Given that Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe were conspiring to limit labor competition, constant vigilance of tech companies' labor practices are totally warranted.
Completely agree constant vigilance is important. It also shouldn't matter that many employees can switch jobs. All employees cannot (personal circumstances, visas, etc). It also doesn't waive the company of its responsibility for fair pay.
[1]https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/04/24/google-apple-in...
As an alternative explanation for any observed difference in pay... Anecdotally, there are lots of non-minority male nerds who spend ridiculous amounts of time reading tech books and working on work related side projects, to the point that they have no social lives and may never have a family. Even if we compare a sample of male and female candidates with the education and years of experience, a few outlier workaholic geeks (especially given power-law compensation) could throw off the averages and make it seem that women are discriminated against.
I'd also like to see research that controls for things like... what school did the individuals study at, not just their degree? A CSU grad will probably make less than a UC grad. What classes did they take? (To control for people who take minimums vs take intense courses.) How many hours per week do they devote to their career outside of work on average? How many hours do they work on average? And so on. If these are difficult variables to control for, that makes my point... we can't say it's a result of discrimination unless we've controlled for all the actual variables.
To zoom out for a minute... I'm very much interested in everyone getting equal opportunity and equal pay for equal work. But it does NOBODY any favors to try to make political points with sloppy or intentionally misleading research, because all it does is alienate potential allies and make them think the debate is not honest.
> I have not observed anyone ever trying to intentionally underpay female or minority candidates
Most bad things that happen in our world are not intentional. Car accidents kill millions each year.
One idea you may want to consider is that salaries are often set based on what someone earned previously. Therefore one bad actor can roll through 10 or more later positions without anyone acting intentionally.
> there are lots of non-minority male nerds who spend ridiculous amounts of time... to the point that they have no social lives and may never have a family
An alternative way to parse these same facts is that white men are more likely to be in an economic condition where it is possible to spend time on non-income-generating activities. For that matter I think at least some men believe a social or family life is not something they could have achieved. In any case I think it is harder to disentangle choices from cultural forces than you think.
> I’d also like to see research that controls for things like... how many hours do they work on average?
I’d like to see research that explains why working more hours is good for society. Buried in your questions are assumptions like “equal pay is fine as long as it doesn’t change the system too much” but the diversifist assumption is “lack of equal pay is a code smell for underlying problems in the system.”
> we can’t say it’s a result of discrimination unless we’ve controlled for all the actual variables
I think here you are projecting your values onto another position. (Intentional) discrimination is the problem that would annoy you, and so therefore diversity advocates should do research to establish a problem you would care about. From the perspective of incorporating you as a political constituency I don’t think you’re wrong.
However, the actual pro-diversity position is something like “I’m annoyed that our society values traits common to X group and not traits common to Y or Z.” As a person in X group this argument is statistically unlikely to impress you, but it is harder to tease out if this is because you intentionally dislike Y (“intentional discrimination”), if there is something important we will lose if we start to prefer more Y traits (perhaps a traditional conservative type position) or if it is just hard to envision a society different than the actual one we live in.
If the diversity advocates laid out the problem as "we would prefer society not require people to work 80 hour weeks and give up having families to get ahead, and we want to discourage people from doing that so we can all live well, otherwise it's a race to the bottom", that's a fantastic, HONEST argument. I would be willing to listen to and entertain such an argument. Historically this sort of argument was actually successful when applied to conservative groups (avoiding a race to the bottom).
My main concern is that the current debate isn't honest. "Group X is discriminated against"... no, nobody cares that they're in Group X, they care that Person Y spent the last 10 years working 80 hour weeks, and that person regardless of having the exact same degree and exact same number of years of experience, brings a depth of skills that nobody working an average of 40 hour weeks can hope to match, and that gets reflected in the competition for them and in their salaries.
> An alternative way to parse these same facts is that white men are more likely to be in an economic condition where it is possible to spend time on non-income-generating activities. For that matter I think at least some men believe a social or family life is not something they could have achieved. In any case I think it is harder to disentangle choices from cultural forces than you think.
Are you aware of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-equality_paradox , where, as one article puts it, "In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions"? That is a piece of evidence pointing in the opposite direction.
> However, the actual pro-diversity position is something like “I’m annoyed that our society values traits common to X group and not traits common to Y or Z.”
I think that, in the eyes of most regular people, all legitimacy of the "pro-diversity position" has come from its message of "discrimination is bad". When it starts getting into territory of "We should change how jobs and society and everything work, not for the purpose of making them work better, but for the purpose of equalizing demographic representation", then I think most people would jump ship. I think the pro-diversity advocates are generally aware of this, and that this is why they try to hide the differences in public as much as possible.
A good example of this is how some academics have come up with a new definition of "racism" as "institutionalized racism" or "power plus privilege". The word "racist" is conventionally defined to mean "harboring racial prejudice"; everyone understands why that's bad, which is why "racism" is a bad word in the eyes of the public and an effective smear. The academics could have chosen a new term or phrase if they wanted to be clear. But by reusing the word "racism", these academics can say things like "Policies that explicitly discriminate in favor of certain races aren't racist, as long as those races are 'minorities'" and "Policies that select the most qualified people for a job are racist, if being the most qualified happens to be anticorrelated with being a minority", and call their political opponents racist, and win arguments that way because the public understands that racism = racial prejudice and discrimination = bad. It is a sleight of hand, which depends on this confusion of terms; I don't expect them to try to clear up the confusion. It can also be interpreted as a motte and bailey: the motte is "I'm just saying racial discrimination is bad, I don't see how you can disagree with that", while the bailey is things like "If SAT scores are different between different races, then the SAT is racist, and college admissions should give extra weight to racial-minority candidates just because of their race."
I don't really think there's a need to research the systemic issues when it comes to enforcement actions against individual bad actors.
Well, we know about all the cases publicly because case records are public.
While people working at Oracle may make more than the average person their wages are still depressed through big business cartels presenting a united front and thus a monospony. There is a market failure and people are responding by suing Oracle.
It’s quite obvious that this idea was never true: companies were quite willing to forgo some money to keep their workforce male & white, to not approve mortgages for minorities trying to move to the “wrong” part of town (redlining), etc.
In any case, your suggestion, even if workable, would seem to be eminently discriminatory: changing jobs, and everything it can entail such as moving a whole family, is in itself a harm nobody should suffer just for their gender/skin color/etc.
In practical matters, people are often not aware of discrimination they suffer until long after, because compensation information is regarded as secret, and because it requires aggregation of many data points to show systemic biases.
A lot of seemingly intuitive things about wage discrimination fall apart upon closer inspection. It's a really complex problem that in some cases has counter intuitively gotten worse since the Jim Crow days.
Except if you're an immigrant, you can't just jump ship.
But you have friends who work at Oracle, so you must have a very informed view. Great insight.