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

#261

Post by PunchTornado » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

renholder wrote: post #205

maxxxxx wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Just publish who makes how much money. That’s it.

Compare two developers. One just codes and the other not only knows how to code but knows how to debug (native, runtimes, etc.). So, then you publish developer 1's pay salary and developer 2's pay salary. Now, developer 1 has a rage-boner because developer 2 is being paid more but there's the reason of his/her desirable skills being utilised in the role. Yet, developer 1 doesn't see this qualifiable reason and just s…

there are plenty of situations where that better dev gets paid less. salary transparency will address that

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

#262

Post by usepgp » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #28

leesec wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure this is a troll but if it's not then I Disagree.

I'm almost certain that's a troll or else someone that forgot a "/s"

Or maybe we shouldn't need /s's to make an obvious joke

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

#263

Post by sleepysysadmin » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

rdtsc wrote: post #199

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…

> 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…

The explanation is simple.

When you provide women the opportunity to become anything they want. They choose the careers that they choose. Which tend to me more social related careers. Teaching or nursing for example does not scale well; therefore salaries are limited.

Whereas men pick more "stuff" categories. It's men who work in STEM creating things. A car or an iphone is going to be generally speaking men who design it. These scale very well and salaries can be larger.

By these modern approaches that allow women to go into whatever they want to do. This is what creates the gender wage gap.

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

#264

Post by slg » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

MRD85 wrote: post #178

Talking about the additional compensation - "Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money." Doesn't this imply that men, per capita, were being underpaid more than women?

Yes, which is why the per capita number is not the proper way to measure this.

For example, imagine a company with 7 male employees and 3 female employees. That company has 9 engineers and one administrative assistant. All the engineers are underpaid. The male engineers are underpaid by $1000 and the female engineers are underpaid by $1200. The administrative assistant is a woman who is fairly compensated. That means the men are underpaid by $7000 total and the women are underpaid by $2400 total. Men make up 70% of the employee workforce and are roughly 75% of the underpaid total. More men are underpaid than women. The per capita underpayment of men is $200 more than the underpayment of the average woman. There are plenty of ways to frame this data that make it look like men are the biggest victims and yet woman engineers are all payed $200 less than their male counterparts.

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

#265

Post by EForEndeavour » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:16 PM UTC

sorum wrote: post #202

rhegart wrote: post #154

High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. 57% of college graduates are women. Men are not only getting the short end of the stick but are being told by every voice that they are privileged, it’s their fault, they are bad whereas women have sooooo many extra programs and positive reinforcement to succeed. No one with a straight face can tell me women in entry level…

> 57% of college graduates are women What's the percentage female graduates in STEM fields? The 57% may not be representative for the fields which matter for engineers. Not saying the delta is big, I honestly don't know and am curious.

A quick search confirms your suspicion. The 57% female figure applies overall, but within STEM, the fraction of female graduates is low, except for life sciences:

https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-in-science-technolog...

The section entitled "Few Women Are Earning Degrees in STEM, Except in the Life Sciences" states that 35% of STEM undergrads are female. For engineering and computer-related bachelor's programs, this drops to ~18%(!).

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

#266

Post by thewizardofaus » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:16 PM UTC

I once applied for a scholarship that did not advertise itself as a Male or Female only scholarship. In the fine print it quoted: "women will receive first priority for this scholarship."

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

#267

Post by romwell » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:16 PM UTC

ben509 wrote: post #244

fzeroracer wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying there are biological differences that are preventing women from entering the software industry? Because historically the trends of CS grads proves this is a false statement [1] so I'm curious where this statement comes from. [1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

All the talk of discrimination against women requires that they be helpless damsels in distress in all this, when their dominance of college graduation suggests the opposite. Biology is not "preventing" women, it's directing their inclination. Women have a ton of opportunities, and it's just as likely that as CS blew up they decided they didn't want to and didn't need to take on the long hours and relative social iso…

>Biology is not "preventing" women, it's directing their inclination.

Right, absolutely, biology is what inclines women to not be programmers.

And it's not at all things like lack of parental leave policies in most software firms that would allow their partners to stay at home should a child be born in their household, or a million other workplace and policy matters.

It's biology, the conversation is over.

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

#268

Post by asveikau » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

Nobody in these discussions seems to attack the elephant in the room: performance review systems.

These are openly meant to overpay some employees and underpay others. Though they can be coated in HR-speak to appear neutral and objective, the decisions that come out of them are typically arbitrary; they enforce biases of all kinds. So we should not be surprised at the results.

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

#269

Post by ALittleLight » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #140

bandrami wrote: post #131

Earlier 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?

>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'…

This isn't quite right. People are paid such that the amount is enough to attract needed workers and less than the value those workers provide. Education isn't a critical factor except that it enables people to be more productive and therefore more desirable to employers.

As an example: a middle school dropout who self learned machine learning, became a master, published papers, worked at a successful startup etc, will likely be better paid than your average History PhD.

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

#270

Post by AdrianB1 » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

edejong wrote: post #217

AdrianB1 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my company in the IT department (over 1000 people) more than 50% are women, reaching around 60%. In the past 5-6 years the promotions were 4 to 1 in favor of women and when hiring, female candidates come first if the skills are comparable or not much lower than male candidates. This is because we used to have a female CIO that set diversity targets that were mandatory for all levels, so in less than 10 years we we…

Makes me wonder how many men left the IT department in order to prevent career-suicide.

Just a few that are located in countries with good opportunities, not the ones outside USA or West Europe. A few like me still believe something can be done to fix it (the CIO retired), so we did not leave yet. The ones close to retirement don't care anymore.