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Comment by yzzxy | Hacker News Reader

His response to the response:

"Was inarticulate re how women should ask for raise. Our industry must close gender pay gap so a raise is not needed because of a bias #GHC14"

https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/520311425726566400

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I don't get what that's trying to say. It seems to me he wants to retract the answer because by now he realized how bad it sounds, but at the same time he's also trying not to get all women in the company to ask for raises tomorrow.

So the statement is like "Yeah, yeah we need equal pay for men and women and all that...but don't ask us for raises to actually make that happen".

The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that he went to a panel at a conference to give career advice to women (which has its own problems) and gave them advice for an ideal world instead of for the real world, which also happened to be anti-labor.

"Our industry must close gender pay gap so a raise is not needed because of a bias"

Which is a much better statement :-)

Protip: If you are a man you should reject any invitation to speak at a women's focused conference. At this conference in particular there was a bingo sheet for statements made by men. Any misstep will turn into a headline. It's crazy dangerous.

Attendees also questioned, perhaps fairly even, a particular panel session that all men. Why were they there? Because they were invited! The only rational response is to turn down such an invitation in the future.

> Why were they there? Because they were invited! The only rational response is to turn down such an invitation in the future.

The Ada Initiative recommends[1] responding thusly:

* Respond saying that you'd be honored, but the panel seems awfully heavy on the men, and can they find a qualified woman to join the panel? Here are some suggestions.

* Respond saying that you have taken a pledge not to participate in all-male panels from now on, but you'd be happy to join if a qualified woman is added.

* If you can't accept, suggest a qualified woman to take your place.

[1] http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Allies_training#Scenario:...

That's a response for a general panel at a general conference. Seems reasonable. However if it's a conference that focuses on women then by far the safest response is to stay away. If you like to live dangerously then their general case response works fine.

Which implies that the solution to the problem is to LOWER the pay of men to match the pay of women. I think the term "unintended consequences" can be writ large here by now.

It implies no such thing.

Just so I understand: what DOES the statement imply? Think of me as mentally deficient here and explain it like you'd explain it to an 8 year old.

It implies only that he wants to see men and women paid equally for equal performance. There's no particular reason to think that he would achieve this by lowering the salaries of better-paid employees (where better pay was not correlated with superior performance) rather than by increasing the salary of worse-paid employees (likewise).

If he's smart, he'd engage an outside auditor to measure employee productivity and how well it correlates with salaries, then raise the pay of any group that wturned out to be systematically disadvantaged.

He is saying that there should be no pay gap based on gender and if that were the case women would not need to ask for a raise to bring their salary up to the same as what a male in the same position would make.

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