I keep telling my wife she should learn Python and become a developer. Women are highly valued in tech right now, at least in corporations of any significant size.
Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men
231–240 of 626 posts
Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amount of training required. I'd be fine with a random anesthesiologist teaching my grade schooler, but I'd hesitate to have a random elementary school teacher giving him anesthesia. Elementary school teaching: a teaching certificate. University professor: PhD, pre-tenure work & published research (Note that there are less-qualified people teaching in universities that are compensated much less.) Nurse practitioner:…
How do software developers fare under that regime? I make 3x more as a software developer than my teacher friends that have had far more schooling (masters degrees in many cases, plus continuing education requirements). I don't know where you live, but in my state (Michigan) teachers have rigorous certification requirements. And I definitely would NOT expect someone without training to be an effective teacher. I'm in…
Successful software engineers have a lot of knowledge & skill that is often acquired informally, so it may not be reflected in university history. Because of the demand for developers and the apparent difficulty of acquiring the skills, they are well-compensated.
If a person has a bachelor's degree, they can get a Michigan interim teaching certificate by passing a test. https://www.teachercertificationdegrees.com/certification/mi... Permanent certification then requires 12 hours (1 semester full-time) of courses, or working toward a masters degree would probably give an immediate and permanent bump in pay.
Imagine a random liberal arts graduate: Would it be easier to go into elementary teaching in Michigan or software development?
Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Let's not act as though those are in any ways similar. Elementary school teaching does require less academic rigor than a university professor. Same applies to RNs vs an anesthesiologist. I do not mean to belittle those career choices (if anything, I myself want to become a k12 school teacher at some point in life). But, there are a certain set of traits that are needed to excel at the 'prestigious' careers. Disposit…
> Elementary school teaching does require less academic rigor than a university professor.
But you replace that with a need for a lot more knowledge of teaching and child psychology, so I'd say doing a good job is significantly harder even in the sense of requiring a lot of education.
Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men
#234Reminiscent of Simpson's Paradox, the most famous example being a gender discrimination lawsuit alleging UC Berkeley discriminated against women in admissions (57% men vs. 43% women). It turned out there WAS bias - in favor of the women! "The lawsuit triggered a study. The study results showed that not only were women not discriminated against, but that women had a statistically significant advantage! Here’s what hap…
You got too distracted by the Simpson's Paradox reference to see the actual Simpson's Paradox in play. As sokoloff [1] pointed out in a below thread, Google having an overwhelming male workforce means that there could still be a large bias against women at the same time that more man are being underpaid. There is simply not enough information presented in this article to know whether there is truly a gender bias (in…
I think you're right.
E.g.: Google is 70% men. At 100,000 employees: 70,000 Male 30,000 Female
If 5% of men are underpaid that's 3,500 men. If 10% of women are underpaid that's 3,000 women.
More men are underpaid (3,500 > 3,000). But women are twice as likely to be underpaid (10% > 5%).
Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Supply and demand. Easier to become an elementary teacher, more qualified elementary teachers available compared to the need
I'm not sure if that's a good thing. the bar for elementary teachers might just be too low
Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men
#236The 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…
> The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Yeah, I am not sure what to think of the data. It's not what I would expect. How is US, Canada, Austria having such a large gender wage gap, followed by Canada. Then Greece, Bulgaria and Romania are all the way on the left. Having lived in Eastern Europe, I would not consider it overall a bastion of women's equality…
I think it is worth noting that the quality of the data can vary a lot from country to country. On average, governments in countries such as Germany and Norway tend to be more critical and transparent of their own actions while others may try to swipe the issue under the rug of inflate numbers when they deem appropriate. Of course, it doesn't mean there are no truths to the data, it just needs to be taken with a grain of salt even if it is the OECD.
Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men
#237That's why we need salary transparency to really address this. There are a lot underpaid men and a lot of overpaid women. Making this into a male vs. female issue does nothing to address the fact that people are underpaid.
I think it would quite quickly turn into yet another source of conflict between employees. The problem with "equal pay" is direct comparisons only work in jobs that are essentially assembly line work, e.g., person A and person B do exactly the same thing every single day, and their output can be measured in exactly the same way, namely how many widgets each person produces in a given time period. Finding a difference…
Many organizations function just fine with salary transparency- professional sports, governments, military, etc.
Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men
#238Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it would quite quickly turn into yet another source of conflict between employees. The problem with "equal pay" is direct comparisons only work in jobs that are essentially assembly line work, e.g., person A and person B do exactly the same thing every single day, and their output can be measured in exactly the same way, namely how many widgets each person produces in a given time period. Finding a difference…
I think this only really comes up when pay disparity is as extreme as it is now, when some people at a company (outside of C-level) are making 300k and others are making 32k there is a good reason to be aggressive about fixing pay disparity.
>...when some people at a company (outside of C-level) are making 300k and others are making 32k there is a good reason to be aggressive about fixing pay disparity.
You're completely throwing context out of the window, though, and that's a dangerous precedent. Is the person making 300k in sales? Is the person making 32k merely the frontline helpdesk?
To try to "even it out, to decrease the dispairity, and - thus - the inequality" would mean the sales person and the helpdesk person making around 150k but only one of them is performing highly skilled, desired, sought-after work and the other is a generalist whom can easily be replaced. You intentionally devalue the sales person to add unwarranted value to the frontline helpdesk person.
So, your sales person leaves and your helpdesk person stays with your company until they either die or company runs under or what-have-you. They could improve themselves to move up the ranks but where's the onus for that, if they're already making gold bars, without having had to have done anything to actually earn that value?
The entire premise is wrought with problems because it doesn't address the principal fact that the desparities probably exist for a reason...
Re: Google Moves to Address Wage Equity, and Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think the breakdown of applicants by gender is for these roles? Are you suggesting that females should be forced into occupations they don't voluntarily choose? The countries that have the most egalitarian societies show difference in gender preference maximizing, not minimizing.
This seems to be a valid observation (see https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more... ), it is not insulting or demeaning and it contributes to the discussion. So, why is this downvoted?
It's not being down-voted because it's not a valid discussion point, but instead probably just because HN has a very liberal audience.
Even the most educated are still capable of bias, and many here do not like the opinion that it is possible that women differ from men in any significant ways.
Don't take the down-votes too personally. As long as you are posting constructive feedback with some evidence to your hypothesizes they will be appreciated by many even if the vote count doesn't make it appear to be so.