The gender wage gap in Silicon Valley – based on AngelList data

Yes, I would have had the same reaction. This is a great way to put a false limit on your potential talent pool. I'm not saying that adding programs or policies to add outreach to specific communities that are under-represented in your organization is bad. I'm saying that setting a hard-and-fast rule that your next hires must fit a particular trend to "balance the team" is a great way to frustrate your recruiting team (either internal or external), slow team growth to an unpredictable crawl, and will cause you to pass over potentially excellent candidates for the wrong reasons. The statement quoted by OP essentially equates to "the candidate had the wrong genitals at the wrong time", which is an absolutely absurd way to think about hiring. I would say the same thing about any of your counter-examples (e.g. to your Syrian Refugee example, "We won't be hiring you right now, because you're not a refugee from the right place" would be a rejection reason if you were trying to "balance the team" via preferential hiring treatment)

Interesting data, BUT... "Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team." - this is gender discrimination and it is illegal.

How about actually making the workplace attractive to woman applicants? Things like ridding your careers page of implicit biases and bro culture, putting extra emphasis on personal as well as professional growth, attending/hosting various women-oriented events/meetups/conferences, involving your leadership with mentoring at and recruiting from places like the Hackbright Academy, etc. etc.

It costs money, it costs time, hell, it takes a long time to produce results, but you know what - it's worth it! They are an outlier, but I do like Etsy's approach (and results) to gender diversity - http://firstround.com/review/How-Etsy-Grew-their-Number-of-F....

It's interesting that you brought up the hiring of veterans in IT. It's actually a real thing for many defense contractors and government agencies to give preference to former military members even in cases where they may be less qualified (citation needed).

Why? Hiring women over men is just good business.

The wage gap means that at a given salary level, the women is going to be better and more experienced.

If you have budgeted 120k for a software engineering position, why WOULDN'T you choose the best person for the role?

And the best person for the role at this salary point is almost certainly going to be an overqualified women who is getting underpaid at her previous job.

Data collection: A+

Analysis: needs improvement.

From the article:

> Based on the data, women are definitely undervaluing themselves in comparison to men. The gap starts around $10k/year for the first year and grows to a staggering $30k/year after 10 years of working epxeriences. [sic]

An alternative interpretation is that women are behaving entirely logically with the knowledge that their employability is maximized if they set their desired salaries lower than men with equivalent experience. Efficient markets are a thing.

I'm not saying that's my interpretation of the data, I'm just cautioning against jumping to conclusions when that conclusion is implicitly blaming the victims. It's a really great analysis and the dataset could set up a great follow-on study of causation.