Hacker News Reader

Comment by ShadowFaxSam | Hacker News Reader

"Applies only to unmarried, childless women under 30 who live in cities"

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.

View on HN

I don't think you can justify your position "these young women were better prepared and organised than their male counterpart in their 20's".

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.

If it is true, it implies we need help programs for the young men who are being systematically discrminated against or otherwise oppressed by society. That includes new assistance programs to boost the rate of college graduation, since young men are so badly falling behind there (with projections for it to get much worse yet).

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?

Peg Tyre wrote the classic book on this 10 years ago: https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Boys-Surprising-Problems-Educ...

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.

Always appreciate different news sources and ways to further educate myself.

>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.

You worked as a financial analyst but yet don't seem to grasp the monumental difference between "women earn 80 percent less than men", which you cited above as the common narrative, and "women earn 80 percent of what men earn" or "women earn 20 percent less than men", which are two accurate descriptions of the common narrative.

I have to laugh at this because I definitely noticed my error after I posted this. I was waiting for someone to comment on the mathematical error.

Thank you, yes I understand how percentages work. Tip of the hat to you.

An alternative explanation, given the difference in numbers here, is that discrimination against women means that the only women remaining in the field are those who are the most competent and well prepared for the job, whereas less competent men are given the benefit of the doubt, and allowed into the same positions.

Yes, what a clever, politically convenient explanation.

Nope, the number of women and men in the workplace is almost the same in countries like Iceland, while the wage difference between males and females in their 20s is still there.

The fact remains that there are more women going to college and getting a degree than men. So I don't understand why you say we don't need to balance that...

It depends on the job. What you say applies mainly to Twitter-empowered employees at consumer-facing tech companies.

>You say that women in their 20s are better at something than men in their 20s

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.

Not trying to drum up any controversy and I fully admit it is a small sample size. As someone who falls in the demographic "Under 30 and Living in a Metropolitan City" I feel comfortable sharing some of my own personal and my friends experiences in their particular office as well.

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.

I wasn't accusing you of trying to drum up controversy, I was accusing PunchTornado of doing that. They were the one trying to force you to extrapolate your limited experience to the entire population and then use that strawman for target practice.

Well, way say it then if you don't want to generalise it and give an explanation for the findings in the article. However you put it, your comment says that it may be that women in their 20s are more organized because in my company I observed this. If this statement is ok with you then fine, but it wouldn't be ok to say it loudly in some companies.

Don't worry your intent was clear - some people simply read what they want/expect to read, but some of us are still able to recognise a personal observation.

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...".

Thank you for this. I couldn't agree more with this in regards to some comments here.

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.

the very small sample of men I was exposed to in a small amount of time at one single professional workplace were better programmers than the very small sample of women I was exposed to in a small amount of time at one single professional workplace

Previous studies like these have generally shown that young attractive females make considerably more than male employees with a similar level of education and experience, but as you go up in age the trend reverses with older or less attractive female employees making less. Basically there is a bias, but it isn't so much gender in general as it is being attractive sexually (or not as the case may be). I'm not aware of any study that has tested if that applies to both genders (from the data it very clearly applies to females, but there may be a lesser effect applied to males as well), but that would be something interesting to look at. I suspect it would show there is a similar bias applied to males, but with a significantly smaller effect that's mostly lost in the noise.

> I suspect it would show there is a similar bias applied to males, but with a significantly smaller effect that's mostly lost in the noise.

In that case height is a factor and the taller the male, the more he earns.

https://www.apa.org/monitor/julaug04/standing.aspx

Reply on news.ycombinator.com