Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#131

Post by bandrami » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #94

The gender wage gap is real in the sense that there is a gap, but when you analyze it, they are comparing apples to oranges. I'm sure everyone here knows this. https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/gender-wage-gap.htm The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Women in Korea are not treated poorly. The important thing though is the people proposing that the wage gap i…

It's only "apples to oranges" if you're willing to beg the entire question. Why is elementary teaching less highly paid than university teaching? Why is nurse practitioning less highly paid than anaesthesiologizing?

Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#132

Post by briandear » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:53 PM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #127

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #94

The gender wage gap is real in the sense that there is a gap, but when you analyze it, they are comparing apples to oranges. I'm sure everyone here knows this. https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/gender-wage-gap.htm The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Women in Korea are not treated poorly. The important thing though is the people proposing that the wage gap i…

Calling it "apples to oranges" is overlooking how some fields are broadly underpaid, which often (though not always) overlaps with gender disparity. For example, primary and secondary school teaching is a 'traditionally female' field that gets massively underpaid compared to tertiary education, despite if anything being much more important to society.

The “underpay” of teachers is due to supply and demand.

Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#133

Post by blaze33 » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

We're nowhere near any common definition of what a fair wage should be. Especially for knowledge workers whose work ain't easy to value.

Say I build some engine and buy a bunch of identical bolts I need: each one obviously costs the same. But now I'm building a business and need some human cogs to run it, why would I have to discuss the particular cost of each one?

Same work, same pay. But... unique person and custom pay? How do we reconcile this apparent contradiction?

Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#134

Post by bandrami » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

smokeyj wrote: post #130

crooked-v wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it "apples to oranges" is overlooking how some fields are broadly underpaid, which often (though not always) overlaps with gender disparity. For example, primary and secondary school teaching is a 'traditionally female' field that gets massively underpaid compared to tertiary education, despite if anything being much more important to society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand

Nope, not that, either: the supply of doctors, for instance, is deliberately restricted by the American Medical Association; whereas the supply of elementary teachers is not restricted by the CAEP. Supply and demand are still second-order effects here.

Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#135

Post by crooked-v » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:54 PM UTC

xienze wrote: post #14

myrandomcomment wrote: post #6

I love the irony of this. Accused of underpaying women - their reaction is "let us get some data". Nope. underpaying men. This is the way you do things. You collect the data, analyze and react. Wash rinse repeat.

A similar thing has happened with companies that go to great lengths to make sure they don't have any gender bias in their hiring process (no face-to-face during interviews, voice altering during phone interviews, etc.) only to find that they still selected more men than women. The conclusion, of course, is that they must be doing something wrong because it's simply impossible that they wouldn't be selecting a perfec…

It's extremely difficult to actually hide all signs of gender, even with the measures you mentioned. Even simple things like the way a job advertisement or a resume is worded can suggest the genders of the people involved in a statistically predictable way. For example: http://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/static/documents/Gauch...

Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#136

Post by sleepysysadmin » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:55 PM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #127

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #94

The gender wage gap is real in the sense that there is a gap, but when you analyze it, they are comparing apples to oranges. I'm sure everyone here knows this. https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/gender-wage-gap.htm The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Women in Korea are not treated poorly. The important thing though is the people proposing that the wage gap i…

Calling it "apples to oranges" is overlooking how some fields are broadly underpaid, which often (though not always) overlaps with gender disparity. For example, primary and secondary school teaching is a 'traditionally female' field that gets massively underpaid compared to tertiary education, despite if anything being much more important to society.

[flagged]

Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#137

Post by lstodd » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:55 PM UTC

oarabbus_ wrote: post #125

kgwgk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The takeaway is that compensations are not perfectly aligned with whatever model was used in the study. Which is expected because compensations were not set using that model, so they won’t be exactly the same. And at that point, if the model is calibrated for everage compensation to be the same, it’s obvious that some people will get compensations below the prediction of the model and some people will get compensatio…

> And at that point, if the model is calibrated for everage compensation to be the same, it’s obvious that some people will get compensations below the prediction of the model and some people will get compensations above the prediction of the model. This is true of most models (in practice - any model which models salary in the real world) yet not every company is being accused of these payment discrimination lawsuit…

> yet not every company is being accused

maybe because attacking them is not worth it?

Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#138

Post by insickness » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:57 PM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #131

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #94

The gender wage gap is real in the sense that there is a gap, but when you analyze it, they are comparing apples to oranges. I'm sure everyone here knows this. https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/gender-wage-gap.htm The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Women in Korea are not treated poorly. The important thing though is the people proposing that the wage gap i…

It's only "apples to oranges" if you're willing to beg the entire question. Why is elementary teaching less highly paid than university teaching? Why is nurse practitioning less highly paid than anaesthesiologizing?

Is this really a question? It takes more dedicated study to become an anesthesiologist than an elementary school teacher.

Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#139

Post by shados » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:58 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #114

ordinaryradical wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So would you say the accurate way to study this is to examine "lifetime pay"--look at the pay of demographics over a time period at the company? That would show if men are making more in 5 years of accumulated employment vs women, right, and potentially unearth some of this "promotion velocity" numerically?

That is one part of the picture. This situation is so complex that I don't believe everybody has actually figured out all the important parts to study in the first place.

This is it, and definitely step 1.

Step 1: Let's agree that this is a complicated problem, and that quick feel good knee jerk reactions may end up having negative impacts.

Step 2: Work on solutions to complicated problems.

Easier said than done, but few things worth doing are simple, and there's already a lot of people doing great work on sustainable, informed solutions (but too many people just going "lets pay everyone the same, its the only way to be fair!!!" hurting everyone else)

Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men

#140

Post by sleepysysadmin » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 7:58 PM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #131

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #94

The gender wage gap is real in the sense that there is a gap, but when you analyze it, they are comparing apples to oranges. I'm sure everyone here knows this. https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/gender-wage-gap.htm The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Women in Korea are not treated poorly. The important thing though is the people proposing that the wage gap i…

It's only "apples to oranges" if you're willing to beg the entire question. Why is elementary teaching less highly paid than university teaching? Why is nurse practitioning less highly paid than anaesthesiologizing?

>It's only "apples to oranges" if you're willing to beg the entire question. Why is elementary teaching less highly paid than university teaching? Why is nurse practitioning less highly paid than anaesthesiologizing?

Because of education level?

A university professor has a PHD. An elementary teacher has a bachelors degree.

If you think a PHD and a bachelors degree should be paid the same. That's perfectly fine, that's called communism. It's perfectly fine to be a communist.