https://www.nyguild.org/post/new-york-times-tech-guild-votes...
I wonder how other news outlets will cover this, if at all. They’re probably afraid others will get the same idea.
> * Black women and Hispanic or Latina women, who make up just over 6 percent of the Tech Guild, make 33% less than white men in the unit
> * Black workers, who make up 7 percent of the union, earn 26% less than white workers
Do they work equivalent jobs with equivalent experience?
The pay gap as a systemic issue (for equal work for equal hours with equal qualifications) has been debunked a thousand times over. But while it's certainly possible (likely?) that some individual companies have a racially or gender-driven pay gap, it's a far stretch to assume that the NYT is one of them.
Equality of opportunity is good, giving people a leg up early in their lives when they've been disadvantaged, regardless of their race or gender, is good. "Equity" for the sake of it is racist.
Obviously? A newspaper is exactly the kind of business to hire based on your personal narrative (including 100% of protected class intersections). That's the entire point of the opinion column. Granted, I don't think that the folks being discussed here are publishing any personal opinions, and I doubt the times is doing anything legally actionable or we would have heard about it, but the idea that they don't consider these factors just because it's illegal is laughable.
If you look at a very small sample of people and one racial minority or gender has all the "lower" jobs, that doesn't tell you what jobs they were "offered" it just tells you what jobs they applied for.
I'd be curious to see an analysis of downvoted comments in political threads and what their general ideological bent was.
if above demographics aren't getting CS majors (or whatever other educational equivalent), there isn't much prospective employers can do about it
- african americans are statistically more likely to originate from lower on socio economic ladder than, say, asian americans
Thus when you get a bunch of job applicants, you might get an asian american with a Yale degree (James) and an african american with a community college degree (John). Affirmative action or other DEI pressures might force you to hire both James and John, but James will probably be able to outperform John due to higher initial degree of education. Furthermore, James may have had parents who networked and ensured he got good internships and experience growing up while John didn't have that opportunity.
So it's not that the company is offering John a "dog job", it's just, James's capacity to perform in current role and take on new responsibilities is at a higher initial state than John's, so it's not unthinkable he would climb corporate ladder faster than John given those initial advantages. Pay gap is a natural consequence that follows.
But Yale basically applies a filter function and attracts the top 0.01% of high school graduates every year (plus some less elite legacy students and DEI admits). When you hire a Yale graduate, that's what you are paying for. Not the Yale education. If you could find a similar filter function some other way, you'd hire that 0.01% of high school graduates via that filter function.
And in fact companies are always trying to get ahead of their competitors and find other, less well-known, filter functions to get high performers who others don't know about. In the 1980s and 1990s Microsoft was among the first to discover that Indian IIT graduates were products of an extreme filter function applied to Indian high school students (IIT grads are like top 0.0001% of Indian high school grads). For a long time Microsoft hired those engineers for cents on the dollar. By the 2000s though, the word was out ... hiring IIT grads is as difficult as getting any other high performing grads.
There was also a brief period of time when Google had an edge in recruiting by identifying high school kids who were good at programming competitions online and via contributors to projects in Google's open source projects. But now, that signal is well-known too.
So John's community college degree doesn't matter if John is an elite performer.
Generally, people are completely unaware of what top 0.01% of performance looks like because we are so rarely around these people unless we are in some very elite institution or working on some project which attracts such people.
Among the people who are qualified for the position, they are prohibited by law from considering race or gender or other protected characteristics when making a hiring decision.
The wage gap, at firms without a history of discrimination, is almost entirely determined by women having their first child and the support structures around it (subsidized childcare, paternity leave, flexible hours).[1][2] This suggests the assertiveness is probably not the issue.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisaconn/2023/11/08/nobel-winne... [2] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/j...
I don't know if that's the case here. But it would be good to investigate all the possible factors before coming to any conclusions.
There was a case recently in the UK where Next (high street clothing chain) were paying their warehouse staff more than their shop staff for (apparently) similar work. The shop workers had a higher proportion of female workers than the warehouse workers (something like 70% vs 50%).
Next claimed this was because the market rate was higher for warehouse workers. They got sued by the female shop workers for discrimination.
They lost and have to pay back pay. Now... you might think 70% vs 50% is barely a difference - did the Next bosses really discriminate? Surely not. Well, that's what the court thought too. Apparently even though they accepted that there was no conscious or unconscious discrimination, the effect of the pay difference was in itself discriminatory.
I dunno how that makes any sense. The shop workers should have sued the IT department and then they'd be in for a serious pay day!
Presumably the rational approach would be mild skepticism about confidence, not specifically accepting or rejecting any claim. Which leaves this well within the grounds of "plausible".
I've worked pretty hard to teach my daughter than it doesn't hurt to ask for more than offered, or even to price yourself out of a job if there are multiple opportunities on the table. Women tend to naturally optimize for stability over maximum income and other factors and to accept a given deal vs negotiate. Much like men are far more likely to move to another location for career advancement and higher pay. There are natural tendencies that training can overcome which is likely better than trying to price control.
Then it’s impossible to determine if its sexism
> Two-thirds of the members fired by New York Times management since the Times Tech Guild formed have been from underrepresented groups.
https://www.epi.org/publication/what-is-the-gender-pay-gap-a...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/07/01/racial-ge...
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/women-of-color-and-...
It's difficult to parse, because it says that experience and occupational choice does pay a significant role in the gap. But then editorializes and claims that less experience and occupational choice are due to discriminatory issues in the broader culture.
Culture war issues like this are unfalsifiable in either direction and largely reflect the political persuasion of the person making the argument than anything quantifiable.
Here's another example from the American Progress article:
> Women of color disproportionately work in jobs within the service, care, and domestic work sectors—jobs with historically low pay.
This is an empirically verifiable claim.
> This is due to occupational segregation, which is the funneling of women and men into different jobs based on gender and racial norms and expectations
This is an unfalsifiable political claim. Some unknown force, by some unknown mechanism, forces people to make certain choices.
But as my career goes on into the years I find that I'm working with less women and less minorities and not more. Despite the best of efforts...
If I were to look for evidence though, I would point things squarely at the interview process... In the past if you could operate a computer you were hired and assumed you would figure it out. Nowadays it's much more about fitting a certain narrative that's largely down to socioeconomic factors... I don't think I've ever worked with someone in tech who went to an HBCU, but lots of people who were token at NYU, Yale, etc...
I conducted around 500 interviews at my last company at all stages: initial screen, technical, architectural, etc. There were simply far more white men applying. (And this is in Atlanta where we have a highly bimodal racial distribution.)
It wasn't like we weren't bending over backwards to attract diverse candidates. I personally went to HBCUs on outreach programs, and there were dozens of annual Girls / Women Who Code programs and partnerships that other folks on my team participated in.
I was once even told I couldn't recommend someone for a role because they weren't diverse.
Look to undergraduate enrollment.
It's not the "interviewing" itself but it's the recruiting stage. If you're looking at fresh graduates you're already significantly skewing things. It's hard to blame companies for this, but a few of the bootcamps are cranking out nontraditional candidates and many companies still overlook them in hiring.
Remember that story from the other day about founding Valve and Gabe recruiting game modders to his team? Two of them were pizza delivery guys and thought they were being called on a prank.
To be honest though, I think we're all lying to ourselves. The job isn't about ability to code. We're not looking for people with those skills. Most companies hiring are looking for stable clock-punchers who will do things that make their manager look good.
Such statistics are meaningless without more context. For example, are women over-represented in entry level positions? Do they work the same hours? the same overtime? And so forth.
Articles that present such statistics are pushing propaganda.
The only explanations I can rationalize is that management isnt aware of the pay difference, or they are aware but they're more sexist than they are greedy.
> In the United States, for example, the non-adjusted average woman's annual salary is 79–83% of the average man's salary, compared to 95–99% for the adjusted average salary
It's the same in essentially every western developed country. Discrimination on the basis of gender is no longer accepted, the disparities that persist are due to different choices.
If women were paid less for the same work companies would benefit from staffing mostly women.
And you should, as any selfish greedy company would do exactly that.
The beauty of the free market is it relies on selfish, greedy behavior to produce prosperity, rather than hopelessly trying to crush such behavior.
Note: I've been pretty heavily libertarian minded for a long time, so this observation has mostly been an outside perspective even though I'm currently more inclined to move R as a secondary/pragmatic position. There are some aspects of R and D I'm inclined to support.
"Equal pay for equal work" is a much more compelling goal in my view than "equal pay for unequal work".
Not to mention it's incentivize companies to cut the roles with artificially inflated wages. Imagine a government mandated that some component or material cost 15% more than market rate. You'd refactor your design with that new cost in mind, and reduce usage of that component. Similar deal with labor.
Congratulations, you've taken a swing at this troll's strawman.
Specifically, they forced Next to pay their warehouse workers and retail workers the same. When the retail workers were asked why they wouldn't just take jobs in the warehouse, they responded to the effect of "it's a less pleasant job, you'd have to pay me a lot more money to do it." Yet the UK mandated equal wages on account of the fact that more retail workers were women, and market rate wages created a net pay disparity (though women and men in the same roles were paid the same).
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/09/eq...
This is not the equilibrium we are aiming for as a society, and the matter is not settled here.
The point of these measurements is not to demand that women are paid more for less work. The point is for us to keep asking “why”, and not just stop after the first one.
“Why are women earning less at the New York Times?”. Maybe the company is just top-heavy with men in leadership roles. This has been floated in this thread as a common cause.
“Why are there more men in leadership roles?”. A few commenters have shared anecdotes of having far more men in their recruiting process. More men applying would help explain more experienced men higher up in the company.
“Why are there more men than women applying?”. We’re getting closer to root causes now. In software engineering, for example, there are just more men in the workforce.
“Why are there more men in the workforce?”. It gets more difficult, but also more important, to investigate the answer at these lower levels. Girls Who Code and similar initiatives are tackling this behemoth cultural problem. It will take years to see the effect of their work, but their success breeds hope that someday, the gap in this New York Times statistic will close a little.
At any of these levels, a company can step in and try and correct the natural bias in their hiring or development pipeline. That is, of course, the most sensitive topic for a lot of us here. Such initiatives should have buy-in from the workforce, and there’s an implication here that the (unionized) workers of NYT do support some kind of intervention.
Their choice, and above all the very measurement of a wage gap, doesn’t need to be threatening to anybody here. It will forever be important to track this number even if we “feel” like the explanations are simple. It doesn’t represent some kind of action the company should be forced to take. It measures where we are on every level of asking “why?”.
There is no need for a society that forces, top down, every possible occupation to be perfectly split 50/50 by sex. Just let individuals make their own decisions.
In this case, why do we "need" more women coding? Maybe they are doing other work that is just as important and fulfilling and useful to society?
You are reading this on another news outlet!
Last year, NYT tech workers also had a strike over return -to-office, as covered by Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/new-york-times-tech-workers...
But that doesn't mean they like paying their tech workers any more than any other management. It's just about money. Big tech is a threat to management's profits, just like workers demanding better salaries is a threat to management's profits.
They've been declining ever since radio and TV started doing news broadcasts, early to mid 20th century. Internet tech has played a role too, but the whole newspaper industry should have seen the writing on the wall several generations ago.
Who are they to judge how big tech treats their employees when they pay their own so poorly?
https://www.nytco.com/2023-new-york-times-diversity-and-incl...
The my don’t complain about tech being non-diverse, they report that it is non-diverse - which is true.
Absolutely not. This is typical trickery of stats. They have diversity at lower levels. But unlike SV almost no diversity at senior ranks. I think its past time that we consider janitorial and admin jobs as a win. If we have legions of educated minorities, why aren't they making it into executive roles at the NY Times?
Here is the exec staff: https://www.nytco.com/company/people/ "Filter by executive"
There are >64 million Hispanics living in the United States, yet not a single one on the NYT exec team.
They have 1 token asian,
1 token black person.
That is not "Better position than most." That seems like 3x worse than your average tech firm.
Pretending that a sample size of 12 should exactly reflect the diversity of the whole population of the country is just weird to me.
>> The NY Times is pro-union and anti-big-tech [...]
That is the claim. These are the reasons it sues, and my notes on each:
* journalists are unionized and tech platforms disintermediate unions
Thats a broad generalization based on the authors opinion and not necessarily true. The attitude was not reflective of my interactions with journalists either. I would dispute this from personal experience. We can agree/disagree forever, I'm just giving my IRL experience.
* workers that produce articles and create the newsroom culture have a conflict of interest
It could be said that any journalist who covers any subject has a conflict of interest by covering that subject. Thats a bit weak.
* tech threatens the ad revenue of traditional news media.
Yeah. Rising costs of paper also threaten traditional news media. The NYT is profitable and not reliant on ad revenue streams for survival. They have a health revenue stream in number of other areas. In addition, for better or for worse, most journalists don't actually know/care that much about ad revenue given the tradition divides between business and editorial sides (I see that at many media orgs I have worked for - its not just the NYT)
So.. that was what I was talking about ("workers", not a "top-down directive").
In regards to your point: Thats a new and different claim so hard for me to speak to that.
I would note that the claim came from Matthew Yglesias. He since deleted the tweet. I would note that he never worked at the NYT as far as I can tell.
I don't know much of Kelsey Piper, but she "heard it from NYT reporters at the time" so not quite first-hand account either. Her tweet is not a "leak" (thats very different) and I see nothing to prove or substantiate it - just she "heard" it.
I'll keep an open mind but I'm skeptical.
I think that's a really weak claim. Journalism has had significantly reduced revenues in the late 2000s through today due to the rise of tech platforms that let people learn about what's happening in the world for free online. Both print and online newspaper combined revenue has been wiped back to the 1950s [1], for example. Journalists covering, say, election politics have no more conflict of interest than any other American. But they definitely have more of a conflict of interest covering tech than other Americans! For most Americans, tech has largely contributed to economic improvements: you can buy more advanced products for less inflation-adjusted money, pretty much every year. You have a supercomputer in your pocket and you can talk to your lights and tell them to turn off while you're lying in bed. For journalists, though, tech has been devastating.
You might try to claim that because journalists don't set their own salaries, somehow this removes the conflict of interest. But that implies journalists are incredibly stupid. You can't work in a vastly diminishing field and not realize that it's going to depress your salary and job opportunities over time, regardless of whether you set the salary or not: there's just vastly less money to go around. And that's what tech has done to traditional journalism.
And the NYT is not immune. While it's doing better than its peers (many of whom have gone out of business), it's not doing well: it's experienced approximately zero market growth since its peak in 2002 over twenty years ago, when shares traded for about $48. Today, they trade for $52. And working at the only institution in your field that hasn't experienced total collapse, but has achieved no growth in 20+ years, is obviously going to color your views on the sector that did that to your field.
1: https://www.statista.com/chart/612/newspaper-advertising-rev...
Being anti tech has nothing to do with salary, it’s centered on what big tech is doing.
The people actually writing articles tend to be in Unions which may help explain their pro Union stances. Both from below and management being concerned with union relations.
The journalists (and tech workers) don't decide their own salary.
You conflated "they" as both management and the people being managed, to make it "ironic."
It is more than a little ironic that the NY Times complains about a "lack of diversity" in silicon valley, when practically the entire NY Times senior staff are generationally rich white people who live in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Here is the exec staff: https://www.nytco.com/company/people/ "Filter by executive"
There are >64 million Hispanics living in the United States, yet not a single one on the NYT exec team. They have 1 token asian, 1 token black person. Half the staff is Jewish. Yet they are complaining about diversity in Silicon valley.
As a person of asian origin, there is probably no way I can get a non-crappy role at the NY Times, yet silicon valley offers enough of a meritocracy that I can get a job there without having a rich uncle.
Remember, when the establishment complains about diversity, they are actually complaining about themselves losing control to the general population. That is why colored people in executive roles in SV is so scary to newspapers.
"Half the staff is Jewish" made me laugh though, perhaps closer to true than false. It's funny how people call The New Yorker the pinnacle of privilege as a writer-type, and their staff writer team is more diverse than just about any other East Coast bigwig outlet.
Just because you're potentially paid 500k to essentially implement the basis of metadata leakage and privacy compromise on scales that previous century actual dictators couldn't even reasonably dream of does not make the work of implementing it more "legitimate". It just makes it easier to attract people who value naterial comforts right now over safety from systemic abuse later. It's all tradeoffs.
Someone'll pay you well to do ultimately horrible things, and make it sound like you're doing everyone a favor.
Juniors, take note. You set the bar on the hell you'll be trapped in down the road. Always, always, be suspect.
almost all modern places that unionize have a liberal/left-leaning customer base the company is afraid of losing
If we are to assume black and women workers have historically been missing entirely from tech then the efforts of recent initiatives would bring fresh people in? Those newer people wouldn't have the same length of professional experience but the expectation is to be paid equal?
Put another way if the CEO is white and they make 50m and you have two employees, one black and one white who each make 50k, the average for white workers would be skewed higher? Before anyone replies "um actually, it's only workers within the guild, the CEO isn't included", okay, but does everyone in the guild have the same job title, experience, and responsibilities?
As an aside, they've structured that website like trash. Yes, I'd love to click a link to see the pay study which is just duplicated below the link without any additional information. It's like they purposely are trying to say nothing but be loud.