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The gender wage gap in Silicon Valley – based on AngelList data

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Re: The gender wage gap in Silicon Valley – based on AngelList data

#31
post #14

Interesting data, BUT... "Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team." - this is gender discrimination and it is illegal. How about actually making the workplace attractive to woman applicants? Things like ridding your careers page of implicit biases and bro culture, putting extra emphasis on personal as well as professional growth, attending/hosting various women-oriented events/…

"How about actually making the workplace attractive to woman applicants?"

Yeah, and do you know what the best and easiest way to make a workplace more attractive to women is?

It is to have other women in the workplace!

I know many women who are unwilling to even apply to a company if they know they would be the first or only woman on the team.

It is a chicken and egg problem. Until his company is able to get SOME women working there, it is going to be extremely difficult to attract them in the first place.

Because of this it makes a lot of business sense to prioritize hiring women if your team is extremely imbalanced.

Re: The gender wage gap in Silicon Valley – based on AngelList data

#32
Nice work!

How many data points per graph? Really just 1 median salary a year (20x2 data points and 1k^2 pixels :)? I would have preferred just points with straight lines over the interpolated wavy line that looks fibbed. Why not more points? Why not a heat map/2d histogram instead of medians? And why not have the same axis on all the graphs?

Re: The gender wage gap in Silicon Valley – based on AngelList data

#33
post #23

>Education shrank the results to single digits for each occupation, gender and work experience, so I decided to remove it from the final dataset. First of all you could have used buckets. Secondly, it doesn't seem like you have enough data judging from your charts. Dice did a study and found that >when you control for education, level of experience and parallel job titles, says Dice, men and women earn the same amoun…

But you know they won't be, because good luck winning that case, and before that, good luck finding a lawyer to represent that case.

IANAL but this seems like an easy case if the company has money in the bank. The CEO openly admitted on his personal blog that he plans to discriminate in the hiring process. Im guessing that would be enough to get past the chance of dismissal and then you're on to the discovery process which is so expensive the company would probably want to settle. Throw in negative PR and a pro bono (or fees from the case/settlement) lawyer who wants to make a name for themselves going after Silicon Valley gender discrimination and you've got a party.

I probably don't know what I'm talking about though.

Re: The gender wage gap in Silicon Valley – based on AngelList data

#34
post #13

> Born white and male in today’s world I won the lottery without having a clue. Here we go. (actually I stopped reading).

There's a couple comments to this effect. Why? It comes across as being unwilling to consider ideas at all.

Re: The gender wage gap in Silicon Valley – based on AngelList data

#35
Generally as a startup, many applicants come through current employees, friends, investors, etc. This generally encourages the cycle of the same people getting the same jobs. Don't rely on your website to widen the diversity of your funnel, even if your jobs list is current...most startups I know are not great about keeping this current anyway.

A few (relatively easy) ideas:

1. Join a few "______ in tech" email lists, and if you don't feel comfortable joining the list or it is not allowed, at least email the moderator and ask if they take job postings.

2. Send someone from your company to attend to a "____ in tech" meetup. There are a lot and they happen often. Ask people at these meetups where they get their information, what email lists they are on, etc. Then, act.

3. Interns. People have mixed thoughts on interns, fine, but the "lack of experience" trope happens because it's really hard to get that first chance. Take a chance on someone in a lower-risk way.

4. Host some kind of public-facing community event one or two times per year. Advertise it on your website and your twitter. Generally as a woman I am more comfortable attending something like this rather than cold-emailing a company for a position that I am not even sure they are hiring for. See: "Code as Craft" at Etsy. Tech-centric topic, inclusive and public-facing way to see the office, meet employees etc.

Re: The gender wage gap in Silicon Valley – based on AngelList data

#37
> At that point I made a decision to change this by enforcing a new hiring rule. Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team

Most of us can agree that this is a bad decision, but I've always wondered how people can end up with such tunnel vision. Men in IT has always been overrepresented, so it's not surprising that the majority of teams are mostly men. But what I wonder is why this person thinks that hiring women only will change this trend? It is in fact gender discrimination, but I believe that inspiring women to work in the IT field is the key to solve the problem. I don't think anyone wants special treatment due to their gender, but rather evaluated by their skills and experiences.

Re: The gender wage gap in Silicon Valley – based on AngelList data

#38
post #14

Interesting data, BUT... "Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team." - this is gender discrimination and it is illegal. How about actually making the workplace attractive to woman applicants? Things like ridding your careers page of implicit biases and bro culture, putting extra emphasis on personal as well as professional growth, attending/hosting various women-oriented events/…

>this is gender discrimination and it is illegal.

Employment discrimination laws don't kick in until you have 15 employees. This guy has 10.

Re: The gender wage gap in Silicon Valley – based on AngelList data

#39
post #14

Interesting data, BUT... "Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team." - this is gender discrimination and it is illegal. How about actually making the workplace attractive to woman applicants? Things like ridding your careers page of implicit biases and bro culture, putting extra emphasis on personal as well as professional growth, attending/hosting various women-oriented events/…

[deleted]

Re: The gender wage gap in Silicon Valley – based on AngelList data

#40
I thought this was an interesting article and then I read the comments. Oh dear, a bunch of white guys kvetching and clutching their...pearls. Your deprivation moves me. Really. Anyway I had a point to make, as a software engineer for 30 years and a woman. (The proportion of women in the field has fallen by half since I started my career.) For my last job I went with a high end recruiting agency and the recruiter got me to raise my salary request by 25K. I ended up getting 10K above her suggestion. It was interesting to see that indeed I was undervaluing myself. In this I find that I was pretty typical of female engineers. I'm glad I took the recruiter's advice. By the way my salary seems to be exactly in line with the salary of men with my experience, from these charts.
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