can stop being evaluated on appearance. In theory women could stop compete on appearance between other women, but its dubious if that would actually change male behavior. Similarly, men could stop compete for wealth but its questionable if that would cause any cultural change for women.
The same happens with college degrees. More women than men go to college. But many women with college degrees want a man with a college degree too. Cue articles complaining about the shortage of marriageable men.
This is a trend that I have personally witnessed since joining the corporate workforce as a recent college graduate living in a major city.
In general I saw my female colleagues getting promoted faster and moving up faster than their male counterparts.
In no way do I think it was favouritism, I just believe our senior management thought these young women were better prepared and organised than their male counterpart in their 20's.
Whether or not this trend continues to higher levels of management remains to be seen.
You say that women in their 20s are better at something than men in their 20s. I believe you know this is indefensible and if you would say the reverse you would get kicked out of your job.
I don't know what comment you read, but the comment I read said nothing remotely close to this. If you want to paraphrase what they said, it'd be more like "the very small sample of women I was exposed to in a small amount of time at one single professional workplace were better prepared for the job than the very small sample of men I was exposed to in a small amount of time at one single professional workplace".
That says absolutely nothing about men and women in general, no matter how much baseless controversy you want to drum up.
The dominant news story has always been the story women earn 80 percent less than men, but that was difficult to reconcile compared to what I was seeing in my work life. This article backed up some of those points.
If you are looking for hard data to back up what I experienced, the article posted here is a perfect source.
Funny: reading HN comments I increasingly get the feeling a lot of folks aren't correctly reading or comprehending what's been written. Whether it's deliberate to support a strawman or a result of reading too quickly or something else I don't know but I often read a response and notice "hang on, that's really NOT what OP was saying...".
Especially when people share personal observations on a study that includes data, yet people cry "small sample size!".
Of course its a small sample size, it's a personal experience of one.
Victim blaming would be a common response, to proclaim that it's the fault of these young men. The real question we must ask is: what is society doing to these young men to leave them so unprepared and falling behind, and how can society correct that injustice?
It hasn't gotten a huge amount of follow-up traction in schools though.
Also The New Jim Crow for a racial perspective that hits black men's employment prospects pretty hard.
https://www.amazon.com/New-Jim-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblind...
BTW for folks who are concerned that feminist or women don't care about boys and men, these two leasing books are books written by women about the abuse boys and men face.
>It depends on the job. What you say applies mainly to Twitter-empowered employees at consumer-facing tech companies.
It may depend on the job, one of them falls into the consumer facing tech company bucket (marketing).
However my other job was an analyst role at a Financial Services company which you typically expect to be male dominated and where you might expect this sex discrimination to occur.
It could have been the specific company I worked for (small sample size), but I found it to be a fair and equal opportunity hiring/promoting process at least for those early on in their career.
Thank you, yes I understand how percentages work. Tip of the hat to you.
In that case height is a factor and the taller the male, the more he earns.
An 8% difference in either direction is acceptable to me. It's good enough to tolerate until it's worth revisiting for further improvements. So now that we have the gender pay gap (almost) sorted out, perhaps we should tackle a problem more likely to cause societal problems: the increasing measures of wealth inequality.
In other words, the proportion of rich to poor is skewing further away from optimal, which could be measured by a curve showing the wealth one has as a proportion of the next-wealthiest person, or by a graph showing the percentage of global wealth owned by a given equal-sized fraction of all people (i.e. the top 1% owns X%, the next 1% owns Y%). A perfectly flat graph indicates perfect communism. A sharply inflected curve indicates oligarchic plutocracy. An unspecified (and likely undiscovered) shape would be optimal economic conditions for civilization as a whole. My concern is that we are moving further away from that presumed optimum in the direction of oligarchic plutocracy, which historically has resulted in violent rebellion, every time it has been observed.
But I agree with you that, for the most part, the rising tide of wealth has raised all ships. Inequality is a natural outgrowth of the massive influx of wealth.
A lot of people who have comparative wealth and have worked hard for it feel they have earned their wealth, disregarding the fact that a lot of other people work equally hard and do not have the same amount of wealth. This sort of thing muddies the issue.
Also muddying the issue is the fact that some people think that if X amount of money could lift Y poor people out of poverty, vs making rich person Z marginally richer, it is self-evidently the case that it is better and therefore right for X to be spent on the Y rather than person Z. I.e. as long as some people are below a minimum acceptable level of wealth, all wealth inequality is, in this view, bad.
>wealth inequality that is caused by things that are seen as inherently unfair, like the family you are born into.
I, like my father before me, am making sacrifices to benefit my future generations. It's not unfair, it's called being responsible and thinking about the future.
edit: changed delusional to short sighted.
Is it wrong to work hard to improve your children's future prospects?
Nothing is wrong it.
> I'd be really interested to hear why people disagree with this
It's a blatant strawman.
If you provide for your child 1000x what they need (during childhood and/or via inheritance) that is not bad (in the scope of this discussion, no other details implied). What is bad is if you have 1000000x what your children need and you built this on the backs of people who will squaler in poverty until the day they die and the only thing you use the wealth for is to acquire more wealth. That is bad. The strawman makes it sound like you are defending an average middle class engineer saving up for their children's college as if they were in the wrong, as if they were on the winning side of increasing income inequality.
Nobody here is arguing against a middle class person saving up for their kids college. They're against people who actually have ridiculous amounts of wealth and the rapid growth of that inequality.
A certain amount of inequality encourages economic growth and innovation. Zero wealth inequality would be perfect communism. A lot of people--myself included--presume that would retard growth due to a lack of incentives.
The maximum amount of wealth inequality would be for one person to own the entire world, and for everyone else to have nothing. This is practically impossible, of course. We can only approximate it, such as by 1% of Earth's population owning 99% of its wealth. This generally encourages the other 99% of the people to take some of that wealth by force, without regard to any increased productivity the current owner may be able to squeeze out via economies of scale or capital investment, or whatever.
A medium amount of inequality encourages people with less wealth to do neat and interesting things in order to become more wealthy (economic mobility), and for those with more to make capital investments that increase productivity, purchase luxury goods, and finance megaprojects (concentration of capital).
So the problem is when the amount of wealth inequality moves away from the optimal profile, which remains undiscovered. My perception is that we are moving away from the optimum, rather than toward it.
No need to presume anything, we have a number of examples to look at throughout history. Actually, stunted economic growth is the best case scenario for socialist systems. Most of them achieve no more than mass starvation and death of millions of citizens.
A certain number of socialist believers must be retained to keep a system of unequal property from running away into oligarchic plutocracy. It's like putting a harmonic damper on a pendulum, to keep it from swinging too far, while still retaining the same amount of energy in the system.
Ideological purity is murder. Don't waste your intellect arguing over the various types of extremism.
If there were no socialists, capitalists would be living in a hellish dystopia. If there were no capitalists, socialists would be living in a hellish dystopia. So just stick the chocolate in the peanut butter (or put the peanut butter in the chocolate) and enjoy your mixed economic system.
It can be argued that inequality leads to more utility being created overall, but I feel this justification is rarely scrutinised in much detail. Instead it is elevated to a moral premise that those who are able to earn more "deserve" their excess share of society's resources, regardless of how many suffer for their consequently smaller share.
Personally, it seems to me we have the resources to feed and shelter everyone in our society, and I'm highly sceptical that doing so would create less utility overall than whatever it is we're doing with those resources instead. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if this argument extends to the world as a whole.
I could be mistaken though.
Dumb luck is also being born into a family where you'll inherit millions of dollars, but tell everyone you worked hard for it.
Also, maybe I was lucky to have been able to come across stuff like this in my life to better shape my view of reality:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-rol...
There is clear envidence for a “gender pay gap” - in that women get paid on average less than men. Whether that is a bad thing which we need to do something about is a different question, which heavily depends on your overall gender role opinions.
If you control for education, years of experience, and skills there is no such gap.
Do we group by job position, skill level, education, experience? And what is "same experience"? In tech, it is usually counted in years, regardless on how many hours you work during the year. Compare to airline pilots where the metric is flight hours. The same kind questions can be asked for all other points. Even the wage can be tweaked. Is it by year? working day? hour? What about pauses, overtime, work at home, commute time, ...
By carefully choosing the metrics, we can say whatever we want.
The question to ask then is why does that happen? Are the reasons for that valid? Are equal opportunities available? Do we even want equal opportunities as a society or an individual?
Because women, more typically than men, raise children as their full time job.
We still need more wage transparency. Companies should be required to publicly list all wages, because lack of transparency is detrimental to the workers.
There's no perceptible gap in wages between
almost any pair of social groups,
After all, if women are more represented among junior positions and less among senior positions, some people might blame childbirth - but other people will blame systematic biases like family-unfriendly policies and unconscious biases.
Well in itself, I don't think that's enough to say that things are fair.
For example, that wouldn't take into account hiring biases. If women have a real hard time getting jobs in those roles, what does it matter if people in those roles get paid the same, regardless of gender?
I feel the main issue with the gender gap discrimination discussion is that people try to simplify it to show that there is or isn't a bias, and it's really easy to simplify it in a way that would support either side of the discussion. The discussion is a really complex one and there are so many aspects to it that can't be accounted for (confidence in negotiating salary, aversion to risk or working longer hours, likelihood to want to take time off for family, differences in natural abilities, etc).
>The gender pay gap is the difference between the average earnings of men and women, expressed relative to men’s earnings. For example, ‘women earn 15% less than men per hour’.
But this is not what should be measured. If there's a mining company that employs 90% men working down in the mine and 10% women doing accountancy, then of course the average wages of men are going to be different than those of women, but that tells us nothing about equal and fair treatment of men and women at this company.
It's a perfectly reasonable thing to measure as long as it's not being used as a proxy for equal pay (which it explicitly isn't in this case).
What it can show is systemic bias. Now, unlike unequal pay, it's not necessarily blatantly unfair bias. It might not be unfair at all depending on the detail.
But knowing that there's a gap and understanding the reasons for the gap can be beneficial.
Lies and statistics.
Also, as we can all see, it is still being published by time.com in 2018.
This suggests where the best opportunities for improvement lie: equalizing parental leave (so that the parental career penalty is distributed more equitably), decoupling health insurance from employment (to lower costs on business for parental leave), and so on.
If you mean giving the same amount of leave to both fathers and mothers, isn't that already the norm?
Also, offering this is one thing, but getting parents to use it is quite another. Many fathers probably avoid taking so much leave precisely because it does harm their career. How would you fix that?
>decoupling health insurance from employment (to lower costs on business for parental leave)
This decoupling is a good idea for many reasons, but I don't see how it would decrease costs on businesses for parental leave. Health insurance doesn't compensate businesses for having to pay people for time that they spend away from work, it just covers their medical bills. Most of that paid time is just parents staying at home with their new kid.
In the US it's nowhere close.
"The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) requires 12 weeks of unpaid leave annually for mothers of newborn or newly adopted children... "California is the first state to offer paid paternity leave weeks (six weeks, partial payment). In the rest of the US, paternity pay weeks are not offered (therefore neither paternity paid leave weeks)." [1]
Of course companies can offer what they want above the requirements, but even when it's offered it's very common for the paternity leave to lag far behind maternity leave. For instance, even for a company like Apple, which is generally pretty progressive,
"U.S. employees will now have a few more weeks of paid parental leave: Young Smith says expectant mothers can take up to four weeks before a delivery and upwards of 14 weeks after and expectant fathers (and other non-birth parents) can take six-week parental leaves." [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternity_leave_in_the_United_...
>In the US it's nowhere close.
I think that wikipedia page has misleading or outdated information in the summary. FMLA leave covers both mothers and fathers equally.
From the Department of Labor: "Both mother and father are entitled to FMLA leave for the birth of their child, or placement with the employee of a child for adoption or foster care."
Bringing up California further confuses the issues, since that is about paid leave whereas FMLA is unpaid. I think the 6 weeks of paid leave in CA comes from the employer-paid disability insurance.
FWIW I did some web searching for the policies at big tech companies (which of course offer more than the minimums. The following article is a bit dated (2015) but seems to give a nice summary of maternity- and paternity-leave policies.
http://time.com/money/4098469/paid-parental-leave-google-ama...
The TLDR: some (e.g., Facebook, Netflix) have parity between mothers and fathers but most of them (e.g., Amazon, Apple, Google, MS, Twitter) give at least some extra weeks for moms and/or birth moms.
The Clinton-era FMLA grants 12 weeks unpaid maternity leave. 25 states expand on that, and 25 do not.
> Many fathers probably avoid taking so much leave precisely because it does harm their career.
Some will take it. If utilization rates are not equal, that's not a reason to withhold the opportunity.
> I don't see how it would decrease costs on businesses for parental leave. Health insurance doesn't compensate businesses for having to pay people for time that they spend away from work
The FMLA only provides for unpaid leave. However, businesses continue to pay for health insurance during the leave period.
I never said it was. However, if it's unpaid leave, it's pretty obvious why many would refuse to take it, or not take as much as is available: they can't afford the lack of pay. How are parents supposed to pay their bills if they're both taking a 12-week unpaid vacation? Health insurance doesn't pay your rent. So it seems pretty obvious that for many couples, the woman (who generally earns less, and also usually breastfeeds) will take all/more leave and stay home, while the man will get back to work so their finances don't take too much of a hit.
Of course, for couples where their employers offer equal and paid parental leave, we might see different results.
Why should that be our expectation? The career penalty is a tax on mothers and a subsidy for fathers. That such inequity is normalized is why "adjusting" the gender gap does not solve it.
I'll also do an aside here and point out that generous (paid) and equal family leave ends up being a subsidy for parents and a tax on childless people, and also in a way a tax on single parents.
Women get rejected from law and med school too. That doesn't explain why they don't go into software.
> better advancement potential
Plenty of women go into fields without much advancement potential. If your argument is that in programming often the only way to advance is management, then that's also true of the vast majority of jobs, including accountancy which attracts a lot of women.
> job security
Programmers have very good job security compared to a lot of people these days. In particular, doing a law degree is a massive risk given how hard it is to land a traineeship, yet plenty of women still do law degrees.
> that are more social
What makes you assume that all women want jobs where they can be social? And what makes you say programming isn't a social job? It requires working with other people as part of a team. There's not much interaction with customers, but that's also true of a lot of accountancy/other office jobs that have an even gender ratio.
> A lot of women go into programming because it's been hyped up so much, and then either going into management quickly or leaving the industry because they hate the work
That's true of both men and women in teaching.
> and also because they feel like they're not really doing anything to help the world (and in the vast majority of programming jobs, it's true, you aren't).
How many lawyers, accountants, personal assistants or managers are directly doing something to help the world?
>What makes you assume that all women want jobs where they can be social?
This has been shown by research. Women are trained from an early age to be more social than men.
>And what makes you say programming isn't a social job? It requires working with other people as part of a team.
I don't think I need to justify myself here. Most programming involves sitting at a computer and typing, and not in a group in real-time. It also certainly has a reputation for being asocial, though that's changed more recently with the "brogrammer" trend, but not for the better as far as women are concerned. It sure as hell isn't social the way medicine is, where the work is all about meeting one-on-one with patients all day long and working hands-on (usually literally) with them.
>Women get rejected from law and med school too. That doesn't explain why they don't go into software.
Well, for the med school rejects, I can't imagine what programming would offer them. They obviously want 1) a high-paying career, 2) to help people hands-on, 3) a social job. Programming might offer 1, and that's it. Women like this will probably fall back to nursing school, or maybe some other career that's more social and less technical than programming.
Really, the only good point you bring up here is that a lot of women go into accounting, since that does indeed seem to have a lot of overlap in career traits with programming.
Why isn't this true of men?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb89YALUzL4
It is intellectually dishonest to cherry pick the variables that suit the answer the researcher already prescribed before the analysis even began. The entire premise of these studies is laughable until they are done and published correctly. It is not and should not be acceptable to be dishonest in this way though science has began to allow it more and more in order to not be called names...