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

#321

Post by malvosenior » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #298

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…

I've never worked in a field where I could compete for a job with a woman, they'd always get first dibs. It is pretty unfair. However a distinction must be made between the formal systems (extremely sexist favouring women), informal systems (potentially extremely sexist favouring men) and workplace environment (women are continuously sexually propositioned; pretty overwhelming evidence for that IMO). Making the forma…

That's a very interesting take. I know as a man, I'd rather work in a place where anyone propositioning someone else would be fired (man or woman) than a place where I may not even get the job because I'm male.

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

#322

Post by fzeroracer » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

esarbe wrote: post #297

romwell wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic, but yes; it seems to be biology. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

You're making a logical error here in assuming that it's related to biology.

If we were to assume that biology is the reason why women avoid certain fields, then this logic should hold true irrespective of the amount of gender equality a region might have. In fact we should assume that the two factors should compound: That is, if a region heavily discourages women from entering into STEM careers then that combined with their biological inclination to avoid said careers means we should see the numbers crater.

So given that this hypothesis does not hold to be true we can clearly show that it's not biology that's the case. It's far more complex than that and is the result of various social and economical factors. Reducing the entire argument into 'it's biology' does a disservice to examining social trends and is mentally rather lazy in my opinion, considering it can be easily used to explain everything.

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

#323

Post by dgzl » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #161

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> High school teachers should be paid much less than university professors. Why?

I imagine you want to make the point that primary School education is more important than secondary School education (which may be true) and thus should be paid better.

I disagree with this in general, because I don't feel like the skills and knowledge needed to be a successful primary School educator are as difficult or unique as those needed to be a secondary School educator.

My reasoning is that a good percentage of the value that comes from primary School education is based around behavioural education, such as learning how to interact and behave with peers and teams. It also is a place where students learn authority and social heptarchy, and punishment and consequence. In addition to learning the foundations of school subjects.

In secondary education, it's assumed that the student has learned all that, and their attention will be focused on difficult study of each of their subjects. The professor should be an embodiment of that subject, with understanding beyond primary School educators. Likewise it's arguably more difficult to keep the attention of University students than primary students.

On the other hand (as in not in general), if someone was a truly exceptional primary educator / early life coach / babysitter, what have you, then the private sector would be a better place for them I imagine.

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

#324

Post by fjord_ » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

johnny313 wrote: post #36

> Kelly Ellis, a former Google engineer and one of the plaintiffs in the gender-pay suit against the company, said in a legal filing that Google hired her as a Level 3 employee — the category for new software engineers who are recent college graduates — in 2010 despite her having four years of experience. > Within a few weeks of Ms. Ellis being hiring, Google hired a male engineer for her team who had also graduated…

It sounds like they took both of them into a room with a white board and found out he was a lot better of an engineer than her. Controversial...a man out performing a woman....

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

#325

Post by gpetrosyan » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

organsnyder wrote: post #175

kbutler wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amount of training required. I'd be fine with a random anesthesiologist teaching my grade schooler, but I'd hesitate to have a random elementary school teacher giving him anesthesia. Elementary school teaching: a teaching certificate. University professor: PhD, pre-tenure work & published research (Note that there are less-qualified people teaching in universities that are compensated much less.) Nurse practitioner:…

How do software developers fare under that regime? I make 3x more as a software developer than my teacher friends that have had far more schooling (masters degrees in many cases, plus continuing education requirements). I don't know where you live, but in my state (Michigan) teachers have rigorous certification requirements. And I definitely would NOT expect someone without training to be an effective teacher. I'm in…

I think how far you are removed from the direct financial impact of your job plays a major role in it.

It is harder to measure a cost on society inflicted by poorly educated students than it is to measure the cost of buggy, failing commercial software. Also, students who were academic failures are not necessarily guaranteed to fail in life, since there are ways to succeed in life other than by being good at school subjects, whereas an incorrect software program can never succeed.

The same holds true even inside the same field. It depends whether you are near a cash cow or a cost center. Working on infrastructure, building tooling for other developers is not likely to be rewarded as well as writing code that could cost your company millions if there is a bug.

There are also differences in specialization. An average game dev is probably going to make less than an average mobile dev, who in turn is going to make less than what a random quant makes.

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

#326

Post by lgleason » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

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…

[edited for typos and grammer] Anecdotally, I've run a couple of tech conferences and know others who have as well fairly recently. We've made a point to hold workshops for under represented groups, had the Codes of Conduct, make a lot of extra effort to reach out to women as speakers etc..

In the end, we would get 5 to 10 times as many talk submissions from men, accept nearly all of the talks by women (often turning down higher quality talks from men) trying to get diversity numbers and have a much higher cancellation rate form the women for various reasons, especially money. If we were lucky we would get 20-30% women speakers when all of that was done. I've also been told by some diversity activists that, in order to get women to speak and to get higher percentages of women as speakers etc., unlike most of the men, you need to pay for their travel etc., offer free tickets for women attendees, consider offering stipends for women who speak etc..

Others, organizing other conferences have shared similar experiences. It's one thing to fight against blatant sexism which I'm for, but this is turning into something else.

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

#327

Post by mpweiher » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

roguecoder wrote: post #282

emddudley wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is some data from the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_318.30.a... In 2017 there were 133,761 Bachelor's degrees conferred in Engineering, 20% of which were conferred to women. Computers: 71,420 degrees, 19% women Math: 24,073 degrees, 42% women Physical sciences: 31,268 degrees, 40% women

Physics hardly any more applicable to software development than biology is, especially areas like biostats or neurophysiology that involve directly writing code. But these numbers sure suggest that something is wrong with computer science departments.

> sure suggest that something is wrong with computer science departments.

Why? Why do men and women have to have the same preferences in what to study, in your opinion?

Does the fact that 78% of students in veterinary science are female "sure suggest" that something is wrong with veterinary science?

Since there are so many fields where women vastly outnumber men (and women significantly outnumber men overall in college) a corresponding skew in other fields is a necessary outcome: you simply run out of women to fill those seats, they are elsewhere.

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

#328

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 9:59 PM UTC

cmonnow wrote: post #292

nostromo wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe sexual differences cause men and women, on average, to have different interests. edit: thanks for pointing out that I misread which type of pressure is being applied.

you're assuming that men and women have sexual differences? it's 2019.

[deleted]

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

#329

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

magneticnorth wrote: post #48

I've talked to one expert about a similar result in a company where I worked, and the flip side to results like this is sometimes promotion velocity - women looked "overpaid" for their level relative to the men, and that was often because they had been at that level much longer than most men at the same level. If you set initial salaries fairly with respect to gender but promote men more quickly, then you end up with…

[deleted]

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

#330

Post by mikeash » Mon, Mar 04, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #259

fasdetwaew wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that women simply are choosing careers in a different distribution to what men do Why is that, though? Are women not encouraged to pursue technology careers? Or are they being encouraged to chose other careers instead? Are they driven away from it by a toxic work place culture? Or just the perception of tech as having toxic workplace cultures? Are women moving into roles with more flexibility because they are expec…

Or... may I dare to suggest they simply don't like it? I used to work at school. Not for a long time, but enough to make some observations. One of them: school kids are passionate. If they're interested in something, no amount of persuasion, toxicity or whatever else will distract them.

It’s perfectly reasonable to consider that maybe women are inherently drawn away from the field for whatever reason. There are biological differences between men and women and it’s possible that this is one.

What I don’t understand is why so many people insist that this must be the explanation, as if the current state of things is definitely a level playing field (or biased toward women) and the fact that there are so many more men in the field must therefore be due to something innate.

We’re only a few decades out from a time when women couldn’t open a bank account without their husband’s permission, and when raping a woman was perfectly legal as long as you were married to her. I think we should give it a little more time and effort before we declare that everything is now fair and any remaining discrepancies must be biological.