Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

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> This pretty much invalidates itself. You can't have a 50/50 ratio if only 26% of the population of programmers is women.

They are Department of Labor statistics which, I believe you will find, measure not the people qualified to be employed in a particular role, but the people currently employed in that role.

So, contrary to your position, if the current numbers on that are 74/26, it is not a logical contradiction that every company in the industry could get closer to 50/50, without either reducing the total number of employed programmers or convincing anyone who doesn't already prefer to work as a programmer to "enter the field".

You are confusing the population of people employed as programmers with the population of people available to be employed as programmers.

(I'm not saying that the latter population, without changes earlier in the pipeline, would necessarily support a 50/50 split either, I'm saying you can't draw conclusions about it from the former population.)

> You are confusing the population of people employed as programmers with the population of people available to be employed as programmers.

http://cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_Degree...

If between 11 and 14% of CS graduates are women, I think its a pretty reasonable number to work with 26% are available to be employed as programmers and that unemployment is roughly equal between genders.

Maybe you are right and the real number is 30% or whatever. It certainly isn't 50% which leads to the same mathematical limitation. I also highly suspect given the ratio is heavily lopsided in university education that it is pretty close to 26%. I can see how people might disagree, I'm just voicing my opinion which is backed up by the available facts [ratio of CS majors, ratio of those currently employed, etc].

To me, it seems to make more sense to concentrate effort on:

1) Pay equality.

2) Encouraging women to enter the field via education.

Those two are solvable problems. Trying to encourage 50/50 ratios in "progressive companies" and leaving the women unlucky enough to end up in "other companies" is simply going to make the situation worse, not better.

How would you feel if you were the only gay/female/black/[insert minority person here] in a relatively conservative workplace?

I highly suspect the answer to that question is some combination of "isolated" and "vulnerable".

Tbh, the only way I'd accept your argument as valid is if you could show the population of female programmers is significantly underemployed compare to the population of male programmers. Even then, it'd have to be a truly noticeable and significant gap.

> Tbh, the only way I'd accept your argument as valid

You entire post seems premised on a strawman argument -- the only argument I made is that the logical contradiction you posited in the argument made in your previous post was not supported by the statistics cited to justify it.

Okay. I guess I just assumed you meant there was some statistical evidence showing it was fundamentally wrong rather than the fact I didn't prove it was exactly 26%.

For purposes of my disagreeing with the OP, being 100% accurate on whether its 26% or 28% doesn't really matter to me. The basic principle applies that its going to create a worse problem than it solves imo.

The pay equality gap is a misdirection. Gender is not a big factor in determining your pay... until you get married or have kids, when men focus more on providing while women focus more on being with their families. Look up the US Dept of Labour's numbers. In fact, unmarried, childless women have out-earned their male peers since the 70s, but don't tell the feminists that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/upshot/the-pay-gap-is-beca...

Eh. The pay gap is 12%. Please provide evidence this isn't real that is verifiable and not vague "look at the statistics". Which statistics?

As I said, gender is not the most important factor overall, their family status is. So if you slice only along gender lines, you will see a gap that is meaningless, because you are comparing apples and oranges.

Here's an article that cites several different studies. Granted, I cited the higher end, it could be lower, by all means make up your own mind. They also add the caveat here that it only applies to metropolitan areas, but this is the vast majority of the population nowadays.

>... in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. In two cities, Atlanta and Memphis, those women are making about 20% more. This squares with earlier research from Queens College, New York, that had suggested that this was happening in major metropolises. But the new study suggests that the gap is bigger than previously thought, with young women in New York City, Los Angeles and San Diego making 17%, 12% and 15% more than their male peers, respectively. And it also holds true even in reasonably small areas like the Raleigh-Durham region and Charlotte in North Carolina (both 14% more), and Jacksonville, Fla. (6%).

> As for the somewhat depressing caveat that the findings held true only for women who were childless and single: it's not their marital status that puts the squeeze on their income. Rather, highly educated women tend to marry and have children later. Thus the women who earn the most in their 20s are usually single and childless.

http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274...

Once again: women and men who want families make different choices.

Jev, that is a bold move but it isn't going to pay off for you.

We read that article and came to two completely different conclusions. That may be due to having different contexts about approaching this conversation. This is a tech site, the OP was about tech, and I was talking about software/tech salaries.

"The holdout cities — those where the earnings of single, college-educated young women still lag men's — tended to be built around industries that are heavily male-dominated, such as software development or military-technology contracting. In other words, Silicon Valley could also be called Gender Gap Gully."

I interpret this as basically admitting its a problem in male dominated industries [which happens to be the case in tech and engineering in general].

"He attributes the earnings reversal overwhelmingly to one factor: education. For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do."

You seem to have missed the entire point of the article. The reversal that is raising women's average wage is due to an education gap b/t men & women. It is not due to equal pay for equal experience/position/etc. that is the basis of the gap in the article I cited.

The pay gap I'm talking about is when a female software engineer is paid 12% less than when a male software engineer with roughly the same experience, education, ability, and position.

You are comparing your apples [overall pay equality across all industries and disciplines] to my oranges [pay equality by experience, education, ability, and position].

Do you now understand why I disagree with you, even reading the same articles? I understand where you are coming from but there shouldn't be a pay gap for the same job title.

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