"Pay gap is fake" "Prove it" Cites stuff "Unrelated/invalid" *Conversation derails

Scrollinf half way, i saw this easily 5 times.

It's as if people stick to their beliefs despite any arguments that are made.

And I read the "Nevertheless, she coded" as more of a global She, as in there are still women in computer science pushing for equality even in the face of the obstacles that women in tech have encountered in the past.

According to wikipedia, "the average female's unadjusted annual salary has been cited as being 78% of the average male salary", so you can save a lot.

This is not necessarily a good thing as unions basically underpay star performers and overpay bad performers. whether or not that is a good thing is your own opinion.

No. Male nurses make way more than female nurses, on average. A big contributor to this is that male nurses are far more likely to be CRNAs than female nurses and CRNAs are the highest-paid nurse specialty (and requires a graduate degree).

All the academic studies I have seen either adjust for it explicitly or put forward a strong case on why it isn't being included.

Thanks, I was looking for a way to call people disingenuous without actually using the term, since it's apparently become a no-no word on HN.

One does not need to call for that in order to find the current representation of women in engineering/CS lower than desirable.

Continuing on the theme of using the sources presented in this thread: do you find it more likely that Google's worldwide tech workforce is 83% male because A) there is "no causal influence, insidious or otherwise" and there is perfect freedom of choice or because B) there are systemic factors at play?

That is the only question.

I do agree that having an earnings gap is a problem that should be addressed (especially with regard to superannuation). The problem is when we are told that there is a pay gap and that it is due to sexism in the workplace - disallowing discussion of the cultural factors that you highlighted.

I really think that point of view is both wrong and harmful.

It's true that society influences people in various ways. But you're assuming that what men do is the "default", and so if women do it less, they are discouraged.

Instead, looking at it from the women's side, perhaps it is men that are overly encouraged to do certain things. For example, men are highly overrepresented in prisons compared to women, and that's not good.

That might be an extreme example, but the fact is that many studies show that men care more about careers that make money, while women care more about making a positive difference in the world (obviously, both only on average). Given that, perhaps society pushes men too much towards tech and finance and so forth. It would be better if we nudged men instead towards nurturing professions, where you help people every day, like nursing or teaching.

In other words, society influences both genders in various ways. Any difference could be either women pushed one way or men pulled the other.

Ehhh you're really gonna need to show me this study, including detailed descriptions of the male and female cohorts showing that every male and female pair in the study are exactly the same age, have the same amount of experience, exact same education level, and work for the same company. Otherwise you can't really claim that the only difference is gender, now can you?

The problem is, you can't come up with such a study. Furthermore, the idea that companies are paying women with "exactly the same" skills as men in "exactly the same" positions up to 20% less doesn't make any sense at all. Why would I ever hire a man in that case? I'd rather save 20% off the top. And if I had no choice but to hire a man, why would I pay 20% over the market rate? And how is it that this conspiracy to pay women less exists in every company, in every industry, in every country in the world?

The biological explanation is, by far, the Occam's razor null hypothesis here. To be convincing, you would need to supply compelling evidence that children who have unusually low contact with traditional societal influence early in life make less predictable employment choices. Otherwise, this is a just-so story like all the rest of them.

My argument is that you cannot expect uniform distribution of career choices either by race or gender.

You can't expect exactly 13% of cops to be african american or exactly 50% of physicists to be female.

Let's look at hispanics and asians.

Asians outnumber hispanics in STEM 9:1

Hispanics outnumber asians in History 3:1

Don't have links to hard sources at hand since I'm on mobile, but even anecdotally I think almost anyone would agree that hispanics are outnumbered by asians in STEM.

Ethnic chinese are strong in STEM not just in US, but almost anywhere. You can take any country with a significant chinese diaspora and you'll see the results are about the same.

Can you make a compelling counterargument that hispanics are brought up in a way that specifically encourages them to learn History?

1. Women are expected (societally) to be more accommodating and compliant throughout most aspects of their lives, meaning they have less practice and comfort negotiating.

2. Even when women do negotiate, they end up being penalized for it, probably because of the expectations mentioned in point 1. See http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/lean-out-th.... Underlying study is here: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/cfawis/bowles.pdf

What is the cause of the negotiation skills gap? It seems unlikely to me that one gender is just innately better at it than another, and more likely that there's a cultural issue at play with regards to how we treat women.

If they are equally good, there's a good chance I'll choose the cheaper one.

As you can see, you disagree with the commenter I was responding to. They think women only get paid more in "some" fields, not most.

The original comment is both inconsistent with itself, and your comment.

Why don't I ever see it being discussed on HN?

If that were true, then why were the several men who spoke after her, and read the exact same letter, not disciplined?

Yo, you post here. You're factually, actively posting and could post about rights of minorities, too. So I'm asking you: why don't you post about these things? Why is it something only brought up as an ideal in a discussion that's about something else, but not something done by you on its own without outside consensus or approval? What has stopped you so far?

Think a lot about this for the rest of your life. Seriously. I have, and it's revealed a lot of truths I was too stubborn to see about myself. I feel dumb for not being introspective, thoughtful, and self-critical about my own set ways and behavior at a younger age. I thought I was, but I was in my own world, rarely challenging myself on new information.

It's interesting that you require data to change your assumption that there's not a problem.

Exactly. Which is why it's important to look at broader aggregates and more data. In fact, when you do that, you find you end up averaging in a ton of other studies that show men being under paid, and...

Hah, right. There are no such studies. Everyone who bothers to look at this comes back with some variant of the same answer: women are underpaid. Sure, there's uncertainty at the margins, and any given evidence can always be attacked in some way. But everyone with any level of expertise or detachment at all can look at this and agree with the broad conclusion.

It's exactly like climate science denial, really. And like climate nonsense, I submit that the reason behind it has rather less to do with the "love for the truth" that the grandparent was talking about and more with... yeah.

Where are all-women (or 95% women) companies? If you can get away with paying them less, where are all the capitalists exploiting the market inefficiency and getting rich in the process?

Hell, nowadays companies like Starbucks[0] routinely put social causes first, profits second. So where are these companies?

[0] https://www.starbucks.com/blog/an-open-letter-from-howard-sc...

And how to value, let's say, a developer? How do you, personally, differentiate good and bad programmers?

But by not controlling for it you reduce the studies explanative powers.

You don't get to just ignore it because it is convenient.

It doesn't even pass the "more likely than not" standard of evidence.

There should be a statistical paper with a proper analysis somewhere, I'll try looking for it.

The methodology: https://www.glassdoor.com/research/how-we-analyzed-the-gende...

I didn't find the editorializing in the cnet article very helpful.

Or is it merely that the pipeline being fugged doesn't mean that everything else is fine and dandy? I'd agree with that, hell yeah, and that claim matches the actual content of those links quite well. But I don't think it in any way suggests that the problem is a myth.

I also don't think the pipeline is unfixable, but that's both my day job and another rant for another day.

> when controllable variables are accounted for, such as job position, total hours worked, number of children, and the frequency at which unpaid leave is taken, in addition to other factors, a United States Department of Labor study, conducted by the CONSAD Research Group, found in 2008 that the gap can be brought down from 23% to between 4.8% and 7.1%.

It's not 77 cents on the dollar, but it's still significant.

Also, if you want to control for time off and experience, you should also control for the second-order factors of involuntarily taking time off or involuntarily having lower-quality experience. If you leave a company because of harassment and don't immediately find a new job, you'll have a gap on your resume that probably translates to lower long-term salary. If you don't get the job out of college you're qualified for because of bias in the hiring process, you'll be a little bit behind in your whole career.

If women are making 77 cents on the dollar because they're more likely to be rejected from higher-paying jobs but making the same as men in lower-paying jobs, or because the glass ceiling is keeping them out of the C-suite but wages are the same if you exclude the C-suite, or whatever, that's still a problem worth fixing! The ways in which you'd fix it are different, so it's important to get this data, but there's still something to fix.

This blog post from the Department of Labor has a bunch of links to other research: https://blog.dol.gov/2012/06/07/myth-busting-the-pay-gap

From that perspective, the answer should be, "Yes they do deserve equal pay for equal work, why is that so challenging?"

Imagine that doctors and nurses were paid the same. Would you still think that?

Other than salary, neither being a doctor or a nurse is "better". One is more technical, the other involves more personal contact, but neither of those is better, just different.

The same is true for Software Engineers and Test Engineers. It's snobbery to say one is better.

We should be lobbying to get nurses paid more.

(Seriously, I'm starting to wonder if I should give up the QA profession for good, even though I prefer it to being a developer.)

Are they?

From what I have seen the consensus is:

An overall small 3-6% wage gap after accounting for basic life choices.

Women under 30 + childless women significantly out-earning women with children + older women.

Women under 30 + childless women have almost no wage gap and in many industries are out-earning their male peers.

Life is rough for the bottom 50% of earners - male and female.

What exactly do you think the stats show?

> and the jobs that are heavily weighted towards women do not pay nearly as much.

Why are you talking about women like they are objects without agency?

My friends in game design work harder than I do and earn half what I earn.

They made a trade-off and work in a more interesting and rewarding job that pays less.

They certainly aren't oppressed and discriminated against.

Now this isn't really true at the bottom end of the scale. But it is for the middle class and up.

I honestly don't see anything wrong with different life choices leading to different outcomes, since the same is true within genders! That is, there's nothing sexist about that fact.

The truth is the people advocating for equalizing pay when the sexes make different choices are arguing for sexism, not against sexism.

Look, if women are being unfairly excluded from the pipeline then fight THAT. Don't blame Google or Facebook or X company for hiring the best they can. They have "diversity consultants" on their payroll for christs sake. This isn't an issue that is gonna magically be solved in a few years. Making the "pipeline" more diverse takes years of investment and education and encouragement. What I take an issue is with people blaming these companies when they're actually doing a reasonable job of trying to become more diverse. As if these companies are the ones really holding people back. and if only they could overcome their biases they'd have a perfect diversity ratio overnight.

Please stop trying to mislead people.

From your link on the very first page:

> However, even among full-time workers (those usually working 35 hours or more per week), men worked longer than women—8.2 hours compared with 7.8 hours. (See table 4.)

Like I said this is an ~5% difference. If you don't like this particular study the results have been replicated dozens of times across a wide range of industries.

If you have some evidence that full time male tech workers work fewer hours than full time female tech workers I'd love to see it.

You can't see how working extra hours can increase productivity enough to warrant a small increase in pay?

At no point did I state I thought the wage gap is entirely due to sexism. although, I do argue it is evident sexism; I believe that still requires argument on your part that it's clearly not.

Because hours worked doesn't affect salary. What's more, you keep assuming that there aren't counter-examples in this dataset at all. It's just a given to you: "I read on Forbes that across all Americans women work slightly less per week" and brought that to this conversation.

But in this industry long hours are the norm, single people without family duties are the majority, and many compensation models very much incentivize long hours.

> You can't just ignore hours worked because "salary".

Unless we're talking consulting, that's exactly what Salary lets you do.

> Much smaller than average for the tech industry.

The average pay bracket difference is indeed smaller. However, it's still large enough for concern, and the other issues I listed around work culture are problems that disadvantage women more than men in modern society.

> Perhaps it's in our interest to make these factors explicit rather than implicit?

I am always in favor of transparency and more analysis but I will not let ANY interpretation of the specific data we have on hand be constantly forced off on the grounds that we could collect better data.

Saying, "Women get paid less, let's make sure that's not happening" is a call to action, not an accusation leveled at anyone specifically. If women in your organization aren't being paid less, congrats. Job done.

Let's be clear: You're effectively trying to stifle and derail the entire conversation on the grounds that it might not be happening everywhere, or that statistics might not be what popular media claims they are. That's counterproductive and frankly unwelcome. If that's your take, your take stifles the discussion here.

We can simultaneous recognize that tech is a more complicated compensation environment and also that women are reporting under-compensation. We're all adults capable of multi-tasking.

And people use experience and continued employment as proxy. Sorry, companies have not figured out a better method in general.

If you only look at women who never married and never had children the pay gap is tiny.

Evidence? First, "pricing is information". Second, Uber et al, and the continuing follies of the tech industry demonstrating systemic sexism. Third, continued use of the word "meritocracy" despite repeated demonstrations that tech firms practice a particularly narrow form of geek clubhousing. Bottom line: no one's actually rational enough to exploit what's really a fairly transparent, backhanded attempt to say that women are paid less because they're worth less. We just tell ourselves that we are.

So I can imagine that you just bail if you aren't conditioned to put up with that kind of crap.

However, there is abundant evidence that there's a systemic divide in opportunities. This is easy to see in the aggregate and particular. That is the interesting thing in itself: if we could be assured that the gap could sexist solely for life choices, this wouldn't be an interesting topic. That's a devilishly hard thing to argue for, however, so id prefer to move forward as a society assuming that we can do more to expose opportunities to everyone, assure that people are protected in their right to follow opportunities, and that we can demonstrate the effect of the policies at moving toward an ideal of equal pay.

If we can't move towards that, perhaps our ideal, well, isn't what society wants. I doubt that we've even approached that level of confidence in our support of communities subject to subtle bias difficult to divorce from "life choices".

What you are doing is saying "No, I don't think the conclusion should be what the data says", and then you're going out and finding ("cherry picking") different data about related but not identical subjects that appears to contradict it.

Sorry, but the burden of proof is on you if you want to make a numeric argument here. And you're doing it with extraordinarily bad analysis.

You are broadening the conversation to look at sexism in broader society.

Let's stick to the specifics here.

> making it all about you and your (higher than any other sociological or scientific field) standards for allowing discussion.

Nonsense. Most rigorous wage gap studies control for a lot more than the GlassDoor study.

The particular data (working hours) that I'm saying should have been included is straightforward to measure and collect.

> You're so angry you're willing to argue that maybe pay shouldn't be equal after all.

A swing and a miss. It's like you aren't even trying to read what I'm writing.

Nevertheless there do exist profitable apps written by low caste Indians living on a few dollars a day and having virtually no social welfare safety net.

Do you honestly believe that women in the US have it worse than those men?

I do not see enough evidence that your systemic "isms" can explain the lack of bootstrapped female founders and entrepreneurs in the US.