Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nevertheless, She Coded

dev.to

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 398 posts

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#301

Post by sanswork »

sebastos wrote: post #294
sanswork wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your whole argument is that people are biologically set to specific roles because in some countries where they have the free choice they still go for those roles. But that ignores the fact that even in those societies children are still constantly bombarded with messages telling them what their gender should be when they grow up. You're looking at the finish line and making an answer while ignoring the fact that they…

You're treating it like well-established fact that people's career choices are based on gender identities which are fabricated by the environment they're raised in. Where is the evidence for this? Where are the oddball societies with female construction workers and all-male nurse workforces? If this is just an "accident" of the memetic evolution of societal gender tropes, then why is it so unilaterally consistent acr…

Actually to prove otherwise you just need to find traditionally "male" roles that are no longer male dominated roles. Like teachers, lawyers, or doctors. All had centuries of being male jobs.

Or find 'male' roles in some cultures that aren't in others like programming.

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#302

Post by jondubois »

I couldn't name a single programmer, man or woman who worked on any Apollo mission. The problem is not that women are under-recognized as coders, it's just that engineers as a class of workers are often under-recognized.

Humans just don't care enough about intelligence unfortunately. Everyone knows about Neil Armstrong though.

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#303

Post by WillPostForFood »

KirinDave wrote: post #278
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…

> And, when you control for experience, time off for family, etc., pay disparities in most tech fields almost disappear. Okay, so spoiler alert, I'm grinding an axe right now. It's completely ridiculous to imply that analysts are not normalizing for hours worked. That's one of the most basic things they do, and you really should provide proof in the form of a study that both published its methodology and has been don…

Can you cite a study that controls for time off, degree type, experience that still shows a large disparity in pay?

It's your belief that someone who works a reasonable sum of hours but then goes to have a child should be paid less.

The question isn't whether someone who takes time off to raise a child should be paid less, it is whether someone with more overall work experience should be paid more. My wife took 10 years off to raise kids. Is she entitled to the exact same salary as a co-worker who continuously worked for that time, increasing their skills? What about a 5 year gap? 1 year?

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#304

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

Smaug123 wrote: post #238
jeremiahwv wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Implicit association tests probably don't work. Sources may be found at https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/25/devoodooifying-psychol...

Well, it's a little more complicated than that. They have extremely high state-specific variance, so it's difficult to show predictive validity. They have definitely been associated with particular sets of outcomes in non-gendered/racial contexts, where you would expect the studies to be easier to run.

Source: I did a bunch of them for my PhD, but my reading of the literature stopped in 2014.

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#305

Post by asher_ »

These types of articles seem to always get the same mixture of responses. The biggest problem that I see is that everyone starts with completely different sets of assumptions and they are almost never up front about them.

The lack of cited sources in articles like these leads people to bolster or criticize particular studies that they have read or heard about, usually without referencing those. Many of these studies are either flawed or contain assumptions that some people don't agree with, so this ends up going nowhere also.

Are there any really good studies on this topic that we may discuss as a common point of reference? Once that take into account all the facts, and don't start with assumptions like the following:

1. There should be equal numbers of men and women in tech (or there is some other ratio that is preferred or correct). 2. Women and men in tech should - on average - be paid the same.

Some people have these assumptions as part of their personal belief systems, but they entail a whole bunch of other assumptions that are not prima facie true.

One other huge weakness in these kinds of studies is that they measure the things that are easy to measure; things like education and experience. If companies are hiring compensating employees rationally, they would use these only as heuristics, and have some measure of how much an individual employee would contribute to the company as the determining factor.

Measuring job skill, as well as all the other skills that go into being a good employee is really hard, but until a study tries to actually do this, they are coming up with conclusions that aren't at all useful in the real world.

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#306

Post by yxhuvud »

sriracha23 wrote: post #288
yxhuvud wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why should you control for time off for family? Except for the really early time after birth, both parents can do that. Is it the fault of the employer? Well, perhaps they could be more persuasive in motivating the women to work and more accepting of men taking days off to care for their sick children. EDIT: Use similar term for both genders.

Motivating "the girls" to work? That language alone -- "girls" versus "men" -- suggests a diminutive, dismissive way of thinking about women.

Thank you, that was a very good point and definitely not intended. I updated my post to reflect it.

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#307

Post by ewjordan »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #289
intellegacy wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh please, google did their own study. They want to hire more females than any company but the conclusion was that there aren't enough women in the engineering pipeline. So yea, the more likely reason is C) Women don't want to become engineers as much as men do, for whatever (social/biological/cultural) reason

There's been plenty written about how "the pipeline problem" is a myth: - http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/26/426... - https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/the-lack-of-women-in-tech-...

Is your claim that the pipeline is not completely fugged? Because there are very clear numbers indicating that it is, starting very early, at the K-12 level.

Or is it merely that the pipeline being fugged doesn't mean that everything else is fine and dandy? I'd agree with that, hell yeah, and that claim matches the actual content of those links quite well. But I don't think it in any way suggests that the problem is a myth.

I also don't think the pipeline is unfixable, but that's both my day job and another rant for another day.

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#308

Post by sheepmullet »

KirinDave wrote: post #284
sheepmullet wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps there are disparaging comments because people love to quote misleading statistics... kind of just like you did. From the glassdoor wage gap study you mentioned in [2]: > After taking into account differences in education and experience, men working at tech companies overall make 5.9 percent more than women do From a brief scan of the study they didn't control for hours worked and they are already down to 5.9%…

> From a brief scan of the study they didn't control for hours worked and they are already down to 5.9% Why is it a foregone conclusion that the majority of women in this population worked fewer hours? A forbes study which averages across a large canvas of american workers is not a very good thing to compare to glassdoor's targetted subsection.

The women surveyed could have worked more hours than the men.

But by not controlling for it you reduce the studies explanative powers.

You don't get to just ignore it because it is convenient.

It doesn't even pass the "more likely than not" standard of evidence.

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#309

Post by sheepmullet »

evgen wrote: post #286
sheepmullet wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which I don't see the value of, honestly, given that tech workers are near-uniformly salaried in this country You can't see how working extra hours can increase productivity enough to warrant a small increase in pay?

So, would you like me to link in the HUNDREDS of articles posted to HN over the past two years going over how working more does not equate to working better and how hours worked is a bad proxy for productivity. Should I? Or are you going to just concede the point right here and now and retract your statement?

Frankly, I don't understand how those hundreds of articles are relevant.

Could you distill the overall argument?

Comparing two individuals based on hours worked is different to looking at populations.

And we aren't talking about 60-80 hour weeks (burnout zone).

Unless you are arguing women as a group are significantly more efficient compared to men?

Re: Nevertheless, She Coded

#310

Post by sheepmullet »

throwaway91111 wrote: post #251
sheepmullet wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I do consider 3-6% damning.

You do realise the gap is just the "unexplained by standard corrections" and not "% due to sexism" right?

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

I care that you are using misleading statistics to push an agenda.

Post reply on HN