Gender Pay Gap Bot calls out brands tweeting about International Women's Day | Hacker News Reader

Gender Pay Gap Bot calls out brands tweeting about International Women's Day

abc.net.au

2 pointsinterpol_p10 comments

Could someone help me understand this gender pay gap issue? My understanding is that it would be illegal to just pay a woman less for the same job. And in my company for SWE women are actually paid more on average. Is the issue with total averages? Like on average, across all jobs, a man is paid more than a woman? If so, I don't think attacking brands is really gonna help anything, instead we would need to persuade more women to enter economically valued careers like Finance and CS.

The bot takes the median hourly pay for women and compares it to the median hourly pay for men

I don't think this bot is "attacking" brands. It's simply posting facts about gender pay disparity. A few of the brands the bot retweeted show a gap in favour of women

Perhaps our sense of what an "economically valued career" is is already skewed by our history of gender differences. Perhaps what men consider to be economically valuable has been prioritised for the last few centuries because men have typically been in power, leading to today's system of rewarding people economically for choosing careers which are deemed valuable by men?

Ah, I see. Thanks for the explanation. That being said I'm gonna have to disagree with your last point. The value of careers is determined by the free market, not some ancient social norms made by the patriarchy. SWEs are paid more than liberal arts majors not because of historically backward value systems, but because a SWE can have a hugely profitable impact on a business that other jobs can't.

I guess I don't have as much faith in the free market to accurately ascertain the value of human labour, but fair enough to disagree on this

Let's consider an airline.

A quick Google search reveals that 6% of pilots are female and 76% of flight attendants are female.

If that is true then the bot isn't really an accurate representation of gender pay disparity as much as it is a representation of position pay disparity.

If two individuals perform exactly the same role, then yes, I think it's fairly clear that their compensation should be the same and that (in any progressive society) it would be illegal for employers not to ensure that.

However, for environments where job offers are made individually and work tasks vary: would there be a problem with paying women more (or, equivalently, paying men less) until the gender averages become equal?

(in those latter environments, I don't think job output measurement is particularly precise as-is (I could be mistaken), so it seems like it should be a fairly easy for organizations to address it)

Institutional discrimination? Sounds like a great idea.

No, I think it's a relatively simple, routinely offensive problem that few organizations solve, largely due to inertia and ego.

We run lint and code style checkers on our codebases nowadays to avoid useless debate over details we shouldn't care about: I don't see why there is delay on equalizing pay and why it will be seen any differently in hindsight.

Let's get it done, make it standard, and help free up everyone's time and mental energy to focus on more important problems.

The gender pay gap as it is calculated, ascribes all of the difference between men and women's pay to one thing: gender discrimination.

Women seeking out higher-earning partners? Women taking less high-paying, high-stress or STEM jobs? Men working harder jobs, retiring later and dying earlier?

All gender discrimination that benefits men because in the aggregate, they earn more.

They studiously ignore life choices, they don't compare men vs women at the same level or in the same position, and they definitely don't exhort women to take higher-paying jobs or date men earning less than them.

Meanwhile my experience is that women in tech are absolutely welcome and paid just as well as men.

Do men in lower paying jobs also start working for free in October?

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