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Comment by throwaway217384 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting question.

I think many, men and women, are still biased against women because they believe they are catty and dramatic or are afraid of increased legal issues (lawsuits). These are obviously not reality either and it too sucks.

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There's also an issue with maternity leave.

Maternity leave means that women effectively cost more than men for the same amount of work, in the long run and on average. This can be mitigated by laws, but cannot be eliminated without addressing the underlying social issues. And no, mandatory paternity leave doesn't eliminate it, as there are more single mothers than single fathers.

The logic is simple. Companies survive by making a profit. In order to do so, they attempt to cut costs for a given amount of work done. Currently, females on average end up spending more time on paid leave. Hence, there ends up being a bias.

And I'm not sure if it is one that can be fixed through legislation. Attempts in that vein tend to be counterproductive at best. It's more of a social issue.

If maternity and paternity leave is leave without pay (unless one elects or has to use available accrued paid time off) then it shouldn't matter. Except having to plan around a short term vacancy can be an undesirable problem for a manager or company No matter the position goes vacant for that period of time or if a temp worker is hired to fill it, you will have a loss in productivity.

If maternity and paternity leave is without pay it's still advantageous for the company to hire men over women, as they will have to hire temps more often on average for maternity leave with a women over a man.

And temps generally are worse productivity-wise than an experienced worker.

If women are actually, objectively, less productive workers (if your explanation is correct), why is it wrong for companies to pay them less?

How do you objectively measure the productivity of a programmer?

Or of a secretary / office assistant / whatever they're called these days (the person who's job is to make life easier for other people, so that said other people can get more of their own work done)?

If it was possible to objectively measure productivity, there wouldn't be any of these huge arguments about pay fairness.

You don't.

You assume that, innate talents being equal, women are equal to men in terms of productivity. I mean, this is the stated intention of the Feminist movement in a nutshell, yes?

And then you take a look at the other stats (as I mentioned, females take more leave. And females are more likely to have a child and stop working [1]. And there are the liability issues, ironically caused by the Feminist movement.)

And so - equal productivity, but less hours for the amount of money you pay. It's a simple calculation, with the result that, if the above assumptions are true, women should, from an economic point of view, be paid less than men on average.

At which point, if you are still arguing that wage should be equal from economic terms, you've gone beyond saying women are equal to men and saying that women are better then men - and that is an entirely different ball of wax.

[1] http://www4.hrsdc.gc.ca/.3ndic.1t.4r@-eng.jsp?iid=13#M_7

Can someone respond to these points instead of just downvoting?

Extension of this:

Can someone please respond to these points with actual numbers to back their points?

Given that employees only stay for a couple years on average anyway these days, you're far more likely to lose either a male or female employee to a job switch than to lose a female employee to maternity leave. It's a highly overestimated risk. Not to mention extremely unfair to women who don't have kids.

Given that employees only stay for a couple years on average anyway these days

All 8 people on my team have been around longer than that. I've been there 8 years, and the other senior person has been around slightly longer. Our boss has been with the company for I think 17+ years. (And our old boss, who took the other half when the team got split in a reorg, has been with the company for 30+ years.)

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm says: """The median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 4.6 years in January 2014, unchanged from January 2012"""

"""In January 2014, median employee tenure (the point at which half of all workers had more tenure and half had less tenure) for men was 4.7 years, unchanged from January 2012. For women, median tenure in January 2014 was 4.5 years, about unchanged from January 2012. Among men, 30 percent of wage and salary workers had 10 years or more of tenure with their current employer, compared with 28 percent for women. (See tables 1 and 3.)"""

[Citation needed]

I have been linking the numbers behind my arguments. If you wish to show the numbers behind yours, I would be more than happy to discuss them.

If maternity leave really is a large cost, then the reason not to pay them less is because we all have a stake in the healthy propagation of the species. Women bare the children, but that doesn't mean they ought to bare the entire burden of it.

It also requires a man to make a child, so isn't it reasonable to expect the father to pay rather than the employer?

I don't think individual companies have such a responsibility. It's better to have the state pay for these costs.

Yes, I agree with you. I made the assumption that the state would likely end up collecting through payrolls or something like that. Perhaps a tax credit to businesses for employees losing hours to parenting and a tax increase on the other employees.

If women stopped getting pregnant then maternity would cease to be a societal cost, however the economy might get a little screwed as the human race dies off.

Parents are your most productive employees. They are the only ones who are making more employees.

That's a good reason for the state to pay for maternity leave instead of individual companies.

If the state pays then the companies are paying anyway, and it is still a spread cost as long as anti-discrimination law is being enforced. The continued existence of the species through childbirth is something that organizations should really factor into their budgets. Is not exactly a difficult cost to foresee as people have been doing it for quite a while now.

>If the state pays then the companies are paying anyway

Yes, but it's better for the state to pay it so that because if companies pay maternity leaves completely, the cost is not distributed evenly.

>The continued existence of the species through childbirth is something that organizations should really factor into their budgets.

I disagree, that should be the responsibility of the state and individual families.

>Is not exactly a difficult cost to foresee as people have been doing it for quite a while now.

It's a cost that is easy to foresee if your company is large. If the company consists of 1-2 employees, the company can go bankrupt from the costs. I've talked to an entrepreneur whose company actually did go bankrupt from maternity leave costs.

I take it that this entrepreneur thought that group insurance wasn't worth bothering with.

edit - I am not against the state picking up the tab, by the way. I just think it is one of those costs that could be paid either way and I have limited sympathy for employers who complain that they couldn't possibly be expected to plan for the eventuality that some of their employees might become parents.

Eh, way in the future though. It's a classic tragedy of the commons. Each individual company is better off discriminating, but ultimately it causes a depletion in resources (i.e. employees) long-term.

Companies regularly last long enough to try and employ the children of their initial employees. 20 years is only getting into medium-scale planning in large amounts of industries.

Women are not objectively less productive workers. Men die earlier--insurance companies have figured this out so why don't companies pay them less as a result? They're going to die sooner, that's a significant risk to the company, they should be paid less than women. Men are more likely to engage in risky behavior, more likely to have anger management issues, more likely to provoke harrassment cases, all reasons to pay them less because they impose a higher risk on the company.

But for some reason you want to conveniently ignore all these facts and instead point to maternity leave and say that's why we should pay women less? Think again.

But further, if your weren't trolling, the answer to your question is that even if the assumption were true, to pay them less would be sociopathic. That's why it's wrong. Again, think.

If disabled people are actually, objectively, less productive workers, a drain on society, why is it wrong for societies to euthanize them?

Men die earlier, yes. You have a point there. [2][3] says that ~90999/100000 males survive to age 60 and ~94194/100000 females survive to age 60. That's a difference of ~3195/100000, or ~3.2%.

However, the question becomes if men retire earlier.

And the answer is no. [1] Women retire earlier than men on average (at least in Canada. Don't have stats handy for anywhere else, unfortunately). And that's measured in years, more than compensating for the above.

Regarding disabled people, a simple answer is that society as a whole would be against it, as there is enough of a chance of any individual person becoming disabled that it is in their best interest to not allow such a law.

And making an argument from an economic as opposed to a moralistic point of view does not make one a sociopath. As you may not have noticed, I never mentioned my moral point of view on the matter, as it's irrelevant.

[1] http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/71-222-x/2008001/sectionm/m-age...

[2] http://www.prdh.umontreal.ca/BDLC/data/can/mltper_1x5.txt

[3] http://www.prdh.umontreal.ca/BDLC/data/can/fltper_1x5.txt

[4] http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2012002/article/11697-...

Men at all age levels have higher insurance rates than women. This means they are riskier employees than women and if the reason women are being paid less is purely economic then the situation ought to be reversed and men should be paid less because of the higher risk. So clearly the reason is not economic but is a systemic bias.

Yes, making an argument involving decisions that affect the life chances of human beings and hiding behind "economic theory" is sociopathic.

>Men at all age levels have higher insurance rates than women. This means they are riskier employees than women and if the reason women are being paid less is purely economic then the situation ought to be reversed and men should be paid less because of the higher risk.

That assumes that only insurance-based risk affects economics.

This is less of an issue now than it used to be; most companies offer Paternity leave for the same amount of time these days. This amortizes the cost across all employees.

Maybe to some extent, but not fully: - Not every birth has an active father involved. - The physical effects of pregnancy will will likely require the mother to take more time off. - Not all men will want to take extended paternity leave. You can try to force them, but that has its own issues, and makes single men more attractive employees.

Mandating that companies pay employees not to work puts them in an awkward position where they're incentivized to discriminate. If government wants to encourage people to have kids, then government should pay parents directly.

Yep. Even though I had support from my employer, I took less paternity leave at the time of birth than I thought I would. Many parents find they want a break from the baby after the first few weeks, and enjoy returning to work.

Men take less paternity leave on average than women take maternity leave.

Not to mention that in the case of single births, you'll end up with the women taking maternity leave while the men don't. And with marriage stats the way they are...

Which means that it's still advantageous for the company to hire men over women. Amortizing costs doesn't magically make the cost go away, it just hides it.

Depends on locale. In Quebec, men pretty much always take their paternity leave (at least 3 weeks, up to 5) and most of the maternity leave can be transferred to the father (up to 25-32 weeks, leaving the mother the minimum of 15-18 weeks) as well. That last part is uncommon but it does happen when the mother is the couple's highest earner (say a partner in a legal firm or a doctor) since the mat leave benefits are capped.

Incorrect. Yes, Quebec has less of a split than elsewhere in Canada. However it's 97% of females take paid leave versus 72% of males, and 48.4 weeks paid leave on average versus 5.5 weeks. That's not exactly on par. And I don't know in what universe 76% is considered "pretty much always".

And it doesn't even cover the case when the mother and father split before birth.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2012002/article/11697-...

> And I'm not sure if it is one that can be fixed through legislation

Well, one think the government could do is to cover pay during sick leave, parental leave and child care leave (i.e. when children are sick). This would also benefit startups/new businesses, where employees being sick/pregnant is not just statistics, but can make or break a business.

That will mitigate the issue, but not fix it.

As having an experienced worker go MIA for months is bad for a company in terms of productivity, and substantially more women take maternity leave than men take paternity leave.

A temp worker is seldom as good at their job as an experienced worker.

Personally, I don't think government should cover things like sick leave, but that is another matter entirely. (In general, the larger the system, the less incentive for any one person in the system to keep the system as a whole running smoothly.)

In the lifetime of a woman, how many maternity leaves does she take? On average it would be twice and very few women I know have taken more than 8 weeks. The way you put makes it sound like women take 6 months+ time off and everyone else has to pay for it.

The way I put it makes it sound like women take 6+ months time off because, oddly enough, women take 6+ months time off. The average in Canada is 39.6 weeks paid leave. Note that that figure is for children aged 1-3, how many weeks paid leave did their mothers take. The average per women will be higher.

The plural of anecdote is not data, and you are no exception.

StatCan: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2012002/article/11697-...

Is "women are less likely to counter-offer and negotiate during the hiring process" obviously not reality also?

(Serious question.)

It is very likely. My wife is a very well respected Engineer in her field and when she was asked to come out of retirement, she retired to start a farm and enjoy the outdoors, they called her back and made what I thought was a very low offer. She was going to accept it because to her it was a work from home gig and was near what she used to make. I said no and helped her negotiate an additional 30% in her rate that she would have simply left on the table because she didn't feel comfortable asking for more.*

*Yes, anecdotal evidence but I hear it from her and her female engineering friends a lot. To the point I've offered to help any of them negotiate their contracts in the future.

I agree with squozzer, you should consider expanding your activities beyond folks who know you personally.

I really like my work and I work a lot. I have worked in early-mid stage startup and now am working with a pre-series A stage startup. I have never shied away from asking for more responsibilities or climbing up the management chain. I am generally known as the more assertive person in the organization. But when it comes to compensation, I cannot bring it up. Not sure if it has to do with being a female.

It would be ideal if there was a 'go to' person who can push me more in negotiating for better compensation.

You may have found a calling. I hope you consider expanding the scope of your activities beyond your wife's friends. What would make it worth your while?

> I hear it from her and her female engineering friends a lot.

Well, the two variables your subjects have in common is being engineers as well as being female. Personally (being a male engineer), I'd say being a bad negotiator has just as much to do with being an engineer as being a woman (except if women engineers are even worse negotiators than I am).

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