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Comment by mjmahone17 | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of specific data presented in the article, such as that women have higher writing standards, in the form of more revisions to publication. If we have concrete data that is only explainable via anti-female or pro-male bias, we should probably conclude that bias (sexism) is the primary cause for disparities in career progression. Other factors may also contribute to the effect, but arguing that sexism isn’t a primary factor, despite data showing sexism has a strong explanatory effect, is not much different from arguing that the world’s warming probably isn’t human caused because we’ve been coming out of an ice age regardless of human activity. While likely true, we have enough data to conclude that’s not the primary explanation for recent global warming.

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It's not as though this assumption hasn't been incredibly off base in the past. The entire earnings gap started off at women earning 77 cents on the male dollar, until we controlled for field, and then specific profession, and then hours worked, and seniority. Controlling for each of these things has moved the earnings gap to less than 5%, and people still will claim that the last 5% must be due to sexism. My question is, why? It's been the wrong hypothesis so far.

When I was hiring folks female candidates always asked for less money than male candidates. Even when counseling female friends about what they should ask for during their job search they still low-balled themselves.

Often it was much more than a 5% difference.

I’m not sure why you’d assume that the field people choose is not related to sexism, or why seniority is not related to sexism. Maybe they aren’t (I don’t know the data either way), but this specific article provides data that shows even when a field is dominated by women at the undergraduate level, it is still dominated by men at the tenured professor level, who make sexist decisions at various points in the pipeline.

Each of your controls could easily be explained by sexism.

Seniority: if men are given promotions when their work was the same quality as women who were passed over, that’s sexism.

Hours worked: if men are given full time employment, women part time, even when both want full time, that’s sexism.

Field and specific profession: if women are encouraged by the exact same mentors to choose different fields, despite having the same credentials as men, that’s sexism.

I’m not saying these factors are the result of sexism, but it’s a bit weird to assume it is, while having data in the original article that indicates all of the above, at least in academic professions, are significantly affected by sexism.

Is controlling for hours worked and seniority just controlling for the specific methods sexism works through? Seems like you could implement a sexist pay gap by rewarding bums in seats even when it's not economically productive, or by only promoting men, and that these measures would then be controlled for.

At this point, though, you would have conceded the point that women are not simply paid less than men on the basis of their sex, the earnings are actually a function of hours worked and seniority. The earnings gap would simply be a downstream effect of the new proposition you are putting forward, which is that the hours worked and seniority are denied to women on the basis of their sex.

This is not something that has been demonstrated to have been true, of course, but that would be the correct way of framing the argument.

No, it isn't, because controlling for those things means comparing the same job to the same job. The gap complaint is women being paid less for the exact same job and hours. It's different from the sexist glass ceiling.

This assumes that there is some essential demographic difference that causes fewer women to end up in these professions. While this may be somewhat supportable in the few fields where muscle mass is relevant, the contention here is that disparity in fields like higher education or software engineering is in itself due to sexism. It's nice that the pay gap isn't that large for women who do manage to enter these fields, but that doesn't address any of the underlying structural causes that prevent women from entering these fields in the first place.

There are many possible hypotheses apart from "sexism against women" though.

Consider the hypothesis of "sexism against men": society considers all women valuable, but only values men who earn a decent amount of money. Men who earn little find it hard to date and have children.

Wouldn't this "sexism against men" spur men to choose high earning (but maybe not fulfilling) professions, while women would feel more free to aim for personally fulfilling (but lower earning) professions?

By the metric of earnings this might look like sexism against women, but by the metric of life satisfaction, it might look more like sexism against men.

I'd strongly reject the argument that "society considers all women valuable", but even so, it's irrelevant to the discussion. Whether it's sexism against men or sexism against women, the disparity is a problem for women who want to enter these professions or for men who want to enter "more personally fulfilling" professions. Regardless of the framing, it's certainly true that inequality can lead to bad outcomes for both men and women.

> it's irrelevant to the discussion

I think it's relevant to how we approach a solution.

If the problem is "discrimination against educated women" then we need to educate people not to be biased against educated women.

If the problem is "discrimination against low earning men", we need to educate people not to be biased against low earning men.

My guess is that if women didn't prefer to date higher earning men, a lot of the wage gap would disappear. The social pressure to find a partner is huge, probably one of the strongest social forces in existence.

Blaming women for the wage gap because they supposedly don't date poor men certainly is one take.

Especially because this entire argument is about the various forms of friction women face as they try to climb the professional ladder.

From all available evidence females across most mammalian species strongly prefer and reproduce with the most successful males.

In humans women strongly prefer men who are more successful than them, are the gatekeepers of reproduction, and generally a greater proportion of women are able to pass on their genes than men.

By Darwinian logic this will inevitably result in a subpopulation of men who the most highly accomplished in certain sex selected traits in the species. This isn't excuse making its nature. I am consistently bemused at how the selfanointed intelligentsia of society that pride themselves on their rationality and scientific acumen refuse to accept this. You might as well cry about Gravity and hop up and down hoping you eventually fly up to the moon.

Why are women writing standard rated higher than men?

For every concrete data point that record a difference between men and women we could argue sexism as the cause. The idea that a higher graduation rate for women in education is caused by a biased education system against men is far from new.

When people talk about sexism as the cause for gender segregation I always look at studies and employment statistics from Sweden. The employment rate between women and men is practically identical, as is the ratio of women and men who work in gender segregated professions. A staggering 85% of women and 85% of men is in a profession that is classified as gender segregated. At the extreme end with higher than 99% gender segregation there is a slight higher number of women, and last year there was one university program where every student was of a single gender (female), but in general it look very similar for both men and women. The small 15% of both genders that work in gender equal professions is quite a small minority.

Arguing sexism as the primary factor for gender segregation is also the claim that both men and women face an identical amount of sexism. The Swedish numbers also support this. Yearly studies on harassment and sexual harassment in the work place show that both men and women face identical harassment when being a minority (down to a few percent variance). The report for 2018 actually marked nursing as the singular worst profession to be a gender minority in, where men reported highest rate of gender based bullying and sexual harassment. If I recall right, construction (women) was the highest the year before that.

But let me introduce an alternative theory to the idea that 85% of the population in Sweden is sexists. An old, about 50 years old study in human behavior that occasionally still get cited in psychology papers claim that most humans who perceive themselves as belonging to the majority group has an increased feeling of safety and confidence, while being in a minority has the opposite effect. This provides for a simple explanation to the gender equality paradox. There more equality and choices there is in choosing a profession, the more likely that the only difference between several professions is which group holds the position of dominance.

> There is a lot of specific data presented in the article, such as that women have higher writing standards, in the form of more revisions to publication.

The data comes from this paper: http://www.erinhengel.com/research/publishing_female.pdf

That paper assumes that "higher writing standards" means "simple vocabulary and short sentences".

So you might get a bad score for

> There is a lot of specific data presented in the article, such as that women have higher writing standards, in the form of more revisions to publication.

And a better score for

> The article refers to examples like women writing better, and rewriting their work more.

Whether "simple words" really means better writing for academic journals is not clearcut to me.

Overall, the readability calculator here: http://www.readabilityformulas.com/free-readability-formula-... scored your comment "difficult to read", which the paper would have said meant bad writing, and the OP article would have called a man's "poorly written mush".

I'm not saying this to insult you, but to point out that the article's definition of good writing may not be something you agree with.

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