As Women Take over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops (2016) | Hacker News Reader

As Women Take over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops (2016)

nytimes.com

13 pointsAnon8416 comments

> Consider the discrepancies in jobs requiring similar education and responsibility, or similar skills, but divided by gender. The median earnings of information technology managers (mostly men) are 27 percent higher than human resources managers (mostly women), according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Way to blow up their credibility in one sentence... Those are completely different jobs. An IT manager needs both management skills and sufficient technical knowledge to make decisions about technical matters and effectively supervise technical employees. Those skills are in higher demand, resulting in higher pay for IC staff and managers.

Also, numerous studies have found that the pay differences within job categories are largely accounted for by factors like overtime, lack of flexibility, stressful work environments, long commutes, etc. Society encourages men to pursue higher compensation, so it's hardly surprising that they are willing to put up with more for an extra 5-10%, even if it's to the detriment of their health and work-life balance.

This.

Two things are rarely mentioned

When you compare apples to apples, male vs female engineering manager with similar backgrounds, the pay is the same. In the Bay Area it favors the woman.

Desire has a large part. It’s no coincidence that the countries with the most women in programming are places like India and China, where they are given little choice. If you can do the job, you do it because otherwise poverty.

When women don’t have to, they don’t.

Yes of course, but it doesn't fit the current narrative of women being the perpetual victims. I'm increasingly annoyed by the propaganda around women's issues because it always amounts to some bullshit.

Considering that women can offload the hard parts to men (hard work and competition) they would be stupid to not do so. Funny thing is that when they don't, they stop making kids, which means that they don't have much value as women actually and end up being just weaker men (at least in the biological strength sense but it's also true for the IQ curve so...)

If at some point in the near future we could finally agree that women and men are not actually strictly equal and that it would be incredibly stupid and useless if it was the case, I would be extremely happy.

The article dances around the reason… the desire for flexibility is financially penalised.

The gender pay gap is really the parenting pay gap, since it didn’t exist before the age where people start having kids. Encourage more men to be stay at home dads and you’ll see the gender differences disappear.

When Spain increased parental leave for men, desired fertility dropped. Some men want to do childcare, but a substantial cohort want to chase comp and status while someone else stays home to raise their kids.

The phrase I’ve heard more than once about this is “Men want kids like kids want pets.” Easy to want something, but work is hard.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/20/paid-paternity...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

Interesting! So the desired number of children dropped (I wonder what number it was reduced from, maybe from an unrealistic number), and the # of hours men spent with their children went up, and women did get back to work earlier. It seems overall to be having the right effect?

Good luck finding a woman that would be happy with that arrangement. On paper they exist but in practice they are nowhere to be found and when you found one, it turns out she couldn't keep up the arrangement past a relatively short period, making men look like an incredibly stable and secure bet.

Paper:

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21913/w219...

Simple supply+demand seems likely to be a factor. More people competing for jobs in that field?

Ignore doubling the number of potential job candidates--surely that's an argument of the male patriarchy

https://archive.ph/yyiNM

(2016)

(2016), but yea. Here's a radical thought: How about we just pay everyone doing the same job at least decent wages for fair work?

But why are women paid more in the fashion and modeling industries

Are you seriously asking, or is this one of those sarcastic rhetorical questions? The point of all of these studies is that society has deemed women shall be paid less. You asked about models, but it is also prevalent in acting as well. A leading female actor will be paid less than a male actor in a similar role. It gets tricky here regarding the perceived attraction/recognition to the audience, but it does seem to default to male actors being paid more as the default.

You can ask why till the cows come home, but there will never be a satisfactory answer. Just asking the question to imply wrongness does not really do anything though.

Because the vast majority of capital in that industry comes from women.

Are they saying the obvious that people pay women less for the same work performed by men, or that the pay has dropped even for men doing the same work starting in the field now? It felt like they kept repeating themselves, and I just stopped reading so maybe the answer is tucked further in the continued repetition?

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