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Comment by solve | Hacker News Reader

Having highly-skilled women is a status symbol for companies in some cities, particularly in NYC. They're simply harder and more expensive to attract - e.g. women without children get paid 30% more than men with the same education in NYC.

In other words:

More success -> able to attract and afford more of the expensive status symbols like high-skilled women.

Not too sure about a cause and effect in the other direction though.

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women without children get paid 30% more than men with the same education in NYC.

I've never heard that before, and some quick research doesn't seem to back it up.

US wide, recent female graduates with the same education as men earn 82% of their salary.[1]

[1] http://www.aauw.org/files/2013/02/graduating-to-a-pay-gap-th...

That study doesn't take into account children, which are a huge factor, I would imagine. In households with children it is common for the woman to assume the role as the primary caregiver while the man assumes the role of the provider. As such, I imagine the woman likely feels less pressure and has less time to pursue a higher pay, while inversely the man feels pressure to increase his pay to fulfill his assumed role in the family.

The point was about NYC in particular, so US-wide statistics are not particularly relevant. And the original point was also about highly skilled workers without children. Your article is a study about 1 year after graduation (from undergrad).

Yes I understand that. Hence my request for evidence.

The person you originally responded to provided one in another comment (which seems to suggest 20%, not 30%): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8912097

> female graduates ... earn 82% of their salary

That's wrong. By the AAUW's own numbers, the women in their study earned 93% of the men's salaries. Get the PDF. Scroll nearly to the end, look for the infographic and text with the 93% number. Personally, then, I split it in the middle, and I'd guess that an unbiased researcher might discover that women earn 96.5% of what men do.

The 82% number which the report pushes much more strongly is the difference _before_ womens' choices are taken into account.

The sad and disturbing part is that the AAUW (and most of modern feminism?) is pushing bad data for political gains and unfair preferences.

Actually the OP's own reference uses the 80% figure too[1]. Wikipedia says between 93% and 96% after controlling, though this isn't for graduates.[2]

It is worth noting that it shows a reverse pay gap in a very limited circumstance (some cities, under 30 with no kids).

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

[2] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap#United_States

women without children get paid 30% more than men with the same education in NYC.

Can you provide your source for this?

Sorry, I stand corrected. It's only 20% higher for young women than men in NYC.

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

To my original point -- lots of status symbol trends are conflating the cause and effect analysis of why teams with women are more successful.

Decent analysis won't be simple, and the analysis is a total failure if they simply ignore this strong factors.

Your source does not suggest that the cause of the salary differential has anything to do with smart women as business status symbols. The article states that the most likely source of the difference is education, that the women are better educated and therefore have higher salaries. Further it holds true more so in cities that have a knowledge based economy.

I, too, would like a citation on this (not that I disbelieve you, but I am curious what data and methodology were used to come up with it).

Are you comparing women without children against men in general, or women without children against men without children?

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