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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

[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.

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.)"""

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.

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