Live data from Hacker News

Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

insights.dice.com

21–30 of 562 posts

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#21
What is interesting is the breakdown of motivations between men and women. It seems readily apparent that women on the whole prefer flexible work arrangements because of child raising obligations. This is exactly the same argument lobbed across the wage gap discussion for years now. Proponents of the wage-gap point that women have an unfair obligation to child-raising duties, which puts them at a disadvantage when compared to their male peers.

I'm not a social scientist and nor am I particularly well versed in the quagmire of social & gender obligations, so I'll keep out of making a normative judgement on this topic.

Suffice to say, in Tech, the longer you spend at the office, the more you appear to be motivated and hardworking. I fear that might just be too ingrained in management psyches for a solution to be readily available.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#22
Does anyone have a link to reliable breakdowns of different professions by race and gender? Tech gets slammed particularly hard for being "white male cishet scum" and I'd love to see how it compares to other fields. I can't imagine fields like law or nursing or mining or teaching or policing are much more equal.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#23

What is interesting is the breakdown of motivations between men and women. It seems readily apparent that women on the whole prefer flexible work arrangements because of child raising obligations. This is exactly the same argument lobbed across the wage gap discussion for years now. Proponents of the wage-gap point that women have an unfair obligation to child-raising duties, which puts them at a disadvantage when co…

I'd be amazed if there wasn't a correlation between time in the office and productivity. There may be very good reasons for the disparity in pay.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#24
post #22

Does anyone have a link to reliable breakdowns of different professions by race and gender? Tech gets slammed particularly hard for being "white male cishet scum" and I'd love to see how it compares to other fields. I can't imagine fields like law or nursing or mining or teaching or policing are much more equal.

if anything white males are underrepresented and asian males are overrepresented.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#25
post #5

Correct Link: http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-c...

Thanks. Changed to that from http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-c... .

The blog post directly from Dice has slightly more information: http://insights.dice.com/2016/03/02/dice-report-gender-plays...

It also links to a more in depth look at what they call the "position gap", which addresses some people's comments about the original article hinging on controlling for education, experience, and job title: http://media.dice.com/report/february-2015-the-position-gap/

(I'd call the IEEE post blog spam, personally. It's barely more than a collection of quotes from elsewhere, and "IEEE" with "Study" in the title gives this more of an air of credibility than a survey by a job search company probably deserves)

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#26
post #15

This is fairly consistent with other studies. The "77%" number is arrived at by comparing the median wage of full-time male & female employees. It doesn't account for differences in industry, job title, experience, etc. It's super broad. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, but it means we need more granularity. Coming out of uni/grad school, male and female salaries are equal in comparable fields. They depart a fe…

> We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women (normalizing parental leave for fathers with newborns is a good

Don't have a kid, but I would think that an infant is better off having his mother close to him in his early months of life compared to having his father, for the simple biological reason that the mother can breast-feed, while a father can't. From what I remember reading kids who are breast-fed tend to do better in life in terms of health or being better from a psylogical point of view.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused by your comment. Facts should either support a discussion and foster it's continuation, or, it should shut down a discussion until new facts are presented. We COULD all still be talking about how square the earth is, but I think we've moved on to more fruitful discussions after the facts shut that one down. Speaking in an entirely abstract sense, discussions should halt if facts don't support it. I'm ope…

>I'm confused by your comment. I took their comment to be commentary on how there is still an insistence by many in society that there exists a gender gap even when many studies have given evidence that the gap is explained by a variety of factors such as work life balance. It would be nice if the discussion could move onto issues such as why there is a gender difference in work life balance desires, in hours of over…

the patriarchy, duh. check your privilege, hurrrr..

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#28

Controlling for "job title" basically makes this invalid; if men are being promoted more often at the same experience/education level and consequently making more that is obviously a gender gap. Edit: "invalid" is maybe a strong word for the study itself - the headline "no wage gap exists" is definitely invalid, but the actual results are interesting.

If. That may be happening, if those doing the promoting are biased. (Which means, in some places, it probably is happening that way.) Systematically, though? Industry-wide? Is this really happening?

> Systematically, though? Industry-wide? Is this really happening?

Probably?

The issue as best I see it is that there isn't any one cause here. So when you look at the roster of Silicon Valley CEOs and see row after row of white, male faces you could say that it's because tech is racist/sexist and prevents women/people of color from ascending to management positions in companies. Then someone might counter and say, no, it's because there are far fewer women/people of colour entering the industry at the entry level, so it's understandable that there would be a lack of representation at that level.

In reality, both of those things can be true without contradicting the other. There is both a pipeline problem going all the way back to elementary schools that presumes which career a person is going to pursue, and there are incidents of sexism and racism within the tech industry, but it's next to impossible to attribute exactly what cause and what effect go together.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#29
post #15

This is fairly consistent with other studies. The "77%" number is arrived at by comparing the median wage of full-time male & female employees. It doesn't account for differences in industry, job title, experience, etc. It's super broad. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, but it means we need more granularity. Coming out of uni/grad school, male and female salaries are equal in comparable fields. They depart a fe…

>It doesn't account for differences in industry, job title, experience, etc. It's super broad.

It also doesn't account for full time covering a wide number of hours worked. Full time can be 37 hours a week or 45 hours a week, can comparing them as both just being 'full time' misses quite a lot.

>This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men.

How it is more often foisted upon women? The social pressure on men to take deadly jobs and to work longer hours is equal to the social pressure on women to choose careers where they can take time off and be with their kids. If anything, I rather be with my kid than stuck an extra 20 hours in the office... one of these pressures is for something most people find more desirable than the other.

>We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules.

So are we aiming for more men to take flexible schedules or for pay to not suffer when someone takes flexible schedules? Because if you want the former, it is more about the pressure to earn than the stigma on flexible work schedules. And if it is the latter, how is this fair to the people who don't get the flexible work schedules? I think the deeper problem is why are women forced in the child care role and men into the bread winning roles and how to fix that (which you do mention).

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#30
post #26
post #15

This is fairly consistent with other studies. The "77%" number is arrived at by comparing the median wage of full-time male & female employees. It doesn't account for differences in industry, job title, experience, etc. It's super broad. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, but it means we need more granularity. Coming out of uni/grad school, male and female salaries are equal in comparable fields. They depart a fe…

> We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women (normalizing parental leave for fathers with newborns is a good Don't have a kid, but I would think that an infant is better off having his mother close to him in his early months of life compared to having his father, for the simple biological reason that the mother can breast-feed, while a father can't. From what I remember reading kids who…

There is a lot more to parenting than just breastfeeding (which can be pumped and stored ahead of time - it's not always practical).
Post reply on HN