Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries • Hacker News Board

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#201

Post by shostack » Thu, Mar 03, 2016, 9:20 PM UTC

abraca wrote: post #131

shostack wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So outside of a few large companies and a few types of jobs with fairly consistent job titles/responsibilities, Glassdoor is fairly poor for employees conducting their own salary research. Have you found any services or tools that are more accurate that you'd recommend?

I recommend looking up the company and job title on an h1b jobs database. There are several sites online that pull from public data. You get both start date and title information. It only shows base salary but the nice thing is that it is an accurate number.

What about for those of us with jobs with loose titles and widely varying responsibilities?

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#202

Post by homonculus1 » Thu, Mar 03, 2016, 9:21 PM UTC

ahoy wrote: post #169

akavi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The framing does make a difference, as it sets the perception of which gender is being "wronged". I think the GP is arguing that one could replace "care for family members... is more often foisted upon women" with "the burden of providing financially... is more often foisted upon men", and thereby shift the focus from injustice against women to injustice against men, while being an equally valid interpretation of the…

I chose my language specifically. Single women are more often family caregivers than are single men.

Does that support the narrative that caregiving is shunted onto women against their will/without their say?

For instance, family courts have a reputation for favoring women when awarding child custody. In light of this, your statistic could equally be interpreted as men getting shafted out of parenthood rather than women getting stuck with responsibilities they never asked for.

Even aside from all that, how are you accounting for personal choices? Is it implausible that women find it more rewarding to care for family members than men do? There are a lot of alternate hypotheses you have to eliminate before you can claim that trends like this are the result of injustice.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#203

Post by malyk » Thu, Mar 03, 2016, 9:23 PM UTC

hnal943 wrote: post #161

shostack wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beat me to it. The episode is basically an interview with Claudia Goldin who is about as qualified a person as you could hope for to speak on this matter. [1] tl;dr women start out with equal pay, but trade pure monetary compensation for flexibility and/or fewer hours when they have kids because society still sucks at gender equality when it comes to enabling parents to equally contribute to certain aspects of parent…

I don't understand why we want a society where everyone is trying to both parent and work full time. Specialization is a powerful tool. Speaking personally it makes a lot more sense for my wife to stay home and have primary responsibility for raising our kids and managing our household while I focus on my career. Implicit in this discussion is that the woman who choose flexibility and child-rearing options are oppres…

That's not what people want though. What people want is for it to be socially acceptable for men to be the ones that take on the more flexible, lower paying, schedules to care for their kids as well as for it to be socially acceptable for women to /not/ take on that role and instead be the breadwinner.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#204

Post by shostack » Thu, Mar 03, 2016, 9:23 PM UTC

hnal943 wrote: post #161

shostack wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beat me to it. The episode is basically an interview with Claudia Goldin who is about as qualified a person as you could hope for to speak on this matter. [1] tl;dr women start out with equal pay, but trade pure monetary compensation for flexibility and/or fewer hours when they have kids because society still sucks at gender equality when it comes to enabling parents to equally contribute to certain aspects of parent…

I don't understand why we want a society where everyone is trying to both parent and work full time. Specialization is a powerful tool. Speaking personally it makes a lot more sense for my wife to stay home and have primary responsibility for raising our kids and managing our household while I focus on my career. Implicit in this discussion is that the woman who choose flexibility and child-rearing options are oppres…

I don't think people want it, but it has become a bit of a necessity due to the widening income gap and stagnant wages. Used to be middle America could afford to have one parent stay home and job stability was much better.

These days both parents need to work to have a hope of affording rent/mortgage, and job stability is a thing of the past so to have two bread winners substantially reduces the risk of being completely out of an income or health insurance.

Specialization is indeed a powerful tool, but in this case it is a lower priority than security and shelter.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#205

Post by mc32 » Thu, Mar 03, 2016, 9:24 PM UTC

frandroid wrote: post #193

hnal943 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why we want a society where everyone is trying to both parent and work full time. Specialization is a powerful tool. Speaking personally it makes a lot more sense for my wife to stay home and have primary responsibility for raising our kids and managing our household while I focus on my career. Implicit in this discussion is that the woman who choose flexibility and child-rearing options are oppres…

The problem is that we're forcing women to specialize in child-rearing, which is not economically valued or rewarded, and men to specialize in earning income, which wields huge social and economic power. And the reason this happens is that men withhold their parenting labour, and women are forced to pick up the slack. It's just like the feminist saying... "If men got pregnant, abortion would be available free of char…

One way to deal with this, is to make it equally viable for men or women to be stay-at-home patents. Viable socially (no stigma) and viable economically, so that the family simply chooses for the higher earner (if income is their determined) to have the job responsibility and the other to say home. So the problem is in the family dynamics. Society has to allow for the family dynamics to fall on either side without side effects.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#206

Post by Dr_tldr » Thu, Mar 03, 2016, 9:25 PM UTC

dalke wrote: post #174

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single past data point does not make a modern day trend.

I'm glad you've clarified that statement "Wage disparity is caused by gender roles, not by discrimination" is incomplete, and that you accept that historical wage disparity included discrimination on the basis of sex. However, your response is less than complete. What is "modern day"? For example, "DU Law School is violating Equal Pay Act"/"The University of Denver is violating federal law by paying female law profes…

>"Why is "trend" relevant? Your clarified statement is that modern wage disparity is not due to discrimination. That means that even a handful of counter-examples would suffice to show that that statement is incorrect."

That does not logically follow. If you're offering an explanation for a large dataset which is depicting a trend, the value of that explanation is not undermined by a handful of statistical outliers. If we say that the explanation for women living longer than men is a mixture of biology and cultural factors, a single story about a woman murdering her husband does not speak to the accuracy of a broader explanation at all.

You would need to demonstrate that the counter-examples and the counter-explanation they suggest are statistically significant.

Edit: I'm not engaging in an ad hominem attack here, but I would like to draw attention to previous comments made by this poster to indicate that this is not the first time they've had difficulty parsing how statistics are generally understood to work: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dalke

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#207

Post by bcheung » Thu, Mar 03, 2016, 9:25 PM UTC

RodericDay wrote: post #42

ahoy wrote: 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…

I like the idea of "mandatory paternity leave", to make up for the biological asymmetry. Even if you have a stereotypical breadwinner/housewife relationship, you are legally mandated to take time off, even if you don't want to. That way you avoid the "you're allowed to take paternal leave, but real go-getters don't!" game altogether. edit: The way I see it, the responses just prove my point. "This would just make peo…

You want to make it illegal for someone to work when they want to work and can work..., and maybe even need to work for the income? That is a horrible idea.

What possible reason is there for this? To equalize wages? A family had 2 income earners, then they are down to 1. And you want to take away all their ability to have income?

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#208

Post by RodericDay » Thu, Mar 03, 2016, 9:28 PM UTC

dalke wrote: post #137

RodericDay wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which can be split between either parent That's the issue right there. Not surprised "One in four Swedish dads take no baby leave". I know things are tricky to roll out, there's tons of quirks here and there. User chongli is on like three leaves of the discussion trying to take the idea down based on implementation details. That comes later. The whole point is that right now it's a "woman's issue". Forcing men to d…

"That's the issue right there" I ... don't think you understood my response. Three months of it can only be taken by the father. The "split between either parent" has limits. What's wrong with the non-mandatory Swedish system? It's most assuredly called "parental leave here", and isn't a "woman's issue" but a feminist issue. As a male feminist, I agree with that. Edit regarding "it is you who is not getting me". You…

I don't know whether a week a month or a year is suitable, or percentages, or damages. This is not my field.

The fundamental idea I'm advancing is that men get to do calculus with their choice ("hmm do I want to stay? or do I better by my kid by working hard now and sending them to prep school?"). It's cool that Sweden makes it attractive for them to pick parenthood, but it's not enough, it's not really in the same ballpark.

I am suggesting that men shouldn't really have a choice. Women have little/no choice (biologically, because of labor, and socially, because of expectations), so only by forcing an approximation of time lost, do we really make people reconsider whether the situation we put them in and the choices we offer them are fair.

In case this sounds incredibly sinister to people, like capping runners so they're not fast, don't get me wrong. I think the outcome here would be an increased amount of resources put into the "work-life balance" question that everyone pays lip-service to, so that we wouldn't be really forced to choose one over the other.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#209

Post by elbigbad » Thu, Mar 03, 2016, 9:31 PM UTC

samd wrote: post #16

That's good news if true, the women who make it and get promoted earn the same as their counterparts. Still lots of work to be done removing the barriers that keep them from getting these jobs and promotions in the first place.

Do you have any data to provide that goes along with your statement that women don't get "these jobs and promotions in the first place"?

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#210

Post by homonculus1 » Thu, Mar 03, 2016, 9:32 PM UTC

korethr wrote: post #173

parennoob wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules. 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 start). Put another way, we need to upend the idea that hazardous and arduous jobs (often involving hard physical labor) are only the domain of men, and encourage more women to participate in industries like mining, firefighting, weldin…

If you make note of the differences in physiology between the male and female body, you might discover that there is a non-arbitrary reason why industries requiring hard physical labor have traditionally been the domain of men.

If you make note of the differences in physiology between the male and female body, you might discover that there is a non-arbitrary reason why industries requiring childcare have traditionally been the domain of women.