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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

#241

Post by sheepmullet »

dota_fanatic wrote: post #166
parennoob wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's two sides of the same coin – women are pressured to pay more attention to family with the exact same mechanisms (society, older relatives, media etc.) that men are pressured into working long hours and being primary breadwinners. Unfortunately, most comments only mention one side of the problem (that of women being pressured to focus on family), and that leads to reflexive "But what about the pressure on men?" i…

Great point—the context of both roles in a partnership is important to the discussion. Having said that, what about single parents who now must do "both" jobs? Women are at a systematic disadvantage in this scenario. Bottom line for me is that women are doing more unpaid work than men in all cultures. Melinda Gates talks about this at length in their recent letters for 2016[1], and it's a pretty damning picture that…

> Women are at a systematic disadvantage in this scenario.

What? There is a strong systematic bias in favour of single women.

A man who is expected to work 60 hour weeks is much less likely to get custody of his kids.

A man who takes a significant pay cut so he can spend more time with his kids can also get charged by the courts for being a dead-beat dad etc.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#242

Post by [deleted] »

whiddershins wrote: post #114
13thLetter wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While those are certainly relevant control factors, I would presume that any conclusions are premature without demonstrating a lack of bias in the actual positions men vs. women are promoted to, relative to their experience and education. I'm wondering why the default assumption is that there is bias, and we're being expected to prove a negative here.

I don't know ... have you wandered around the world and actually talked to real people about how they view gender? Almost no one will assert they think men and women are exactly the same. So if everyone starts from the presumption that there is some, poorly defined, somewhat-conscious, never agreed upon, but certainly real, difference between men and women ... a bias in treatment would be the default condition, and w…

[deleted]

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#243

Post by mst »

tomp wrote: post #124
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…

It's not just society, it's also biology. Even if "parenting" roles were completely equal, "childbirth" role would fall only on women, so they would still take more time off for children (and hence get lower pay).

Artificial Uterus, or in the Vorkosigan saga, 'Uterine Replicator'

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#244

Post by losteric »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #218
losteric wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree with everything here, especially getting rid of stereotypes around nurturing roles. My question is, what happens if many women and men aren't funneled towards those roles? What if it's a natural preference given our evolutionary history? I'm not saying that's the case, and my parents had no problems reversing nurturing roles over 20 years ago... but given our hyper-"PC" society, I am curious how far soc…

Ultimately, over the exceptionally long term, as automation removes the need to work, the solution is to move to a leisure-based society in which everyone is given equal stipends and allow optionally working up to, say, 10 hours per week to earn more, thus removing the problem entirely. Although that solution may be roughly on the scale of "ultimately, the great heat death of the universe will make the problem moot."

I don't think that addresses the problem though. What happens when we see gender imbalances in a post-labor society?

What if we see basket weaving dominated by women and ham baking dominated by men? Is it free choice? Genetics? Physiological? Cultural?

What about the indirect imbalances resulting from the choice of work, like one role creating a reusable tool and one creating a consumable resource?

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#246

Post by jfaucett »

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…

"This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men."

I disagree. The primary cause is that women can become pregnant - the possibility alone is in most cases enough - in which case they leave the work force for X amount of time. Depending on country, laws, and personal preferences this time period can range from a few weeks to years. In some countries when this hypothetical becomes a reality it can have a large negative impact on the employer. For instance, in Germany the woman's job position must be held open for her until she decides to return to work (possibly years later), not to mention the full salary compensation months before and after giving-birth, when she is no longer working.

But to simplify it down to flatland, lets assume a woman were to just take 1 day off before giving birth, have a job that required no movement or lifting, and the employer didn't have to compensate her. Still, in this simplest case, a woman is at a disadvantage compared to a man.

Because of this biological disadvantage, I think there will never be the sort of absolute equality we want until people are born in tubes or the capitalistic employer/employee relationship changes.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#247

Post by dalke »

Dr_tldr wrote: post #206
dalke wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I disagreed with the statement 'Wage disparity is caused by gender roles, not by discrimination'.

It's clear from history, as my example of Lilly Ledbetter, that Wage disparity is also caused by discrimination.

I don't see the need for "counter-examples and the counter-explanation" when documents like http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/4-28-11a.cfm ("Gender-Based Wage Gap Persists, Experts Agree at EEOC Forum" (2011)) say things like:

> 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 ...

Two possible objections are that 2011 isn't modern enough, and that the EEOC cannot be believed. Without knowing what is considered valid evidence, I don't see the need to dig up examples when they can be dismissed with a one line response.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#248

Post by st3v3r »

apta wrote: post #240

> What if it's a natural preference given It is known that women tend to be more emotional than men for instance. As such, they do well in nurturing roles like you described. I'm not saying that men can't do them, it's just that more women feel "at home" doing that kind of work.

Is that a natural thing? Or is it because emotions are considered "unmanly"?

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#249

Post by taneq »

akavi wrote: post #48
SamBam wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men. > How it is more often foisted upon women? The social pressure on men to take deadly jobs and to work longer hours is equal to the social pressure on women to choose careers where they can take time off and be with their kids. So... you're saying the exact same t…

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…

Well put. Likewise, you can reframe the difference as 'women are paid less overall than men' or as 'men get less leisure time and less time with their families overall'. It would be interesting to see a campaign for shorter hours for men without changing pay.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#250

Post by rayiner »

losteric wrote: post #188
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 fully agree with everything here, especially getting rid of stereotypes around nurturing roles. My question is, what happens if many women and men aren't funneled towards those roles? What if it's a natural preference given our evolutionary history? I'm not saying that's the case, and my parents had no problems reversing nurturing roles over 20 years ago... but given our hyper-"PC" society, I am curious how far soc…

That argument ignores cultural evolution, which humans have long used to adapt to changing circumstances much more quickly than biological evolution. Just as we evolved culturally to accommodate the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture, we will do the same to accommodate our modern post-physical labor society.

And I don't think we live in a "hyper-PC" society in this regard at all. Let's put it this way. People would be more surprised to find out that a woman's husband quit his job to stay home with the kids than to find out that her husband is a different race.

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