Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

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I put it in scare quotes for a reason because that's the phrasing people use when talking about but saying "we know many of the factors that contribute to the wage gap and when you control for them it mostly disappears" misses the point.

One of the factors you control for is job title. When you only compare people with the same title the wage gap shrinks a bit. For some reason people interpret this as "Great! Not a problem. Moving on." when it completely ignores that as a group women holding lower paying job titles is itself indicative of a problem -- career paths that are dominated by women are seen as less valuable and girls are socially pressured away from more lucrative careers (you know like software engineering where every woman in our field including myself can tell you stories of being the only girl in her class) by parents, academic advisors, the school and workplace culture the fields cultivate and pushed into "softer", "more nurturing", "more creative" career paths compared to boys.

Which it itself a problem for boys because boys who want to go into things like art, music, design, writing, fashion, social work, are mercilessly pressured away from it where girls are more likely to be encouraged. The patriarchy hurts everyone folks.

Not every person wants to continually climb the ladder.

In general men are more likely to value social status because a man with a high career title is more attractive to women, whereas a woman's title does not increase her ability to find a husband.

In fact, women by and large prefer men to have a higher career title than themselves. Is it any surprise men want to climb the ladder more.

Do you have a citation for these assertions?

https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/men-...

Just look at the charts. Honestly, failure to understand this simple aspect of human nature is the reason for a lot of social ill, ranging from 'incels' to the disastrous egalitarian social policies.

I'd be careful drawing broad conclusions from that study given the data source (https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/2016-fales.pdf): The bulk of the sample data came from an NBC News online poll. Online polls are subject to known biases (https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2020/02/18/assessing-the...).

The second study (with a smaller but believed to be more representative sample) asked slightly different questions, and concluded that there was some statistical significance on "Makes at least as much money as I do" and "Has a successful career," which don't by themselves support the hypothesis that "women by and large prefer men to have a higher career title than themselves" (though I can agree that it waggles its eyebrows and points in that direction; perhaps suggesting follow-up studies).

> I can agree that it waggles its eyebrows

Most people across the world wouldn't raise their eyebrows, since such claims are pretty much universal throughout most civilizations.

I'd also be very careful throwing around a word as heavy as "most" when talking about something as broad and far-ranging as the collective experience of human civilizations.

The [citation needed] for that is the stuff of multiple lifetimes of research.

The [citation needed] argument just says, "I'm going to ignore everything you present if it isn't proven, despite the fact that I've not proven my own position."

My position is simply to be skeptical of these assertions. People throw around a lot of unsourced claims; skepticism is often a correct response. There's nothing for one to prove when one's own position is "I'm not convinced by your argument."

(For example, when the citation was provided on the claim a few layers upthread, it indeed was revealed to be wanting, as the bulk of its data relied on Internet polls).

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