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Nevertheless, She Coded

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Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#251

Post by throwaway91111 »

sheepmullet wrote: post #247
throwaway91111 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I can appreciate skepticism. But do you have any arguments to advance yourself? Wage gaps are hugely complex, and the stats put out by the labor department (fuck Glassdoor, whatever) are both controlled, detailed, and fairly damning. Women make less on average in almost every field, women are employed less in high paying jobs, and the jobs that are heavily weighted towards women do not pay nearly as much. I don't…

> and fairly damning. Are they? From what I have seen the consensus is: An overall small 3-6% wage gap after accounting for basic life choices. Women under 30 + childless women significantly out-earning women with children + older women. Women under 30 + childless women have almost no wage gap and in many industries are out-earning their male peers. Life is rough for the bottom 50% of earners - male and female. What…

I suppose you can hand-wave the aggregate results away if you're comfortable with that 3-6% gap. But your argument basically amounts to "what matters to you doesn't matter to me, so I consider it insignificant".

I do consider 3-6% damning.

If you only compare women to other women, of course you won't see a wage gap; you can blame it all on the individual.

It's this willingness to value personal views of the world to minimize the facts that allows the gap to continue. Do you really think you can reason about systemic discrimination by looking at the individual? That's as ineffable as wondering why some people win the lotto; individuals are dominated by noise, and you only see the disparity in aggregate.

Why bother commenting if you don't care about the wage gap?

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#252

Post by danso »

prepend wrote: post #244
danso wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you pay those 2x to 5x coders 2-5x more than the regular coder?

Sadly no. A 5x will make more, but certainly not 5x salary. In my last company with pay bands, you could see a 20-50% premium.

I had assumed the answer was "no", and I asked the question because you seemed to insinuate that the pay gap correlates to merit, and that's why things can't be simplified to comparing people with "programmer" in the title.

Well, yes, not all programmers are the same, nor are all definitions and valuations of the title "Programmer" -- which is partly why good data on the subject of "pay disparity" is hard to come by. But I'm arguing that even in some dream world where this data exists, merit would be a very tricky variable to incorporate. As you said, programmers who are 5x, or even 2x, are not paid by multiple-of-productivity. The fact that they aren't isn't so much a reflection of unfairness, but the reality that productivity of a programmer is not at all easy to quantify, and even if it were, not at all constant.

The corollary of great programmers not being paid great wages is that there are some shitty programmers are not paid shitty wages. It's possible to accept that there isn't a pay disparity between males and females for a given job at a given company, while believing is that there's a greater tolerance for non-shitty wages to male shitty programmers.

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#253

Post by astrodust »

mmel wrote: post #226
dobbin wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a common pattern throughout history and one that really annoys me. People argue that the pay gap isn't real because men choose more highly-valued positions, but the reality is that positions favoured by women are inherently considered low-value. If some type of "women's work" somehow starts to become respectable or starts to pay better, it stops being "women's work" and the women are pushed out. If women start e…

I'm curious, what used to be considered a "hard science" that is now no longer considered so due to (or corralated with) the influx of women into that field?

There might be confusion about causality here. Generally women find more success in a field that's not jammed full of highly competitive men who push anyone weaker out of the way. Where they move on to some other target, the playing field becomes more fair.

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#254

Post by handojin »

xor1 wrote: post #173
phlakaton wrote: post #104

If ever I had a notion that an expression of solidarity for women in tech was unnecessary or quixotic, the response to this article on this very forum would be sufficient to dispel it.

From what I've seen, there are less African-American and non-white hispanic men in tech than there are white and Asian women, yet I never see this discussed. Is this not an important issue as well? Will skewed racial ratios only be handled after gender parity has been achieved? Or do they not matter at all?

Ah. Christ. Mechanics? I mean the women are like 50% of the population so big target likesay? Some of those women are non-white and a rising tide lifts all boats you know?

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#255

Post by 59nadir »

tomlock wrote: post #227
bsder wrote: post #208

I really wish they would quit promulgating this because it's actually counterproductive: "women face continued pay disparity" Seeing this statement tells me immediately that the author is grinding an ax. In some fields of engineering (EE, for example), women actually get paid more (104% last I checked). And, when you control for experience, time off for family, etc., pay disparities in most tech fields almost disappe…

>pay disparities in most tech fields almost disappear. So what you're saying is there are pay disparities in most tech fields. Aka, women face continued pay disparity.

It's a hard sell to say someone "faces" something when they're on the better end of it.

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#256

Post by Tossrock »

parennoob wrote: post #194
ar15saveslives wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they make less than men, why don't companies hire women alone? Don't they want to save money on salaries?

This is an argument that I have yet to see being addressed to my satisfaction. If recent raises / salaries in the tech industry outside of Silicon Valley are any guide, companies love to save money on salaries. So I honestly have no idea why all the men I work with haven't been replaced by women being paid 95% or whatever the claimed pay gap is. And remember, this is in the US, where you can legally be let go because…

Because there aren't enough women applying. At my previous job, I interviewed 50+ people, and fewer than 10% were women. For the record, I advocated strongly for most of them, and contributed to several being hired, including one of the best engineers I've met. Companies have a hard time hiring enough software people in general, and there are many more men applying for software jobs than women. If there were some untapped pool of female engineers all looking for jobs, believe me, that pool would get tapped. It just doesn't exist.

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#257

Post by SomeStupidPoint »

throwaway91111 wrote: post #249
SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim is that women (im aggregate) make different life choices than men, and once we account for those, the "wage gap" disappears. I honestly don't see anything wrong with different life choices leading to different outcomes, since the same is true within genders! That is, there's nothing sexist about that fact. The truth is the people advocating for equalizing pay when the sexes make different choices are arguin…

The only sexist thing here is your support of a baseless claim. If it's not baseless, presumably you have something to offer. However, without evidence, you are most likely wrong. Does that wrongness amount to sexism? Hard to say; my inclination says yes since you're referring to shuffling hundreds of dimensions defining employment into "life choices". Yes, that is probably a factor; culture is a powerful force. But…

The only contention I have is one you agreed to elsewhere: that the actual aggregate wage-gap once you've controlled for common variables (such as life choices) is 3-6% (with women earning more in some fields), which likely isn't significant or correctable.

A difference on that magnitude can easily be something about aggregate behavior correlated to sex, an uncontrolled for variable, or just random chance.

So let me ask you: do you have any evidence that 3-6% gap is the result of sexism instead of merely being a fact correlated to sex? (Particularly if we were to confine the data to people under 40, to control for historical biases that take time to age out.)

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#258

Post by gshulegaard »

alainv wrote: post #111
gshulegaard wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To build off your comment, I went ahead and found the glassdoor study: https://research-content.glassdoor.com/app/uploads/sites/2/2... And it, like most of the statistical papers surrounding the pay gap suffer from what I personally affectionately refer to as the "peanut butter spread" problem. The implicit assumption of pay gap studies is that if you group all jobs into a category and then segment them by gender bot…

You're building a strawman. No one is calling for "a Utopia-esque society where there is perfect freedom of choice [and] perfectly equal distributions of any sort." One does not need to call for that in order to find the current representation of women in engineering/CS lower than desirable. Continuing on the theme of using the sources presented in this thread: do you find it more likely that Google's worldwide tech…

Not sure I am in a position to say it is or is not a straw man argument since I am the one who made it...but it is more or less a fairly well known "classical liberal"/libertarian[1] position:

https://youtu.be/QcDrE5YvqTs

[1] This description taken from the Wikipedia citaiton of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's characterization of Chirstina Hoff Sommers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Hoff_Sommers

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#259

Post by handojin »

_xhok wrote: post #196

I wish comments were scored in a way that was weighted by the degree of bravery it took to write them. What a shame that most of the top comments here are boring, stand-up-for-the-vulnerable types agreed with by the majority— "women face difficulties in tech, and we should help them whenever we can"—while the downvoted posts are the ones trying (not necessarily successfully) to arrive at politically incorrect truths.

Perhaps you could share these politically incorrect /truths/? I'm not through the thread but I'm missing them.

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#260

Post by flukus »

jeremiahwv wrote: post #201
ar15saveslives wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they make less than men, why don't companies hire women alone? Don't they want to save money on salaries?

Precisely the question. Why indeed? Would you be more likely to hire a man than a women for an engineering role? Take the harvard implicit gender bias test for one answer: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html

Can you do an implicit test when it's nature is made explicit?
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