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Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

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Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#521

Post by leereeves »

belorn wrote: post #517
leereeves wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Administered hormones are not equivalent to natural hormones (which is a significant problem with HRT). And those quotes are not quite "hormones (within natural occurring levels) have very minimal effect on emotion". "the impact of estrogen on emotion varies" And another quote from the study you quoted (Effects of testosterone on mood, aggression, and sexual behavior in young men: a double-blind, placebo-controlled,…

I would use the wording of the article, in that hormone is closely linked and associated with certain behavior. There is very little studies (but feel free to provide them) that shows that artificial reduced estrogen will cause a person to get emotional upset. By regulative I mean that in order to see a major effect, you already need to have a major state. A person with no aggression is not going to get aggressive ba…

Are there people with no aggression?

I think you may mean (and if this is the case I generally agree) that when hormones trigger behaviors such as road rage, those behaviors have already been learned. Likewise, testosterone is unlikely to cause someone to shoot another driver because significant inhibitions against that behavior have been learned.

But hormones have an effect even in early childhood and before birth, when no behaviors have been learned yet. Prenatal hormones affect brain structure, and studies have found a link between hormones in children as young as 3 months and their choice of toys.[1]

[1] http://www.livescience.com/22677-girls-dolls-boys-toy-trucks...

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#522

Post by DanBC »

FD3SA wrote: post #509
dang wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This turn into generic gender-war predictably degenerated into yet another tedious spat. Perhaps elsewhere on the Internet there is a spot where people haven't had enough of such discussions yet, but HN isn't one. Note the guidelines: "Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread…

New HN rules: Citing science as a defense against the current cultural paradigm is inciting a flamewar. How the mighty have fallen. I actively steer young entrepreneurs away from YC and HN, as it has become incredibly in tune with the echo chamber of the radical political ideologies of our time. I don't understand how this behavior encourages clear and logical thinking or produces successful entrepreneurs. I would ap…

> as it has become incredibly in tune with the echo chamber of the radical political ideologies of our time.

And yet, in this very thread, the people voicing those "radical"[1] ideologies are downvoted, and the people trotting out MRA talking points are not.

[1] How the fuck is "men and women should have equal pay for equal work" radical?

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#523

Post by fche »

dalke wrote: post #228
fche wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EEOC only indicated _disparity_, and because it's a governmental political bully, it got to turn that into an accusation of discrimination. Logic not necessary.

You are of course free to reject any data points you disagree with. It is unfair, however, to give no guidelines of what you think might be acceptable. For example, if "modern" means "occurred within the last six months", then we have to look towards anecdotes and accusations, as court cases and rigorous scientific research take far longer than that. If "modern" means ten years, then it's easy to find court cases lik…

If those data points were on topic ("discrimination"), instead of off topic ("difference"), I wouldn't reject them.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#524

Post by eli »

13thLetter wrote: post #235
DanBC wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>why the laser-like focus on tech This is a tech site. It's going to focus on tech wages. Other sites are focussing on the gap in motor repair or restaurant chefs or whatever.

It's not just tech sites, though, which is what I'm getting at. Major politicians and newspapers constantly go on at great lengths about alleged gender problems in tech. Do they talk nearly as much about, say, the imbalance towards women in education? I'm going to assert that they do not.

I don't see what you're getting at. Like, is there a conspiracy against the tech industry? I really doubt it. I think tech jobs are very desirable and the gender imbalance very pronounced so it's a natural focal point.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#525

Post by rosser »

oldmanjay wrote: post #377
rosser wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people should totally be making major life decisions on the basis of what employers will "tolerate". FFS. We've already ceded enough control over our lives to these companies whose only agenda is to suck people dry, and then find new ways to wring even more out of them. Businesses exist to serve people's needs and interests. People do not exist to serve businesses.

Another interesting way of considering it is that people who exercise their natural right of association make trade offs in doing so that you find repelling. This viewpoint has the benefit of not dehumanizing people who run and work for businesses.

I flatly reject the notion that, with as massive a power differential as the employer-employee relationship structurally entails, it qualifies as an "exercise" of some "natural right of association".

With the way we've chosen to run our world, such that there are orders of magnitude fewer people offering jobs than there are needing them, one side of that dynamic has tremendous power to dictate terms to the other. That is not remotely an equitable relationship, and to suggest that participating in it is some sort of "exercise" of a "natural right", that is freely entered into, is fatuously specious.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#526

Post by Dylan16807 »

tomp wrote: post #468
Dylan16807 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically correct but irrelevant. Childbirth itself takes a couple weeks. A proportional pay gap from that would be well under one percent, and it could be offset by the fact that women live five years longer.

> A proportional pay gap from that would be well under one percent If only pay gap were proportional... I'm afraid that employers penalize time off work disproportionally, probably exponentially; part-time work doesn't have half the salary of full-time work, and when employees take a few weeks off, they don't forgo only those weeks' salary, but also slow down their future learning, progress and promotions. Whether th…

This is a hypothetical scenario where parenting roles are equal, meaning lots of men are taking off months, and lots of women are taking off months plus a couple weeks. People take off a couple weeks all the time; it's called vacation. I can't see any meaningful pay difference making sense.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#527

Post by eli »

13thLetter wrote: post #85
eli wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are BLS numbers on profession by gender and age: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat09.htm The legal profession has actually made significant progress in closing the gender gap. Tech has a problem with gender. I'm not sure it's helpful to point out that other fields also have similar or even worse problems.

> Tech has a problem with gender. I'm not sure it's helpful to point out that other fields also have similar or even worse problems. It kind of is. When there are other fields which both a) employ more people and b) have a much larger "problem," it's valid to ask why the laser-like focus on tech.

I focus on tech because it's the industry where I work and the one I'm most familiar with and the one where I think we really have the ability to make a difference.

Pointing out other problems in other fields does not absolve tech industry of any responsibility.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#528

Post by baddox »

203993203993 wrote: post #492
baddox wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if that's true, but even if it is, how does that make the discrimination any less of a problem?

If we can't even agree on what kind of discrimination happens then we certainly can't do more than social media inactivism. At best we can make the problem worse by trying to solve the wrong problem.

The kind of discrimination is well-defined: it's women making less than men. Whether the employers choosing the salaries are women or men is interesting information, but it doesn't significantly change the approach to solving the underlying problem.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#529

Post by dalke »

fche wrote: post #523
dalke wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are of course free to reject any data points you disagree with. It is unfair, however, to give no guidelines of what you think might be acceptable. For example, if "modern" means "occurred within the last six months", then we have to look towards anecdotes and accusations, as court cases and rigorous scientific research take far longer than that. If "modern" means ten years, then it's easy to find court cases lik…

If those data points were on topic ("discrimination"), instead of off topic ("difference"), I wouldn't reject them.

Since you don't accept the EEOC as a valid source of information, you are likely to reject statements like http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/4-28-11a.cfm :

> Gender-based wage discrimination remains a problem today and a percentage of the wage discrepancy cannot be explained by non-discriminatory factors, said government and private experts ..

In http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-hoff-sommers/wage-ga... , in an essay that argues that illegal wage discrimination is minor, I read:

> What the 2009 Labor Department study showed was that when the proper controls are in place, the unexplained (adjusted) wage gap is somewhere between 4.8 and 7 cents. ... The AAUW notes that part of the new 6.6-cent wage-gap may be owed to women's supposedly inferior negotiating skills -- not unscrupulous employers. Furthermore, the AAUW's 6.6 cents includes some large legitimate wage differences masked by over-broad occupational categories. ... Could the gender wage gap turn out to be zero? Probably not. The AAUW correctly notes that there is still evidence of residual bias against women in the workplace. However, with the gap approaching a few cents, there is not a lot of room for discrimination.

If it's 2 cents, out of 23 cents, then that's 9%. While minor compared to indirect societal factors, I don't think it's small enough to dismiss outright.

Neither you nor I can explain the unexplained component. It's true that it may have nothing at all to do with discrimination on the basis of sex. However, that is very doubtful as we see successful lawsuits where there is wage discrimination based on sex and we see settlements for that accusation, so we know there it's still ongoing. And we know that mediated settlements are rare, so they are the tip of the iceberg.

Therefore, I see no reason to reject illegal wage discrimination as one of the factors that goes into the wage gap.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#530

Post by 13thLetter »

tveita wrote: post #505
tomp wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a bias in treatment would be the default condition, and would probably require conscious effort and/or policy to overcome. Ironically, people usually assume that the unequal treatment benefits men over women, and completely dismiss the reverse possibility, even though there's no rational reason for this :)

Maybe a priori in a vacuum, but most people are aware of the historical context where women just recently got the right to vote and attend university, and are still considered men's property in some parts of the world. It's well acknowledged that men are discriminated against in some contexts, but yes, there is no serious debate that the sexism in our society overwhelmingly targets women, and there's a reason that th…

> and there's a reason that the movement for equality between sexes is called "feminism".

Except you're going to have a hard time pointing to any of the places where feminism is fighting against this well-acknowledged discrimination against men.

...And that's fine! Really, it's okay to say "this is the movement for women's equality meeting here in this room, if you're interested in men's issues you're going to have to go somewhere else." The NAACP doesn't spend all its time fighting against anti-Semitism, after all, and that doesn't make the NAACP bad in any way. I don't understand the weird compulsion to try and crowd everyone else out of the gender equality mindspace.

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