The grandstanding is corny at best. Take the first example:
> Despite continued assaults on the credibility of her contributions to modern computer science as the world’s first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace coded.
Yet in reality she was very much respected in her day, and despite her challenges received widespread support. The first "assaults" on her scope of her contributions came over 100 after her death, and not some sexism she had to fight and overcome.
It was difficult for me to read the rest of the article once I came across that sentence. Granted, I have not read everything regarding Ada Lovelace, but she has always been acknowledged and respected. There is a major programming language named after her!
The "assaults" on her credibility did not happen to her during her lifetime. Even if they are proven to be true, her proven contributions are still impressive.
Because it's somewhat a cross cultural and cross racial issue --that is women don't only get the lower hand among white men (in given industries, sectors), but also non-white women are also disincentivized within/among other "races" and cultures, so it's a pan-human issue. women are ~50% of the pop across all races and cultures (sometimes less so due to active pop. suppression).
The fact that this comment is the top comment on this post, and pedantically tries to tarnish the entire article, which contains many real-life quotes from female software developers who are real, and live today, speaks volumes.
Please, take a moment and reflect on what is most important. Is it gender equality, or is it nitpicking the temporal sequencing of Ada Lovelace's contributions?
I'm frankly quite surprised by the initial wave of comments disparaging this message.
The facts are that women are poorly represented in the tech community[1], and do make less than men[2]. Any attempt to let women feel more accepted and bring about much needed change should be championed, not picked apart and belittled because you feel like you are personally being attacked when people are just asking for help.
So... your response to finding an uncorrected variable in the study (which I don't see the value of, honestly, given that tech workers are near-uniformly salaried in this country) is to go out and cherry pick a "correction" from an entirely unrelated study that confirms your worldview? Who's quoting misleading statistics now?
Yeah, I've gone through and scanned that BLS report you linked to (actually you didn't, you linked to Forbes, but this is what they were talking about): https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf
It doesn't say what you think it does at all. This isn't a study of men vs. women working identical jobs and doing less work, this is a finding that across the entire workforce, a men's "work day" is somewhat longer than a woman's. Which is to say: Women are more likely to work part time jobs.
> Which is to say: Women are more likely to work part time jobs.
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.
So, would you like me to link in the HUNDREDS of articles posted to HN over the past two years going over how working more does not equate to working better and how hours worked is a bad proxy for productivity. Should I? Or are you going to just concede the point right here and now and retract your statement?
This may not even be relevant, so long as businesses are applying the same metrics to all their employees - in this case hours spent at work - and compensating them fairly according to those metrics.
I don't see how a number cribbed from a comparison of "work day length" (NOT total hours worked!) across the entire US workforce (and thus not correcting for the fact that women and men have different career statistics) says anything about whether women in the tech industry covered by this glassdoor study work more or less hours than their coworkers.
What you did is go out through the whole world of statistics to find one value that kinda/sorta "fixes" this inconvenient finding in the direction you want. That's just baldly ridiculous cherry picking, and you should be ashamed.
What? That's 100% up-is-downism. What you say is simply incorrect. The conclusions is backed by data. The data is in the link. Go look at it. See? Glass Door says women are underpaid. That's data!
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.
Even if the data says women are paid less, it doesn't say why. Correlation does not show causation. The implication is that there is gender discrimination. Research by women into the gender wage gap has explored a large number (but not all) reasons for this and shown the actual gender wage gap when taking into account actual reasons is only as high as 8%, with more research and experimentation underway to account for additional reasons. This is the most current objective research on the subject I am aware of.
"New research by ILR School professors Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn finds an eight percent gender wage gap that cannot be accounted for, even after controlling for observable variables that influence workers’ pay.
Gender discrimination in the workplace COULD be a cause, they suggest."
Still better than "Hey guyz! I found a link on Forbes to a BLS study about some other subject that totally makes you wrong!"
Believe what you want. Just like climate change denial, there's enough uncertainty in these numbers to make any level of ostrich-headery justifiable. I just want to know why no one ever manages to show data that is "wrong" in the other direction...
Ok, I can appreciate skepticism. But do you have any arguments to advance yourself? Wage gaps are hugely complex, and the stats put out by the labor department (fuck Glassdoor, whatever) are both controlled, detailed, and fairly damning. Women make less on average in almost every field, women are employed less in high paying jobs, and the jobs that are heavily weighted towards women do not pay nearly as much. I don't understand how people can brush off single statistics while ignoring the absolutely massive cache of freely available evidence.
Also, starving people of hours is just as effective at reducing costs as lowering the hourly. I don't think it's in your favor to argue that's something that should be controlled.
I suppose you can hand-wave the aggregate results away if you're comfortable with that 3-6% gap. But your argument basically amounts to "what matters to you doesn't matter to me, so I consider it insignificant".
I do consider 3-6% damning.
If you only compare women to other women, of course you won't see a wage gap; you can blame it all on the individual.
It's this willingness to value personal views of the world to minimize the facts that allows the gap to continue. Do you really think you can reason about systemic discrimination by looking at the individual? That's as ineffable as wondering why some people win the lotto; individuals are dominated by noise, and you only see the disparity in aggregate.
Why bother commenting if you don't care about the wage gap?
The shitty part is the gap, not the explanation. Are you seriously defending a wage gap because you're skeptical about why it exists? That's why it exists.
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.
The claim is that women (im aggregate) make different life choices than men, and once we account for those, the "wage gap" disappears.
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.
The only sexist thing here is your support of a baseless claim.
If it's not baseless, presumably you have something to offer.
However, without evidence, you are most likely wrong. Does that wrongness amount to sexism? Hard to say; my inclination says yes since you're referring to shuffling hundreds of dimensions defining employment into "life choices". Yes, that is probably a factor; culture is a powerful force. But it's also probably not the only factor; there are likely myriad explanations. Are you blind to that, or just dismissive?
The only contention I have is one you agreed to elsewhere: that the actual aggregate wage-gap once you've controlled for common variables (such as life choices) is 3-6% (with women earning more in some fields), which likely isn't significant or correctable.
A difference on that magnitude can easily be something about aggregate behavior correlated to sex, an uncontrolled for variable, or just random chance.
So let me ask you: do you have any evidence that 3-6% gap is the result of sexism instead of merely being a fact correlated to sex? (Particularly if we were to confine the data to people under 40, to control for historical biases that take time to age out.)
To be clear, I am not accepting that margin; I'm simply regrettably far from my spreadsheet for 2015 to which I can refer. My objections are a) the assumption "life choice" is NOT a sexist dog whistle, that b) you're talking about aggregate wage gap, which reduces the situation into a single statistic, and c) that a sex linked difference isn't worth addressing even if it does have a dominating effect in today's economy (which I doubt, and evidence is weak at best).
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".
I object to the contention that there arent biology correlated preferences and differences (such as attribute variance) which will cause biases in the distribution of labor and aptitude, which likely will always cause some form of imbalance in statistics. I also object to the notiom that we want equal outcomes rather than equal opportunity (even though that is harder to measure).
That being said, I think we should generally imrpove sexist behavior and systems, which hurt both sexes (albeit, in different ways).
I just think the "wage gap" is one of the least sexist fascets of modern society (if at 3-6%), and mostly represents people perpetuating a misunderstanding of statistics. So in that way, I feel like people are over-solving a mostly solved problem, which seems likely to lead to more sexism, not less.
I think that effort spent on fixing the larger issues are also likely to stabilize remaining issues with wages, and we would all be better served focusing on the large gaps in other statistics instead of the small one here.
That said, Im always happy to see new statistics that tell me Im full of shit, so if you find what you're looking for, please post it.
It's certainly reasonable for a studies across fields with hourly pay or, e.g., including both part-time and full-time (such as the BLS survey cited by the Forbes article), but I'm not sure we can make that assumption for software development - programmer productivity in a given time period is, on its own, somewhat mythically considered to vary by orders of magnitude.
You don't think people who are willing to work longer hours end up getting paid more? Are people who work more than forty hours each week doing it for nothing?
> From a brief scan of the study they didn't control for hours worked and they are already down to 5.9%
Why is it a foregone conclusion that the majority of women in this population worked fewer hours? A forbes study which averages across a large canvas of american workers is not a very good thing to compare to glassdoor's targetted subsection.
Right, but uh... The vast majority of positions Glassdoor cares about are salaried positions which don't track hours. They're exempt from overtime, as well.
It also seems to me that that signal would show up weakly in the data because it wouldn't vary the immediate effect on apples-to-apples salary, only on promotions and possibly referrals.
So I think your complaint is specious and the inclusion of a totally unrelated data point from a radically different dataset is either very misguided or profoundly disingenuous.
> The vast majority of positions Glassdoor cares about are salaried positions which don't track hours
Yes. And this makes any kind of data analysis a lot harder.
On paper I work the same number of hours as my Japanese coworkers. In reality they work more than double.
It's the same way on-call for many companies is just rolled into salary.
I've managed projects as a senior dev while the senior dev sitting next to me was purely technical. Etc etc.
The truth is two senior devs sitting right next to each other can have wildly different actual job duties.
I suspect glassdoor has taken at least some of those differences in work duties vs stated title into account.
> because it wouldn't vary the immediate effect on apples-to-apples salary,
Why wouldn't it?
Its not uncommon to stay at a certain level/title for 3-5 years.
You can't just ignore hours worked because "salary".
I come from a strong union background where you would get overtime or be able to take the time off later and where there were fairly rigid job duties. Where interviews and scoring candidates is all done in a very standardised fashion.
And oddly enough after adjusting for these explicit factors we had a very small unexplained gender pay gap. Much smaller than average for the tech industry.
Perhaps it's in our interest to make these factors explicit rather than implicit?
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.
> My point is: Work longer -> slightly more productive -> slightly higher pay.
And I'm telling you this is not a foregone conclusion.
> If the conversation starts from an inconclusive or flimsy premise then it should be derailed.
No. It should include both the initial position and the specific cases that inspired it and then move to a broader case. This is not customer service, these are people's lives.
> It is far too easy to make bad decisions based on flawed studies.
Are you suggesting that the decision to pay women equally, carefully audit corporate promotions, and firmly and directly punish racist and sexist harassment are actually open for debate? Is there an outcome where we might say, "Oh no, actually it's correct to pay women less for equal work?"
> The first step is to work out if it's a real issue we could be, or should be, solving.
How many individual women need to risk their careers explaining unconscionable behavior by their managers and employers HR departments before you're satisfied anyone anywhere is allowed to have this conversation? You should put that number out there.
> But you have to actually make a case.
You may not realize you're doing this, but you're actually interfering with everyone's ability to make a case by derailing every conversation and making it all about you and your (higher than any other sociological or scientific field) standards for allowing discussion.
Look at you. You're here because marketing copy for an event triggered you. You're so angry you're willing to argue that maybe pay shouldn't be equal after all.
I was talking about the specifics of a single study on comparing the tech industry with other industries on the wage gap (and I guess more broadly at the fact that people misuse these studies).
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.
> You are broadening the conversation to look at sexism in broader society.
No. No. No sheepmullet. You've been broadening the scope from unrelated articles to Japanese work culture whenever it suits you. It's too late for you to go, "HEY I WAS RIGHT IN THIS LIMITED CONTEXT."
Unbelievable.
> Nonsense. Most rigorous wage gap studies control for a lot more than the GlassDoor study.
Yes, because the include many more hourly, tipped and commission-based jobs. The Glassdoor dataset has almost none of those.
> The particular data (working hours) that I'm saying should have been included is straightforward to measure and collect.
Salaried jobs don't collect the data, and that's the majority of Glassdoor's data.
> A swing and a miss. It's like you aren't even trying to read what I'm writing.
Given your prior attestation you are not broadening scope despite mentioning Japan's dangerously broken work culture as a pole star, I'm wondering if YOU are reading what you're writing.
And given the moderation, you're not doing such a swell job convincing people here.
Funny enough, I agree with both you and the person you're arguing against. I agree that the wage gap (as defined by the difference in how much men and women earn when working in the same position with the same skills) is probably pretty close to 6%. [0] I also agree that there is a big problem currently.
In my opinion, the problem is twofold. First of all, this gap - whatever you think it is, 6% or 9% or 21% - it is a problem. Most Americans live pretty close to financial ruin, like it or not. 76% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck [1] and 63% of Americans are one missed paycheck away from the streets [2]. A 6% pay gap is about two paychecks. Even though it may not seem like much to a HN reader with significant savings or a safety net, this small gap spread across the whole population actually causes problems.
The second part of the problem is societal: women are discouraged from pursuing higher-paying jobs by society. This isn't the fault of the women themselves, or the people doing the hiring, but sexism and biases hidden everywhere. In my opinion, this is the best support for affirmative action: more women doing a certain job translates to more women interested in that career.
These two things combined are a double whammy that currently mean that less women work and women who do work are not always financially secure - and that's the big problem here. If you're a woman from an upper class background and have been encouraged by those around you, you may never experience any of these problems, and that's great. But if you're an average American woman, these things have a very real impact on your life.
This also explains the giant gulfs of opinion I see here on HN. Most people here are relatively wealthy - remember, if you earn more than 36k a year, you earn more than most working Americans. $70k/yr means you earn more than 75% of American workers. I'd bet the vast majority of US programmers on here earn above 70k/yr. It's easy to get caught in a bubble and say 'well the women around me seem to have no problems!' and forget about the majority of the country. At the same time, if you live in a low-income area, those two "missed" paychecks might be absolutely killer.
[0] I have a personal, unfounded feeling that it's closer to 10% - maybe 8-9% if I had to guess.
> The second part of the problem is societal: women are discouraged from pursuing higher-paying jobs by society. This isn't the fault of the women themselves
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.
>> The second part of the problem is societal: women are discouraged from pursuing higher-paying jobs by society. This isn't the fault of the women themselves
> 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.
Additionally, it seems implicit in the GP's POV that money (or higher pay) is necessarily the better end goal, rather than caring for others or improving society. What if money isn't the most appropriate proxy of value and worth?
(And to be clear, I wouldn't agree with using that to "whitewash" paying someone less because "their pay should be their enjoyment")
This is a really good point, but I think for me it's more of a visceral response to falseness or inaccuracy that was developed by programming actually.
It is good to encourage women and other underrepresented groups to enter tech-just imagine how many awesome programmers we are missing out on- but I feel we can do this by being objectively accurate.
I'm with you on the underrepresented story, this is very common. But the glassdoor study has many major flaws and I don't think is really that useful. The biggest flaw is that it's only using self-reported data for location, gender, salary and job title; and it has a very broad comparison by job title that doesn't really fit when you are comparing "programmer" with "qa engineer"
It's going to be easy to find problems with any study with which you disagree. I want to be clear: studies that are trying to distill something with this vast a number of moving parts will never be entirely satisfactory to everyone. The issues are simply too complicated.
That said, I find it much easier to believe that women are paid less than men, on average, than to believe otherwise. This has been the case historically since pretty much the founding of the nation. While I would certainly hope and do believe that women now make more than they have in the past, and that their pay is now approaching that of men, I think it's unreasonable to believe that we have reached "pay equity" between the sexes.
In my opinion, I would not consider pay between men and women equitable until I have seen reasonable looking studies that have proven the case. I think it would be wise to be skeptical of such studies but look forward to their being published.
That's pretty fatalistic, there are many quality studies that people disagree with. The soundness of a paper isn't based on whether you agree with it or disagree with it, it is based on the methods and the data.
It's interesting that you require data to change your assumption that there's not a problem.
I think it is easy to nitpick studies, especially when they are trying to measure something that is this complicated. While the soundness of the paper should be grounded in the methods and the data, it is far too easy for an individual to discount it's value based on a perceived mistake in method. The more complex the methods, the more polarizing the results, the more this is the case. For this particular issue, I think the methods by definition need to be fairly complex.
I am comfortable with my assertion that I will need to see some data before I take the position that women are not paid less than men in a discriminatory fashion. In my opinion, that women are discriminated against is a historical truth. I am not trying to be insulting, but I do find it hard to believe that people disagree on this.
While you see it as a historical truth this is something that is patently false in my daily life. Sorry I don't substitute historical truth for modern truth! I don't deny the existence of sexism.
Certainly possible. Another issue I have is that I regularly see good responses to these sorts of studies linked above pointing out valid flaws and yet none-the-less I'm expected to take this issue seriously. I just don't view it as a legitimate issue, not that I'm unwilling to.
> It's going to be easy to find problems with any study with which you disagree.
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.
And it, like most of the statistical papers surrounding the pay gap suffer from what I personally affectionately refer to as the "peanut butter spread" problem.
The implicit assumption of pay gap studies is that if you group all jobs into a category and then segment them by gender both groups should have equal distribution of some set of attributes X, Y, and Z. I can't help but feel as if looking at genders (or really any segment of society) and assuming they have "independent and identically distributed"[1] random variables is flawed.
For example, UC enrollment of undergraduate students for Engineering/CS has hovered around 14.5% for the last several years[2]. My fraternity, however, was more than half Engineering/CS majors at one point in time during my time as an undergrad at UC Davis.
One way to look at this is:
* My fraternity favored Engineering/CS majors
another way would be:
* My fraternity discriminated against non-Engineering/CS majors
But neither is actually true. The fact my fraternity had a higher percentage of Engineering/CS majors than the overall student body distribution does not imply any sort of causal influence insidious or otherwise; correlation is not causation.
Moreover, all things being equal, should my fraternity have the same distribution of majors as the overall student body?
I would argue no. Membership of a fraternity, or any other student organization for that matter, should be a personal choice. Whether it is a collection of like-minded individuals, similar majors, or similar interests that motivates you to join the choice should be yours to freely make. If that means that individual fraternities all have non-identical distributions of majors, then so be it!
Make no mistake, I am all about freedom of choice. I also am steadfastly libertarian and individual freedoms (and this applies equally when it comes to gender considerations). But I don't necessarily believe that in a Utopia-esque society where there is perfect freedom of choice that there would also be perfectly equal distributions of any sort.
You're building a strawman. No one is calling for "a Utopia-esque society where there is perfect freedom of choice [and] perfectly equal distributions of any sort."
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?
Not sure I am in a position to say it is or is not a straw man argument since I am the one who made it...but it is more or less a fairly well known "classical liberal"/libertarian[1] position:
oh please, google did their own study. They want to hire more females than any company but the conclusion was that there aren't enough women in the engineering pipeline.
So yea, the more likely reason is
C) Women don't want to become engineers as much as men do, for whatever (social/biological/cultural) reason
Given a multitude of other results showing that equalizing for pipeline problems shows women competing equally with men, the more likely reason is that women are being filtered out of the pipeline by sexism, not some mysterious "maybe they just don't want to" handwaving.
Oh and your claim that they're being filtered out by sexism doesn't qualify as handwaving?
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.
We have voluminous statistical evidence that women are judged more harshly than men in all phases of hiring when the only differentiator is being perceived as a woman. That's not handwaving, that's decades of study. Handwaving is "for whatever (social/biological/cultural) reason".
We know there's a pipeline problem, and we are fighting that. We don't think it's going to be solved overnight either, and critically, not just by addressing the pipeline because, as numerous stories from the tech industry have made clear recently, even when qualified women make it through that anemic pipeline, they still face individual and institutional sexism. Or have you forgotten that one of Uber's recent departures left Google after an internal sexual harassment scandal that was quietly handled?
" the more likely reason is that women are being filtered out of the pipeline by sexism, not some mysterious "maybe they just don't want to" handwaving."
So you're alleging that Google is judging women more harshly than men, "at all phases of hiring".
And they hate being doctors too. Except they don't. And deconstruction of what was a frankly pervasive culture of sexism in medicine and law has resulted in much higher participation of the second sex in these fields.
Is your claim that the pipeline is not completely fugged? Because there are very clear numbers indicating that it is, starting very early, at the K-12 level.
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.
Sorry, in retrospect that was very unclear. I agree with your second statement. There are definitely fewer women and people of color even applying for STEM jobs, although there are so many other factors such as quality of education, harassment, visibility of role models, etc that I think calling it "the pipeline problem" is an oversimplification.
What I think the original comment I replied to was saying though (and what most people in the industry with hiring power that I've talked to about this have said) is that "the pipeline problem" is the main thing preventing them from hiring a diverse team. That's bullshit though; there have been a million and one studies showing implicit biases in the hiring process, for one. We definitely need to improve the pipeline — the "pipeline problem myth" I'm referring to is that that's the extent of the problem.
> It is good to encourage women and other underrepresented groups to enter tech-just imagine how many awesome programmers we are missing out on
I don't follow the logic. Someone who enters tech through such an intervention is someone taken away from another field; why do we need another awesome programmer more than we need another awesome salesperson?
You bring up a fair point that the study is not perfect. I would be interested to find a better study, but to be honest I'm not sure where I would be able to find one... I'll see if I can find a more objective one after work.
There are also less women in the military, construction works etc. Women tend to also live longer, should we cook up some conspiracy theories related to these facts as well?
Seeing sexism everywhere is not helping the fight against remaining actual sexism.
This is an argument that I have yet to see being addressed to my satisfaction.
If recent raises / salaries in the tech industry outside of Silicon Valley are any guide, companies love to save money on salaries. So I honestly have no idea why all the men I work with haven't been replaced by women being paid 95% or whatever the claimed pay gap is. And remember, this is in the US, where you can legally be let go because your boss doesn't like the color of your shoes.
Because there aren't enough women applying. At my previous job, I interviewed 50+ people, and fewer than 10% were women. For the record, I advocated strongly for most of them, and contributed to several being hired, including one of the best engineers I've met. Companies have a hard time hiring enough software people in general, and there are many more men applying for software jobs than women. If there were some untapped pool of female engineers all looking for jobs, believe me, that pool would get tapped. It just doesn't exist.
Well, it's a little more complicated than that. They have extremely high state-specific variance, so it's difficult to show predictive validity. They have definitely been associated with particular sets of outcomes in non-gendered/racial contexts, where you would expect the studies to be easier to run.
Source: I did a bunch of them for my PhD, but my reading of the literature stopped in 2014.
There are software companies composed of all men (or 95% men if we want to be a bit more relaxed). Successful ones - as in making profit.
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?
If women are underpaid because they're (consciously or not) undervalued as workers by entrepreneurs, then those same entrepreneurs are unlikely to visualize a net salary savings. You're basically saying: if women are as good as men but you can pay them less, why not hire women? And the answer is that the same factors that lead to women being underpaid lead to not seeing them as interchangeable hire with males.
I could be wrong, but I think the point that the poster was making was this: Sure, maybe women are undervalued on average, but that's just on average. Assuming women are both paid less, and undervalued, then together that creates a double opportunity for an employer that can see through the undervaluing, and rationally hires mostly women because they are just as good but cost less.
And the point is that we don't seem to see such companies. All the major tech companies have similar percentages of women, despite all of them trying very hard to increase those numbers.
I think your characterization of the op's point is correct. My point remains: The same sexism leading to underpaying women or directing them into less compensated roles, should also tend to obscure, for decision makers, the "rational" idea that there's a double opportunity there.
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.
But is the sexism so pervasive it would prevent women from starting companies and making an app? The meritocracy of technology means that people downloading your app have no idea who the coders are, or what their genders are.
Perhaps this is an opportunity for VCs because people certainly love money more than sexism.
Prevent? No. Continually add friction at all stages, from conceptualizing, staffing, funding, and interacting with the larger techsphere while competing for earned media, virality, etc.? Yes, absolutely, with predictable effects.
One way to understand the effects of systemic "isms" is that the targets have to continually deal with a headwind that others don't, and the cumulative effect of this is like compound interest. The supposed meritocracy of technology that's blindly present in the download screen hides all the non-meritocratic context leading up to it.
> One way to understand the effects of systemic "isms" is that the targets have to continually deal with a headwind that others don't, and the cumulative effect of this is like compound interest.
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.
When you can find a few examples of some group succeeding or being where the vast majority of their group are not, it's called "tokenism", and it's a self-defeating argument. Is it common for low caste Indians with no security to successfully bootstrap profitable apps? Are they a significant constituency amongst tech leaders in India? Rags-to-riches stories only prove something is possible, not that it's normal.
We have no problem understanding how subtly performance enhancing drugs in sports can make huge differences over the long term. Why are we sceptical that performance degrading circumstances are as consequential?
Regarding "exploitation", I suspect that it is because employment markets are inefficient and non-fungible (based on location and many, many other factors, including culture and reputation) and that if a company's metric is hiring talent at the 90th percentile, then they may more quickly hit a limit where their ability to fill 90th percentile job salaries strips their ability to access talent in non-majority groups.
Efforts to reduce imbalance (regardless of demographic) is necessary to overcome location bias, and the bigger the pool, the higher the tide for all boats.
If you're "labor", stop thinking that you're at war with other demographics.
> Efforts to reduce imbalance (regardless of demographic) is necessary to overcome location bias, and the bigger the pool, the higher the tide for all boats.
Thing is, you can do it right and do it wrong. Effort for the sake of effort means little, it's not the thought that counts but results.
When President Bush piloted his No Child Left Behind act, one of the underlying goals was to close racial and class
gaps in educational standards, therefore, improving opportunity for disadvantaged groups but not guaranteeing ideal results.
Justice Clarence Thomas, the only current black Supreme Court judge, took a strong stance against race‐based affirmative action as it establishes “a cult of victimization” that permeates leniency on and faulty judgment of black students and workers in admissions and employment processes.
He believes this strengthens stereotypes and requires special, preferential treatment of the black community in order to make up for past oppression.
...
This sentiment is spreading, and a continual decline in academic achievement of black students
will most certainly propel these sentiments throughout the country. The American Civil Rights
Institute founder, Ward Connerly [who's african american], said he is “not against policies that address ongoing
disparities in income, educational opportunities or other factors, but they should not be race
based.” Policy reform is now addressing the achievement gap between black and white
students in hopes that solving the underlying issue between black underachievement will lead
to natural, unregulated increase in black enrollment in universities and, ultimately,
employment.
What do you mean by "subconsciously undervalued"? Do you have studies that show it? What about participation in opensource? Side projects? StackOverflow profiles? - none of these can be affected by "subconscious undervaluation".
And how to value, let's say, a developer? How do you, personally, differentiate good and bad programmers?
You really have to ask yourself: Why would women, as a cohort, make the same amount per individual as men? Do you assume that nothing can be different enough between men and women to reasonably justify the statistics?
I know of women who are paid more than me in tech, and I know why. I know of women who are paid less than me, and I can think of n reasons why.
As for sheer numbers, ask yourself: are there any industries where there are considerably fewer men than women? The answer is, of course, yes. Look at nursing. In the most gender-equitable societies on the planet, I'm talking the Norways and Swedens of the world, you'll see 80-90% female involvement in nursing. Look at construction. In those same societies, you will see almost the exact opposite, probably even greater disparities. Look at sales departments, I don't know a single woman who likes sales work, and I know at least a few who have given it a serious try. I'm sure there are some, but you won't convince me that it's the norm without hard data. On the flip side of that, I grew up with guys who love working with their hands in construction, and who like that it's honest work.
My intuition is that men and women(real, living individual men and women) are different in some way which drives them to prefer different work based on schedules, the way their job has them interact with people, the amount of solitary vs. collaborative work, work-life balance, and hosts of other complex differences.
As for harassment, I find it hard to believe that tech is a particularly bad place for it. I would believe you if you said that startups are prone to harassment (HR vacuum). Until I see a non-partisan study with an appreciable number of respondents, a consistent rubric for assessing individual situations, I will continue to believe what I see in person.
No CNET or USA Today article is going to convince me that it's a problem in itself that there is a statistical difference between the average yearly earnings of different cohorts. I'm sure married and unmarried people make different amounts of money on average. I'm sure people with and without kids make different amounts of money on average. Nothing about those statistics says that there is a discriminatory or unfair advantage. If you could prove that a major company is systematically underpaying women for work of equivalent holistic value, then it would be the case of the decade; this case has clearly never happened, because if it ever did, it would be an outrage, and at very least the people making this argument would be pointing at it every time they got a chance.
And I know you'll downvote this before reading it through, but maybe the first few open-minded people will get a chance to reflect. I can spare a few HN hivemind cohesion points.
> As for sheer numbers, ask yourself: are there any industries where there are considerably fewer men than women? The answer is, of course, yes. Look at nursing.
Do the men employed as nurses make less money on average than their women colleagues?
They are almost always in a union. All men and women who are in a union make equal pay.
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.
Do the men employed as nurses make less money on average than their women colleagues?
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).
So male registered nurses in the US appear to be a solid single digit in terms of percentage. Wikipedia says 6.6%.
The internet says CRNAs are 41-43% male.
So a very small number of male nurses, and a majority of them becoming CRNAs, and so the average pay for male nurses is higher than the female average. But really, I bet the 59% female CRNAs are being paid the same.
This is the problem with looking at averages only. If men are being prefered over women in the CRNA program, there is a problem. If female CRNAs are paid less on average than male CRNAs there is a problem. But the average alone tells you nothing. It definitely doesn't give you enough information to show you which part needs fixing.
Your whole argument is that people are biologically set to specific roles because in some countries where they have the free choice they still go for those roles. But that ignores the fact that even in those societies children are still constantly bombarded with messages telling them what their gender should be when they grow up.
You're looking at the finish line and making an answer while ignoring the fact that they are placed on different courses from birth.
You're treating it like well-established fact that people's career choices are based on gender identities which are fabricated by the environment they're raised in. Where is the evidence for this? Where are the oddball societies with female construction workers and all-male nurse workforces? If this is just an "accident" of the memetic evolution of societal gender tropes, then why is it so unilaterally consistent across cultures that have developed separately?
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.
Actually to prove otherwise you just need to find traditionally "male" roles that are no longer male dominated roles. Like teachers, lawyers, or doctors. All had centuries of being male jobs.
Or find 'male' roles in some cultures that aren't in others like programming.
I picked 3 examples where it is true though. The exception being teaching in the US specifically pays awfully but it pays pretty well/has good benefits in other western countries.
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?
Many asian countries culturally encourage STEM fields above all else so it's not surprising that they are both over represented in STEM fields and underrepresented in non-STEM fields.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here? That culture pushes people to certain expectations? I agree.
The programmer role also changed, as far as I'm aware. I think there used to be more separation between program designers/architects and the people who would translate the requirements and punch/verify cards, and operate switchboards. I think the people at the bottom of that chain were called programmers.
The definition of the role is at least somewhat different today. It could also have something to do with the wide availability of women who were trained typists in the '50s and '60s, as keyboards were used to punch cards/tape.
I won't purport to be an expert on exactly how that phenomenon came about, I've not seen a satisfactory explanation of it.
> I don't know a single woman who likes sales work, and I know at least a few who have given it a serious try.
I don't work in sales so perhaps someone better qualified can comment, but isn't the stereotype that the culture in sales is like that of fraternities? I can imagine how that's probably not welcoming to women, especially when the sales revolves around social relationships.
If ever I had a notion that an expression of solidarity for women in tech was unnecessary or quixotic, the response to this article on this very forum would be sufficient to dispel it.
HN has actually improved dramatically in recent years. There used to be no one like you speaking up in support. And, yet, it took me a long time to see the sexism here because it was already so much more civil than other places I had known.
(In case you are unaware, I appear to be the highest ranked openly female member here. I strongly suspect I really am because I have been saying that for a couple of years or so and no one has shot me down yet with "Nope!!! THIS member is openly female AND on the leaderboard, you dumbass!!!!!")
From what I've seen, there are less African-American and non-white hispanic men in tech than there are white and Asian women, yet I never see this discussed. Is this not an important issue as well? Will skewed racial ratios only be handled after gender parity has been achieved? Or do they not matter at all?
The same people who call attention to gender diversity also speak out for racial diversity. This particular piece focuses on gender because of today's being International Women's Day.
Because we get flagged down a lot. This thread managed to survive because we started a big twitter stink to try and get it unflagged, and because we had the international women's day hastags to get attention, it managed to make the front page. But even that was a struggle.
Many of us, myself included, fight on behalf of a lot of underrepresented groups on HN as best we can.
I'm sorry if you haven't seen it, but I assure you some people here are trying.
I see it come up pretty regularly. It usually is then followed by racist pablum of one sort or another--so the resistance to racial issues isn't exactly different from the resistance to gender ones.
Because we have enough difficulties discussing basic issues of gender equity, without trying to deal with intersectional and allied issues. Walk before you run!
In the meantime, I note that you could have chosen, in response to a post on International Women's Day, to show appreciation to black _women_ and latina _women_ in tech, and recognize the issues that they face on all of these fronts. You chose not to do so. Hence it seems to me like your purpose here might be to draw attention away from those women, because you don't think they need your support or solidarity. Was that your intent?
The disparity you're talking about could be because there are more women in tech (just underrepresented in C-level roles or whatever it might be) likely to speak up, whereas black people are underrepresented in tech full stop?
This is just concern trolling.
Obviously all these issues are important to address; simply pointing to another issue does not contribute to solving either of them.
Ah. Christ. Mechanics? I mean the women are like 50% of the population so big target likesay? Some of those women are non-white and a rising tide lifts all boats you know?
Well, the very first claim the article brings up is that women face a pay gap, which is simply not true when you control for other variables. So that's not a good start.
Also, the origin of the quote 'Nevertheless, she persisted' is from a completely non-gendered context, where a woman persisted in breaking the non-gendered rules of the US Congress.
I wish comments were scored in a way that was weighted by the degree of bravery it took to write them.
What a shame that most of the top comments here are boring, stand-up-for-the-vulnerable types agreed with by the majority— "women face difficulties in tech, and we should help them whenever we can"—while the downvoted posts are the ones trying (not necessarily successfully) to arrive at politically incorrect truths.
Very much this. It's the easy, trite, safe, politically correct position to take. You get a pat on the back for being a good moral upstanding person according to the mores du jour. You feel good. No hard conversations are had. It becomes a cult. People are burned at the proverbial stake for not subscribing to the Geocentric model.
It is incredibly hard to have a good discussion about this topic. I think it is getting better on Hacker News, but there is still a lot of work to do.
I sometimes write about such topics, but can't get much traction. A few of my pieces have gotten a few thousand page views, mostly on HN, but most of what I write is largely ignored. If you want something meatier, you might enjoy my personal blog.
This forum, like most places is no different. Regardless of what you are trying to say, best to just stfu because there will be another person awaiting to single their virtues.
Also, 99% of stats on the internet are bullshit, including this one.
Take everything with a grain of salt and just be a nice person. That's my motto. In addition to don't raise pitch forks when I hear a stat
Main one being about the wage gaps being inflated. Not sure if thats true.
Additionally, why don't we speak about rights of minorities on this forum. I don't think xor meant anything negative by this. A good question to ask but I guess not today?
"why don't we speak about rights of minorities on this forum."
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.
We do speak about minorities; others have provided links. Bringing it up here, now, though, is deflecting from the actual topic at hand, which is a sadly common tactic in discussions like this.
They are. The mechanism greys them out quickly due to downvotes followed by ungreying later due to upvotes if the post was substantive with citations. It's what happened to me early on countering BS that was popular.
I just had a conversation with a friend of mine today about the issues she is facing as a "woman in tech". It was some stuff that really surprised me. On today of all days.
Treatment of women as full-fledged peers is definitely something that needs better attention in our industry.
I am always amazed by the stories I hear. It's a common yet toxic mentality where women are told they can't or shouldn't do something, or aren't cut out for STEM because they are female.
I recently saw this surface on HN in the basement of this thread, discussing the appointment of Jennifer Widom as the dean of Stanford Engineering. Many posters speculated, without knowledge of her credentials, that she was unqualified compared to her male peers and only selected because she's a woman.
I don't know how it escapes them that this attitude is the literal definition of sexism, and that women in tech have to fight this constantly.
I saw it happen all the time in engineering school. I even occasionally see it in workplace. So many of my female classmates and coworkers are talked down to, discouraged and have their skills written off by their male counterparts (nevertheless, they persist). No wonder the share of women in STEM fields dwindles, the culture can be absolutely toxic.
I don't doubt that many people are honestly being unintentionally sexist. But it's on everyone to constructively call out this behavior and support a healthier culture in the school and workplace. At the very least, why would one want to write off the ideas and talent of half the population?
There's this nerd fiction favorite called "Snow Crash". I read it early on, and this line always stuck with me:
> It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.
Widom is great. I can credit her Stanford online Databases course with a good bit of my career as it stands today - she is a thoroughly great teacher, and explainer of things.
Yep. I go to the top university in Canada (wrt being employable in technology) and work with/know many qualified females. I can say that there is only one (out of ~25) that claims she has never experienced any sexism.
Even the women who say they have never experienced blatant sexism have no idea how many job offers or interviews they didn't get simply for being a woman, or how much less money they are making over the course of their life, etc. Sexism is not always explicit and obvious.
> The first thing I coded was an Everquest 7-page website in plain-old HTML. I was 15 and I had figured out HTML from right-clicking and wondering if 'View Source' was how it was made.
I went into computer engineering because I loved video games and wanted to write games. I believe my one of my first webpages was a Final Fantasy fanpage with Microsoft FrontPage, uploaded to my dad's Prodigy web space. I don't know what the actual stats are in terms of girls playing video games, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a correlation between that childhood activity and a later interest in programming.
I really wish they would quit promulgating this because it's actually counterproductive:
"women face continued pay disparity"
Seeing this statement tells me immediately that the author is grinding an ax.
In some fields of engineering (EE, for example), women actually get paid more (104% last I checked). And, when you control for experience, time off for family, etc., pay disparities in most tech fields almost disappear.
Complaining about discrimination or harassment? Sure, go for it. Lack of child care and having undue burden with family health issues? The stats back you up.
However, attempting to promulgate something which is not true hurts the overall movement when there is so much that is true and needs to be fixed.
I'd be curious where you got that 104% number. Here's a source saying woman make 1-6% less in tech[0]. Here's one saying ~28%[1] among programmers.
Based on my casual research, the correct answer to "what's the gender pay gap" is to sidetrack into a half-hour discussion on what you're controlling for and whether it's appropriate to control for that.
For example, professions where flexible schedules are rare see the wage gap grow for women between their 20s and 30s (compared to professions where flexible schedules are more common). This is likely because that's around the age where people have children and women are expected to handle a disproportionate measure of childrearing duties.
Is that something you try to control for? If you're looking for direct, hiring-manager-discriminating-against-you sexism, then yes, you control for it. If you're looking for the wide variety of subtle ways women are discriminated against, you don't.
From what I've found, if you're looking for the sort of direct sexism of hiring managers paying less to _exactly_ the same person for _exactly_ the same work, you come out with a 3-10% wage gap.
If, on the other hand, you're looking for the wide variety of systematic ways women are prevented from getting equal pay, you get 10-30%. Some of those ways can be addressed at the individual level, some at the company level, and some at the societal level.
> And, when you control for experience, time off for family, etc., pay disparities in most tech fields almost disappear.
Okay, so spoiler alert, I'm grinding an axe right now.
It's completely ridiculous to imply that analysts are not normalizing for hours worked. That's one of the most basic things they do, and you really should provide proof in the form of a study that both published its methodology and has been done in the last 5 years that didn't account for this, setting aside that one clickbait publicity stunt from Glassdoor. People keep citing other studies that "don't do this" and it's not true, or point to the national average and say that extends to knowledge work and that's absurd.
"The pay gap" is not simply lockstep salary progression. It was just the most obviously unfair and lowest-hanging fruit. That's only the start of it. The fact that women are often passed over for promotion because industries frown on maternity leave, the fact that harassment leaves women with fewer mentorship opportunities, the fact that many environments treat interviews like hazing, all these things add up to create aforementioned gap.
Your quote up at the top is the root of the pay gap. It's your belief that someone who works a reasonable sum of hours but then goes to have a child should be paid less. You believe that someone who takes time off for a reasonable work-life balance or a family emergency should be paid less. That attitude is bad for everyone, but it's especially bad for women in much of western society's current form.
And yes, there are still places where women DO get paid less for the same work. That is not done yet. And until it's so rare that it's unheard of, we're going to keep pointing it out.
Can you cite a study that controls for time off, degree type, experience that still shows a large disparity in pay?
It's your belief that someone who works a reasonable sum of hours but then goes to have a child should be paid less.
The question isn't whether someone who takes time off to raise a child should be paid less, it is whether someone with more overall work experience should be paid more. My wife took 10 years off to raise kids. Is she entitled to the exact same salary as a co-worker who continuously worked for that time, increasing their skills? What about a 5 year gap? 1 year?
> 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.
I think the question is, "Can the person do the work and contribute to the environment they're being paid to be a part of." It is not some sort of game where dollars = experience.
From that perspective, the answer should be, "Yes they do deserve equal pay for equal work, why is that so challenging?"
Paying people more for having more experience isn't some weird fetish that companies engage in. It's done that way because people with more relevant experience generally get better at the thing they're experienced in (or have more breadth of knowledge, etc). If you try to pay someone with 10 years experience the salary of someone with 1 years' experience, you will either have a very hard time finding people to hire or you will end up hiring someone who is not very good at their job.
So yes, if someone takes 10 years off to raise children or to go yachting around the world or to help sick children, they will probably not command the same salary that their (otherwise identical) co-worker who stayed in the field for those 10 years would command, because they likely won't be capable of "equal work". Anyone doing anything else would be systematically overpaying their workers, and are likely to be out-competed by companies paying market wages.
>
So yes, if someone takes 10 years off to raise children or to go yachting around the world or to help sick children, they will probably not command the same salary that their (otherwise identical) co-worker who stayed in the field for those 10 years would command, because they likely won't be capable of "equal work". Anyone doing anything else would be systematically overpaying their workers, and are likely to be out-competed by companies paying market wages.
I'm confused by your patronizing tone. You seem to think I don't know that this is common practice.
See, the point of the prior post was: I disagree with this premise. The question should be, "How well does this person do the job" not "how well does this person match my preconceptions about how an expert in this job should look." This is especially the case in the world of software and software products, where we're notoriously bad at identifying talent and educating people.
Anyone who's designed tech interviews with a high technical standard can tell you that years worked is at best a weak signal.
Yes, that is true. It's worth noting that it's a relatively small part of the problem here. We need to stop being angry at women for being women (e.g., viewing nursing rooms as a luxury or somehow unfair).
In fact, according to a different video also by Christina Hoff Sommers the 77 cents on the dollar pay gap oft cited is no more than a blanket calculation using Census data.[1] This is seemingly confirmed by the Washington Post.[2] In fact, the Washington Post seems to indicate that the 77 cent figure doesn't correct even for weekly/hourly wage metrics much less hours worked.
As a whole I think you might find the Christina Hoff Sommers videos interesting to watch. Although they are "classical liberal"/libertarian leaning right (considering the American Enterprise Institute is a conservative think-tank I am not too surprised by this).
But I also wanted to ask some things about your points:
> the fact that many environments treat interviews like hazing
> someone who works a reasonable sum of hours but then goes to have a child should be paid less
> someone who takes time off for a reasonable work-life balance or a family emergency should be paid less
These aren't really gender specific so I am struggling to see how they would contribute to a gender pay gap. Perhaps you could elaborate?
> The fact that women are often passed over for promotion because industries frown on maternity leave
> the fact that harassment leaves women with fewer mentorship opportunities
I would be interested to read any sources you have that could give me some insight into these dynamics. These are points I haven't read about before and I wasn't even aware they have been examined to any degree.
Personally I tend to be more Libertarian and am very pro-"choice".
I don't think being skeptical of the dubious statistics surrounding the gender pay gap makes someone misogynistic or anti-feminist...so I would encourage you to try and keep an open mind before labeling someone so just because they express reservations about the wage gap and the statistics behind it.
And why should you control for time off for family? Except for the really early time after birth, both parents can do that. Is it the fault of the employer? Well, perhaps they could be more persuasive in motivating the women to work and more accepting of men taking days off to care for their sick children.
Another thing in the "etc" bucket is the type of degree possessed. Men are currently more likely to have a more technical degree (EE, mathematics) which tend to get higher pay. The Payscale study cited in an earlier comment, for example, only controls for education level, not degree.
Warren violated the rules- it has _nothing_ to do with her gender.
Whether her points are validate or not, the rules were followed as they would have been with any man.
If she wants to get her opinion out, she can hold a press conference outside the Senate or simply call Maddow, like she did- a friendly audience that would allow her to speak as long as they had time for.
I look forward to your evidence of sexism there then, since otherwise any inconsistency is entirely irrelevant to the "strong woman stood up to men" narrative (and please realize I say that as an enthusiastic Warren supporter).
The Senate has rules, and those rules are fairly enforced regardless of gender. Tying a movement to the perceived unfairness of a fair enforcement seems to me to be unwise.
I'm not the person you asked, but I don't see how Senator Warren speaking has much to do with women programmers. While there are lot of challenges, I don't think Ada Lovelace was denegrated. In fact, the quote about her is kind of nonsense as it refers to her historical significance as related to her actions at the time. Is this trying to say that she coded despite computer science historians trying to belittle her contribution after her death? Or is it poorly worded and intends to convey that people kept trying to stop her and she persisted (which is true as it was very difficult for her).
"Despite continued assaults on the credibility of her contributions to modern computer science as the world’s first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace coded."
I also don't like how the article equates programming and its value system of efficiency and beauty as factors of value and correctness with the political aspect of Senator's Warren actions that uses a different value system. If you agree with Warren, then this article makes more sense because you think Warren was right, but was stopped. If you disagree with Warren, then you may think that she broke whatever rules of the Senate and was properly stopped.
Finally, I don't like how it equates all of these awesome female and non-binary programmer examples of success with Senator Warren's failure. She was stopped and Sessions was confirmed as attorney general. It would be cool if there was a better example that resulted in success, like Senator Warren's own story of how she became a senator.
The article isn't responsible for the recent re-purposing of the phrase "Nevertheless, she persisted", and I think it's a relevant connection to make.
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.
For example, the inclusion of Elizabeth Warren and McConnell's line. What McConnell did (attempt to shut down resistance of the opposite party) was wrong-headed and undemocratic, but the only thing it had to do with gender was the use of a pronoun (edit: yodon is right).
Nobody would have paid much attention to it if he'd said "nevertheless he persisted", but a partisan attack was made into something about gender when there's no reason to believe it was so.
What does it really have to do with coding, anyway? It's inclusion says more about the author's goals than it does about the topic.
King is not "on camera praising sessions." She was a speaker at a public event where she was expected to acknowledge the other headliners in the room. She acknowledged his physical presence, nothing more, and if you watch the tape it's fairly clear she isn't happy about doing so and left him to the end of the list because of it.
"What McConnell did (attempt to shut down resistance of the opposite party) was wrong-headed and undemocratic, but the only thing it had to do with gender was the use of a pronoun"
If that were true, then why were the several men who spoke after her, and read the exact same letter, not disciplined?
Susan Fowlers case is harrowing and disgusting and shows that sometimes there bad people in powerful positions who are sexist.
I don't think the tone of "the world is sexist" is genuine or fair, Susan Fowlers case is notable because it's definitely the exception, not the norm.
Of course I will be glad when things like that _never- happen_, but if you take the example of murders.. There is usually a huge murder problem when you do not hear about individual murders. If you know how many people a year are being murdered in your town, that means that there is a low enough amount for each case to be exceptional and newsworthy.
Of course, you hope that no murders happen. But that's unfortunately unrealistic.
I hope, sincerely, I'm right about that case and there is no institutionalised sexism in tech, I have never really seen it (aside from one super condescending guy), but of course that's anecdatum. What I _do_ see is a lot of women being told to play victim and doing so, this article is fodder for that.
For what it's worth, I'm not sure I've seen much I could objectively call sexism either. Some, but not a lot. Certainly not enough to use words like "systemic."
One explanation for this is that it isn't happening. Another is that it isn't happening in my "spaces" (networks/companies/etc.). But another is that it is, but in ways that I don't see. I don't know how much all my coworkers are paid, and if someone is receiving unwanted advances it would likely be happening where I can't see it. There are other explanations too, maybe I'm used to some sexist behaviors and wouldn't notice if they happened right in front of me. A lot of the tech culture humor I'm aware of, and have participated in, revolves around programmers being men. It took some time and some serious reflection before I realized this was the case, and that it was a problem.
So sure, no one in my office runs around "grabbing women by the ...," or joking with me about it, but that doesn't mean sexism isn't happening. And I respect and trust my female peers enough to take them seriously when they tell me it is.
All that said, there's one piece of data I simply can't square with "sexism isn't a serious problem in tech." Every company I've worked for, every conference or meetup I've attended, most of the blogs I follow and books I've read - vastly more men than women. To the point that it's almost absurd. Here's what gets me about that - I love what I do! Tech is a great field to be working in for a ton of reasons! Objective reasons! On top of that so much of tech lends itself naturally to inclusiveness. What the fk is going on that I can work for years on teams of 90% men?! This doesn't prove sexism in tech, but it's evidence that something is up, right? And the accounts I've heard of women being treated poorly in tech give credence sexism as one possible and reasonable explanation.
Heck, I don't even think I'm arguing with you. Your posts sound reasonable, I get the sense you care, and I'm certainly less familiar with European tech culture than American. BUT it is worth your time to dig into the, "if I don't see it isn't happening" thing because that can be a trap; one I've fallen into myself.
> What the fk is going on that I can work for years on teams of 90% men?
You have to seperate "unattractive to women" with sexism.
For example it's a truism of our field that to get reasonable pay rises you have to job hop.
Woman tend to want to stick around in a job longer than men. So it's a big negative for them.
Women tend to prefer building close relationships in the workplace. In a field that values technical competence above language and cultural compatibility it's harder to build these relationships. Again another big negative for women wanting to work in software dev.
Or consider that we as an industry love new and shiny and see how compatible that is with women who want to be able to take a few years off for children.
I could go on and on.
All these factors make our industry unattractive to many women... but they aren't sexist.
As a male software dev who works on older legacy software I am constantly judged when I interview for not keeping up with the industry.
Perhaps there is a biological difference in the sexes when it comes to interest in technology versus interest in community. The societies which have a stronger social safety net and closer to equality of opportunity for both sexes see a WIDER gender difference in fields like IT and nursing. Compare that to the smaller gap seen India where there is a strong economic incentive pushing women into IT
Susan Fowler's case was not unique, I know women in tech who can confirm this. These are systematic issues. Why are you so desperate to downplay them, and why do you get so nervous when you're not allowed to frame the issues or control how they're addressed?
I don't think anyone is claiming that Susan Fowler's case is unique, it is not. Her case is rare, like murder. Of course murder is a terrible crime and is in no way equivalent to sexual harassment, but is useful as an example of a terrible, but rare case.
I sincerely hope the problem isn't systemic or systematic within tech, but I need to see data to believe this. Your anecdotes of multiple women who have, unfortunately, suffered, is not evidence of a systemic element of tech company culture.
I'm not worried about framing issues, I'm worried about being accurate and precise. One of the parts of programming that I like the most is the procedural accuracy that comes from coding.
What do you mean by "everyone is telling you it's not rare?" I read accounts of women who were treated horribly and unjustly, but certainly not by "everyone." I expect I see a post or three every month and that is rare considering there are 3.6M programmers in the US and 18.2M worldwide.
I don't stare at a screen all day. I work and have worked with teams of all sizes, hiring, firing, negotiating salary, dealing with HR and all that stuff. Although I would love to stare at a screen all day.
It's funny that you are calling me as sheltered and saying my experience isn't valid. This doesn't seem like rational behavior. Your irrationality in this aspect makes me doubt other claims by you that are not backed by data.
You know, not every woman who has bad experiences in the tech industry writes a blog post about it and puts it up on HN. A lot of us don't even bother reporting it to HR anymore, since we're well aware by now that HR exists to protect the company from lawsuits, not to protect women from harassment. And lawsuits just end up getting you informally blacklisted. I personally know a lot of women, including myself, who have faced issues with sexism and harassment in the tech industry, and most of us have either sucked it up if we decide it's not that bad, or find another job if it is. I doubt any of us would bring it up in front of a male coworker who hasn't already demonstrated that he's "safe" to talk to about these things. I think it's great that more women are feeling comfortable speaking publicly about issues in the industry, but I think many of us are still struggling not to be the nail that sticks out and gets hammered down. Why would someone put their career at risk to "educate" a coworker who has already demonstrated that he doesn't care what women say about it?
This is a really good point and shows how hard it is to gather data on the subject.
I certainly don't expect everyone to write a blog post about it, but I would encourage people to tell their stories. Otherwise, we just have more and more hearsay.
In this case, HR will work to prevent a very expensive lawsuit. I've seen HR help victims of sexual harassment many times.
But without more people speaking up, things will never get better.
That plays well into my murder analogy- that's incredibly unfortunate. I would say, normally, that I'd urge women to report this anyway, but this is what HR is for and that's depressing that it's viewed in such a light- they should absolutely tell their stories though.
If you have any female friends who want to work in a truly equal work environment that promotes women as equals; then my studio is aggressively hiring. http://www.massive.se/jobs/ ; it's in Sweden but we're also very good at relocating people (thorough support with VISA's and relocation allowances, etc;)
You're claiming you can estimate the frequency of these incidents based on how often they crop up on HN, which just flagged this straightforward and innocent link for being feminist, so yes you are definitely sheltered from these issues.
I'm not making that claim at all. I'm claiming that it seems rare to me based on my experiences in the industry.
I am claiming that you should not assert something is common without data. Somehow your anecdotal conversations are valid for a really broad assumption for frequency?
It's very interesting that you have such a double standard toward things you believe. How do you form beliefs? Do you randomly decide things, then cherry pick enough "data" to back up your opinion?
Damn, if only these women had also found the Wikipedia portal for logical fallacies, and also had concrete stats on workplace harassment, which is a personal, embarrassing, and highly political subject.
The parent comment "debunked" my reasoning by citing logical fallacies.
There's a page on Wikipedia that lists all logical fallacies and links to their pages, it's often cited as one of the best / coolest pagest on Wikipedia (seriously, check it out.)
But recently a lot of people think they can win (or shut down) arguments (or pleas for equality) by leaning on these logical fallacies a little to hard. It's a lame and desperate move, as there's literally always something you can throw out when you can't defend your point anymore. It's become such a "thing" that you can counter "oh cool that you found that wikipedia portal". It's particularly frustrating since combating inequality (or any social issue) often requires more of an emotional / social intelligence and personal experiences / understanding, which are apparently not fair game to these Greybeard Grand Wizard Gatekeepers of Logic(tm)
And asking for concrete data/stats on an incredibly personal, often legal, and highly politicized systematic trend is obviously absurd, but a good way to dismiss an argument you find inconvenient and don't want to address.
I hate to jump on you, since I commented on a lot of your comments. But I am genuinely curious if you can point me to documented cases. Your anecdotes of "I know women who were sexually harassed or discriminated against" is the same proof that the parent is giving.
I've seen sexism once, it was some guy talking down to the team lead of the help desk, this guy was _shredded_ by every person in the office, before being told to come to HR, someone came to clear his desk that day.
This was in the UK where it is rather hard to fire people, so I find it hard to believe to be quite honest that the situation is anywhere near as dire as it's painted. Of course, I wouldn't see it, I'm a big ugly bearded bloke.
But we need stats, stories, we need to hold people accountable if it's not the way it should be. Not tell everyone it's bad and then go on about feminism. The kinds of people who are causing these issues do not give a solitary fuck about how your girls have your back, especially if you're not going to hold the guy to account in the first place.
The highest-profile case that I'm personally attached to or know people involved in would be the countless allegations against Jacob Applebaum from Tor.
There's one particularly dishonest method that people who defend the status quo use (usually out of sweaty desperation for privileges handed out based on gender, race, or financial class), which is the way they frame incidents of abuse or oppression as completely isolated from society or culture.
If you look at the Uber or Tor cases you have to realize that there is a culture in hacker / geek / IT that enabled it. Hell, if you post on HN must you realize there's values that the majority of us share. And those values that enabled the horrors at Tor and Uber are likely also present in other situations that are based on or include the same culture.
If you think I'm implying all men in SV or on HN are misogynists then you're willfully misinterpreting me, I'm just saying these are systematic / cultural issues and should be addressed as such. Also, it'd be great if you'd step out of the way.
Jacob Applebaum was publicly crucified and Uber also. That would not be a thing if there was an inherent sexism in tech, if that was the case people would have shrugged at it as if it was normal behaviour. They most certainly did not.
Sex crime in Sweden is reported at higher rates than the rest of the world. This is believed to be caused by the fact that it's easy to provide evidence that will lead to conviction and trials are dealt with swiftly.
The reason I bring this up is because if Women know it's normal and accepted to point out their oppressors and that justice will be had, then they will be more likely to report them and the world becomes a better place.
I fight for equality, my fight is no less valid than yours just because I have a penis, but I told you about the refugees already- I don't want women to be in tech if they're not integrated. We _all_ deserve to be integrated.
I've handled the hiring of almost all Web developers within my company for the last half decade, and in that time I have hired absolutely zero women. Yet, this has nothing to do with discrimination and much more to do with the applicants themselves and the numbers by which they apply.
During this time, I've seen Web design positions attract females applicants by about a two-thirds majority, whereas Web development positions attract only one in twenty (if that). And yet, those who have applied seem to fit into two distinct categories of undesirables:
First, the designer, with a design degree, who learned to code from some two-week academy that now feels the need to apply for a position well beyond their skill level. Or second, the mathematics major (or similar) who feels their knowledge of topics only related to programming in general is satisfactory enough to hit the ground running as a Web developer of all things...
So I'll be happy to discuss the potential of a wage gap if I ever seem to hire a true female Web developer.
In truth, your real issue is you don't value an integrated workplace. Once you decide that it is a top priority to have a diverse workforce, you will find ways to attract, grow, and retain diverse talent.
You clearly have not decided this is important to you, which is your choice. However, because you choose not to pursue it, you are now concluding that you are entirely blameless for your objectively abysmal performance in hiring women. That is not a valid conclusion.
My experience is that once I chose to prioritize hiring women, a bunch of my own hidden biases, assumptions and yes, values, became clear. I realized that I had missed opportunities to hire women in the past. I realized that I had connected values I shared with people I hired as objectively "good" when in fact they just matched mine. I have a high opinion of my skills, so it's perhaps natural that I would do so, but in the end it actively hurt my abilities to recruit a diverse workforce. It was actually quite painful to realize I was the reason for not hiring women in many cases.
The other thing to realize is women, like all humans, have their own biases, and instinctively suss out those organizations that are seriously hiring women, and avoid those that don't. So until you decide that you want to recruit women, and succeed in doing so, you will continue to have a terrible record for hiring women.
> Your real issue is you don't value an integrated workplace ...
> You decide that it is a top priority to have a diverse workforce ...
> You will find ways to attract, grow, and retain diverse talent ...
> You clearly have not decided this is important to you ...
> You choose not to pursue it ...
> You are now concluding that you are entirely blameless ...
> I chose to prioritize hiring women ...
> I realized that I had missed opportunities ...
> I realized that I had connected values I shared with people I hired as objectively "good" ...
> I have a high opinion of my skills ...
> I was the reason for not hiring women ...
In truth, your real issue is that you project your own failures in an amazingly presumptuous manner.
Whereas I merely left a comment detailing my factual observations regarding hiring for a specific type of position advertised equally to both men and women on services like LinkedIn and Craigslist.
" the mathematics major (or similar) who feels their knowledge of topics only related to programming in general is satisfactory enough to hit the ground running as a Web developer of all things"
All companies I worked for routinely hired guys like that assuming they will learn on the job. Most did, some did not. In any case, many professional programmers I see studied mathematics, physics or something similar and then changed career.
Edited to add: it is possible that your company can not afford a bit longer learning curve in the beginning. Did not wanted to make it sound like I am accusing you.
I actually thought that big difference between men and women is that men assume they can do tech by default, apply for jobs even as they have minimum qualification or experience and it oftentimes works out.
I couldn't name a single programmer, man or woman who worked on any Apollo mission. The problem is not that women are under-recognized as coders, it's just that engineers as a class of workers are often under-recognized.
Humans just don't care enough about intelligence unfortunately. Everyone knows about Neil Armstrong though.
These types of articles seem to always get the same mixture of responses. The biggest problem that I see is that everyone starts with completely different sets of assumptions and they are almost never up front about them.
The lack of cited sources in articles like these leads people to bolster or criticize particular studies that they have read or heard about, usually without referencing those. Many of these studies are either flawed or contain assumptions that some people don't agree with, so this ends up going nowhere also.
Are there any really good studies on this topic that we may discuss as a common point of reference? Once that take into account all the facts, and don't start with assumptions like the following:
1. There should be equal numbers of men and women in tech (or there is some other ratio that is preferred or correct).
2. Women and men in tech should - on average - be paid the same.
Some people have these assumptions as part of their personal belief systems, but they entail a whole bunch of other assumptions that are not prima facie true.
One other huge weakness in these kinds of studies is that they measure the things that are easy to measure; things like education and experience. If companies are hiring compensating employees rationally, they would use these only as heuristics, and have some measure of how much an individual employee would contribute to the company as the determining factor.
Measuring job skill, as well as all the other skills that go into being a good employee is really hard, but until a study tries to actually do this, they are coming up with conclusions that aren't at all useful in the real world.
Those were secretarial jobs because the men designing the hardware thought that was the hard stuff, and that designing software was basically secretarial work. When they discovered that designing software was hard, they forced the women out. http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2011/researcher-reveals-how-...
It's a common pattern throughout history and one that really annoys me. People argue that the pay gap isn't real because men choose more highly-valued positions, but the reality is that positions favoured by women are inherently considered low-value. If some type of "women's work" somehow starts to become respectable or starts to pay better, it stops being "women's work" and the women are pushed out. If women start entering a respectable field and the field becomes "women's work", it stops being respectable. You can see it with the salaries of doctors in Russia, and the narrowing definition of what is considered "hard science" or STEM as women enter these fields in the US. It has very little to do with how difficult or important the work is.
I'm curious, what used to be considered a "hard science" that is now no longer considered so due to (or corralated with) the influx of women into that field?
There might be confusion about causality here. Generally women find more success in a field that's not jammed full of highly competitive men who push anyone weaker out of the way. Where they move on to some other target, the playing field becomes more fair.
Your theory sounds more plausible to me. I'm male and find an all-male environment incredibly competitive, toxic and tiring to myself. It's very hard to get reasonable discussions and almost always degenerates into competition.
So I can imagine that you just bail if you aren't conditioned to put up with that kind of crap.
In the short term that may be true, but over a timespan of decades or generations, social attitudes about the roles of women more generally are more important. It is only very recently that the kind of constraints you mention are influential—previous generations would simply see women (or men) excluded from various domains.
Construction and garbage workers may have lower status, but these are generally good-paying bluecollar jobs. Construction in particular has a wide range of skill levels.
No, it's because back then programming was largely secretarial and clerical and involved many manual tasks repeated over and over to set up the programs. It was very different from what is done today.
There are disparities in pay and representation between men and women in the tech industry, favouring men. Are we then to work to create parity in pay and representation between men and women in the fastest possible way? Some people say yes. Some people say companies need to immediately go out of their way to hire more women, hire a more racially diverse staff and carefully calibrate their pay so that, ideally, your company diversity is a reflection of the diversity of the country you're in. But to me this seems really really wrong. Is it because I'm bigoted? Maybe. I don't think it's just that though, I honestly think its a really unfair approach, my own regrettable biases aside. To do that to tech would be unfair to many people, and also, would only be because tech is lucrative.
If men become doctors and women become nurses, or if men become Software Engineers and women become Test Engineers, then there's still something wrong with the world.
"Adjusting for profession" ignores the cultural context of terms like "pay gap" -- we come from a world where women couldn't work certain jobs at all.
> If men become doctors and women become nurses, or if men become Software Engineers and women become Test Engineers, then there's still something wrong with the world.
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.
I try my best to be mindful of my unconscious bias with respect to nurses and test engineers. My point is that these roles are typically less paid than doctor and SWE roles.
I'm all for having more male nurses and more female doctors and SWEs. I think this is a necessary step to solving the pay inequity gap.
It's not obvious to me that nurses should be paid the same hourly rate as doctors and software engineers. My understanding is that it's cheaper to get the education to become a nurse versus being a doctor. But I'm not an expert in this field.
> often dissimilar pay is a result of other factors.
Why do these "other factors" push down the pay rate of women by almost 30%? If these other factors were random noise you'd expect them to affect both genders approximately equally.
The fact that men work more hours or that women take on more childcare duties does not mean that the pay gap doesn't exist. All it means that it's caused by cultural factors.
Then it becomes an earnings gap and not a pay gap.
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.
Perhaps because one of the factors is job/title. The 0.70 cent figure, isn't controlling for the work being done. It's a uniform blanket stat, that is severely short sited.
I agree that talking about a $0.7X to the dollar pay gap isn't helpful, since it isn't controlled for a number of factors. But there still is a pay gap of 2-20%, , depending on the industry, attributable only to difference in gender.
It's better than it's made out to be, but that there still is a gap is not right.
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?
> 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 don't think people typically perceive the issues facing women result from conscious bias. While there are some cases of blatant sexism, my impression is that people consider the more difficult and (hopefully) more common issue to be unconscious bias.
It would be interesting to see the data on this. I've worked in software development for 20 years and hired tons of people (maybe over 100). I think that professional jobs have the lowest pay disparity.
I would imagine it's really hard to measure the pay gap between programmers because there are literally coders that are 2x or 5x more productive than other coders. So I don't think it's as simple as checking all the people with "programmer" in their title by gender.
I had assumed the answer was "no", and I asked the question because you seemed to insinuate that the pay gap correlates to merit, and that's why things can't be simplified to comparing people with "programmer" in the title.
Well, yes, not all programmers are the same, nor are all definitions and valuations of the title "Programmer" -- which is partly why good data on the subject of "pay disparity" is hard to come by. But I'm arguing that even in some dream world where this data exists, merit would be a very tricky variable to incorporate. As you said, programmers who are 5x, or even 2x, are not paid by multiple-of-productivity. The fact that they aren't isn't so much a reflection of unfairness, but the reality that productivity of a programmer is not at all easy to quantify, and even if it were, not at all constant.
The corollary of great programmers not being paid great wages is that there are some shitty programmers are not paid shitty wages. It's possible to accept that there isn't a pay disparity between males and females for a given job at a given company, while believing is that there's a greater tolerance for non-shitty wages to male shitty programmers.
I've seen data local to my country that had showed it, but the problem was they grouped all IT workers together. Withe first level technical support being much more gender neutral you couldn't really read much into it.
It's not proof of a pay gap, but it's evidence of a pay gap.
Loads of other evidence of a pay gap is trivially available. I won't entertain the ignorance articulated here on that. You can Google. But I will add an aside that is less obvious.
It's entirely possible to have perfectly even pay between every member of your team and still have an overall pay gap if you don't have good diversity in the upper levels of your organization. Many otherwise very good and well-meaning organizations fall prey to this.
My position for example, as a distributed systems engineer, is very hard to get into. You don't learn about it in college, you don't find a ton of great books about it, and the field changes rapidly using terms and concepts that were only recently overturned. The way I got into it: a pair of very smart men decided to mentor me when I was younger.
But were it not for that apprenticeship/mentorship, I would not be in the field. Women claim they have fewer opportunities for this and that follows with my observations. Therefore, my (higher paying and more in-demand) position is more difficult for many women to acquire.
It definitely exists. Consider the pay disparity between men who negotiate well versus those who don't. Now look at HR studies that show women rarely negotiate (no links to studies from me right now but I have heard this anecdotally from hiring managers and I have read this before in business mags). Do you see how a problem can evolve?
Do you know whether your equally skilled female colleagues are making less money than you? Have you asked?
There is systemic pay discrimination in development jobs here in Australia so I can only assume it is similar in the US.
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.
I agree with the parent on negotiating and I think your points are valid too. There's no one individual parameter in this discussion if you're looking to improve.
I did see something in the article you noted that I'd like to question though:
> that is, when their credentials have already been screened and they are in the interview phase—the focus shifts away from their competence and toward their social skills. That effect is absent for male candidates.
I think it's possible that this is not hiring managers trying to screw over candidates or make it harder for women, but it's a likely bias from past experiences based on a team environment where men and women differ because of our inherent differences.
Anecdotally, I've only seen women get nasty with other women to the point where it brews and stews and becomes problematic in a team environment. If women don't like men - they seem to navigate that better, perhaps because of your point in #1. Nonetheless, if men don't like other men - many times they'll blow up on each other but it doesn't linger. I've been in physical fights with great friends of mine, we've said nasty things, and in most cases the next day we let it go.
Just in the last couple years, I've had to let go several senior women because they were causing stress and anxiety with other women employees. From my experience - it's more likely I'll have a cultural issue with a female (with other females) and it's more likely I'll fire a man due to competence. Navigating cultural problems is much harder than making a decision based on lack of production. Everyone generally understands when people are fired from incompetence.
That being said - everyone has their own biases. It's not supposed to enter the picture in hiring but these considerations are often more subtle and are usually in consideration of one's current team and culture they wish to preserve. If you have some really strong personalities, male or female, you might be expressing concerns about social skills because you're trying to avoid a potential clash, not because you're out to get women. I wouldn't hire a male drill sergeant to work with my team which is more laid back and collaborative either.
> this just means there is a negotiation skills gap.
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.
I concur. There is nothing flagworthy here. This is only controversial because people doing flagworthy things are trying to inject politics into a celebration of people who write code and build software.
> Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) had arrived on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2017 to debate the confirmation of attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions.
Don't recruiters keep stats on the offers and demographics that people get?
I had heard wage gap wasn't an accurate disparity in software engineering jobs. Like there isnt a cabal of people at every company conspiring against equally qualified candidates based on gender.
In HIRED's report it seemed more common that people underbid themselves, and more often than not the company still gave people higher offers if they had underbid but these were still lower offers than for people that bid higher or overbid.
Lets work on it but we have to get the discussion right first. I think villifying a sexist boogeyman isn't going to get us anywhere if a persistent reality is more nuanced.
I think we have to be really careful to avoid putting words in other people's mouths with these things.
> I think villifying a sexist boogeyman isn't going to get us anywhere
I don't think anyone is denying that sexist rhetoric exists, or that a pay gap exists. It could be "vilifying a sexist boogeyman" to say that one is primarily caused by the other, and it's fair to criticize articles that say that. But I don't think this article says anything like that. I think it addresses them separately.
The article is based on the circumstances that perpetuate a wage gap under the guise that the awareness of gender discrimination applies to wages for programmers.
I like the cause: awareness of gender discrimination, harassment and awareness of contributions in the workforce.
I think the wage gap is tangential to these circumstances, when there is evidence to the contrary for equally qualified individuals in software engineering roles. This isn't saying that gender based averages won't reveal the existence of a gap, it is saying that the current discussion misses the mark, as if this is a form of harassment that is either deliberate or unconscious bias that people simply aren't aware of, when there are other circumstances that are more nuanced and likely more prevalent, in the field of "coding".
> In HIRED's report it seemed more common that people underbid themselves, and more often than not the company still gave people higher offers if they had underbid but these were still lower offers than for people that bid higher or overbid.
It's not PC to suggest that the source of the problem may be with women themselves and their interests.
I'm desperate to push the "women aren't victims" narrative.
If we tell them they're victims enough then they'll believe it. There is evidence of this in other things for instance refugees who are told that they're victims are less likely to integrate.
I'm more focused on pointing out that we're all equal. If you're a woman on my team, I'm incredibly sorry but I'm not going to celebrate your feminity any more than I'd celebrate my other colleagues manliness. You do your job and I'll reward everyone with good pay, a bonus and a cake or two.
Your comments in this thread have broken the site guidelines which ask you not to do classic flamewars "unless you have something genuinely new to say". This isn't new—it's a tedious trope we've all heard a zillion times and nothing is to be gained by repeating it. Please don't.
I live in Sweden, in Sweden it's believed that Women and Men are equal. That's all I have to say about feminism- if there are cases where they are not then that needs to be addressed.
However, the "Women in tech" push, while noble sounding has not done much to assuade confidence that they're actually doing anything. My awareness of women in tech is absolutely sky-high, with all the back-patting praise they're giving themselves almost constantly.
I don't mind it of course, they're completely free to do what they wish, but it doesn't sit right with me to keep calling them victims. If they're victims give me something to use to help them. Don't point at invisible sexism (which I have seen _once_ and subsequently that person was fired for it).
I get that you have an agenda regarding this, I, kinda don't. My personal belief is that Women are a plus to any company, and if some company is sexist then (on a purely capitalist level) great! more coders/sysadmins for me.
If someone else is going to pay them less, great! I could give a shit what you have between your legs, it's what's between your ears that matters, so, again, I'm gonna pay fair and others will probably too, but otherwise, more coders/sysadmins for me.
If I find out someone is being sexist in my org and pushing coders/sysadmins away, that person is going to feel a big wrath _regardless_ of my moral code. But because they're costing the company talent, and talent is hard to find.
Then of course I _do_ feel a moral obligation to ensure everyone in my org is happy, but my previous sentences were referring to pure logic.
"I live in Sweden, in Sweden it's believed that Women and Men are equal. That's all I have to say about feminism- if there are cases where they are not then that needs to be addressed."
The page you're commenting on cites these cases and is trying to address them.
And yet... for some reason you can't let that be. Something is making you pop up, uninvited, to make sure your thoughts on feminism and what's fair in tech are heard too.
Do you really not realize you're doing this? Can you honestly not figure out why? Do you not see how a bunch of men in this thread fighting desperately for the status quo is, in fact, a sign of something systematic?
You are also not invited, nobody is invited. It was posted for comments and I gave mine.
My advice for you is to think clearly and objectively about what your thoughts are and how they are misaligned with mine.
I understand what you have been claiming but you have also been decrying other people for doing the same things you are doing. I am not here for a fight. I don't want you getting swelly eyed and emotional because then all logic and reasoning will shut down.
Men in this thread are mostly doing what I have done. And that's denounce the victim complex, to denounce the notion that women need to be handled with kid gloves, to denounce that anyone believes that it's fair for women to be unequal.
It's not about maintaining a status quo, that will never be the case- it's about shutting down this kind of rhetoric which does nothing to help women. It just makes them feel validated if they feel like victims or, worse, makes them feel like they're going to be systematically oppressed when it may be perfectly false to assert that.
I have worked for a long time, if someone told me I couldn't do something I would have that bias deeply ingrained in my head, if I were told people are likely to think less of me, I would assume them being critical of me or my ideas was them attacking me or oppressing me based on those things.
Where I have worked, where my friends have worked this is patently false, but of course maybe that's because I've only worked in a few companies across Northern Europe.
You've repeatedly crossed into taking personal swipes here, which breaks the HN guidelines regardless of how correct one's views are. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it any more.
Please don't post grandiose inflammatory claims about divisive topics. That's trolling, and destructive of the thoughtful conversation we're hoping for.
“A 2011 study from Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce found that "men with some college but no degree earn about the same as women with a Bachelor’s degree," and that "wo men have to have a Ph.D. to make as much as men with a B.A."
So you can't chalk the wage gap up to education. What about time in the workforce then? Attributing differences in pay to women's perceived inexperience ignores the studies that show the more years a woman spends in the workforce, the bigger the gap gets between her and her equally experienced male colleagues. Women in their late 20s earn around 92% of what their male peers receive, whereas women in their early 50s make just 71% of the average man's wages, according to a report from Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard University.”
None of this addresses the parent's comment - they believe the pay disparity along gender lines disappears when hours worked and time spent out of the workforce.
> Women in their late 20s earn around 92% of what their male peers receive, whereas women in their early 50s make just 71% of the average man's wages
That makes sense, but doesn't mean that disparity increases as a woman ages - my first impression is that a woman in her late 50s entered the workforce about 40 years ago. There was certainly pervasive inequity at that time, and the opportunities those women were excluded from early in their careers compound.
It sounds like you believe it to be self-evident that pay equality was a problem in the past but not presently. What, to your mind, has made pay between the sexes equal in the last fifty years?
While I grant you that people have made the issue more visible, I don't see any reason to think pay somehow became equal. On the contrary, studies insist that the problem persists to this day.
> It sounds like you believe it to be self-evident that pay equality was a problem in the past but not presently.
I've made no such claim.
I do believe that there is not a significant disparity in pay or opportunity based on gender alone in the tech industry in the US today. That belief is based on my own experience, which is subjective, and therefore I wouldn't presume to tell others that they should share it.
Even your article admits the biggest factor, and the most important one. Men choose careers that end up paying more on average. It seems they still try give the impression that women doing the same _exact_ position as a man gets paid less in every case. I can believe there is a disparity, especially in certain fields where the general public's perception of skill reflects your perceived worth (like physicians, maybe law). Some people get paid more just because they're taller, and that isn't the company being heightist.
Heres an example of a thread where (in the second reply) I thought mikash was being inflammatory, but my expectation is that you wouldn't care! This I think highlights the "one direction" I'm trying to point out.
By that logic, women can never know if there is sexism because they don't have all that mythical privilege to compare it to. I'd love to see one time ... one time.. there be a focus on the disparity between men and women in waste services, janitorial services, etc. We accept they don't prefer those jobs but suddenly in tech (since it became sexy) its now a problem?
There's a difference between racism and bias. We're all biased, but racism is an ideology that subordinate races are inferior, and that's why they're subordinate.
Also, there are many ways that wealth and class are derived from gender and race.
>There's a difference between racism and bias. We're all biased, but racism is an ideology that subordinate races are inferior, and that's why they're subordinate.
Yes, that's what I consider the true definition of racism, but that is not the definition of racism that's currently being used in contemporary American political discourse.
>Also, there are many ways that wealth and class are derived from gender and race.
Definitely not. Men are also the victims of sexism. But the world is (and has been) controlled by men in most societies. Women suffer the most from sexism, so knowing the scope of sexism requires being a woman.
So I'm barred from having an opinion because I'm not a woman? Perhaps rather than my "experience" I should have said "real life observations." Regardless, so be it, but don't expect my support if you ever end up wanting it.
This is the sort of uncivil slur we ban people for, as well as a personal attack, which we also ban people for. Please don't comment like this here again.
No one has to "attempt to divide the genders." Women have already been subjected to this in colonial and imperial countries for at least thousands of years.
What you see as an "attempt at dividing" is more accurately the article showing you reality while you dismiss it.
People who claim that 'women earn 77 cents on the dollar as compared to men' - when studies overwhelmingly show that this is false when taking into consideration roles and hour etc. - are definitely 'dividing genders'.
Pay equity debates require nuance. Most of those promoting the issue seem to fail to grasp that.
That there are some sexist pigs in the world (ie. some guy at Uber), does not make the world full of sexist pigs. It doesn't necessarily even make Uber full of them, although it's more plausible.
Almost all politicians involved in the issue are divisive, because that's what gets them attention, and riles up the base.
Watch some of the 'not popular' politicians do interviews on the news. They are refreshingly reasonable. On all sides.
> "People who claim that 'women earn 77 cents on the dollar as compared to men' - when studies overwhelmingly show that this is false when taking into consideration roles and hour etc. - are definitely 'dividing genders'."
Women didn't start anything here in terms of division by gender. Did you think JFK signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963 for fun or something?
If there is overstepping, consider that they may just be trying to correct the overstepping of the other side. It's one of those things you can only appreciate by having your own skin in the game.
JFK did not sign a law stating that across all America, pay averages for women and men must be the same.
He signed a law stating that a 'female plumber should be paid the same as a male plumber of equal qualifications'.
Broadly - this is the case. There is essentially pay equality in America.
Men and women do different jobs, and have different lifestyles, which constitutes the differential in pay.
The inability to understand this, and to project misleading data is definitely divisive.
If you said: "very few women have Eng jobs because so few of them get Eng degrees - let's start a program to encourage girls to get in to Engineering" - then this would not be divisive.
But if you said: "Women should have 50% of the Eng. jobs even though they only make up 13% of the talent pool" - then this is extremely divisive.
Recognizing the specific contributions and presence of women in the field seems entirely reasonable given how throughout the history of our industry they have been erased.
And of course, we're not even a month of a self-implosion event at Uber, where we see a lot of corroboration of workplace harassment claims.
If you need to be told "not all men" you can maybe write a chrome extension so that it subs "men" to "men (but of course it should be clear from context: not every single man ever or currently)" and that'll cover you.
How do you know they didn't do as good of work? You and I both know that objectively judging "quality of work" in this industry is extremely difficult, and more often it just comes down to someone's biased opinion.
I would really appreciate it if you could back this assertion up with some detail.
I read the post, but your comments still make little sense to me. The only interpretations I can think of paint you in a pretty negative light and that would be clearly unfair on my part.
FWIW, gender equality is a serious issue in all fields (including software development) in this country and I feel it is both important and worthwhile to keep this top-of-mind. International Women's Day and this page are both working toward that goal... This surely is just as relevant to the site as the "Decline in Sexual Frequency Among American Adults" article.[0]
PSA: at this point, making comments complaining about "virtue signalling" is virtue signalling. And I suggest investing in new talking points -- "this is just as (insert -ism) as what they're fighting against" has been retired.
So if A are fighting against B on behalf of C, but are doing B to D, we're supposed to just keep silent because you say that "talking point" has been "retired"?
> Despite continued assaults on the credibility of her contributions to modern computer science as the world’s first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace coded.
Yet in reality she was very much respected in her day, and despite her challenges received widespread support. The first "assaults" on her scope of her contributions came over 100 after her death, and not some sexism she had to fight and overcome.