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Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

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Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#341

Post by lliamander »

dragonwriter wrote: post #299
wbillingsley wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially, it happens from a tax perspective. Governments try to push up "workforce participation" to increase tax revenues and reduce benefits outlays, and increasing the incentives for women to go back to work a few months after childbirth is part of that. From their perspective, a childcare centre with a staff:child ratio of 1:4 is more efficient than a stay-at-home mum with a nine month old baby at 1:1 (and the…

> Governments try to push up "workforce participation" to increase tax revenues and reduce benefits outlays, and increasing the incentives for women to go back to work a few months after childbirth is part of that. This theory conflicts with the fact that the trend over time has been toward more support for parental leave, not less, on the part of government.

Parental leave only after women entered the workforce in such large numbers, and we've seen (and felt) the negative consequences from trying to outsource child-rearing so completely. Parental leave was not as necessary because there were more stay-at-home parents; and before early 1900s it was more common for both parents to work from home (i.e. on a farm).

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#342

Post by sien »

cortesoft wrote: post #232
shostack wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beat me to it. The episode is basically an interview with Claudia Goldin who is about as qualified a person as you could hope for to speak on this matter. [1] tl;dr women start out with equal pay, but trade pure monetary compensation for flexibility and/or fewer hours when they have kids because society still sucks at gender equality when it comes to enabling parents to equally contribute to certain aspects of parent…

As the father of a 10 week old baby girl, it isn't as simple as just society enabling parents to contribute equally. I am SO into being a dad. I want to do as much caregiving as possible. However, breastfeeding kinda throws a monkey wrench into the "split all the work equally" plan. For newborns, eating is what they do most of the time (when they aren't sleeping). If you breastfeed your child, which all pediatricians…

True. But from about 9 months you could both work say 3 days a week if you wanted.

Mind you if you have another child you'd have to do that again.

But good luck getting well paid 3 days a week work for both of you.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#343

Post by clevernickname »

When those gender roles are all but constant across countless independently developed cultures existent over tens of thousands of years, with distribution of visible physical traits to match them, it's pretty safe to assume that they're baked into our DNA and not some random whim of western culture.

Imagine how long a tribe with male caretakers and female warriors (who it cannot be argued are not on average significantly smaller and weaker than men) would survive against a tribe of male warriors and female caretakers.

There are species with much less divergence in biology between males and females. We would not have evolved to have such divergence if it were not useful for our fitness to have distinct fighter/protector and caretaker roles. Indeed as K-strategists that take a very long time to mature, having dedicated caretakers was an extremely useful evolution.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#344

Post by lliamander »

kaitai wrote: post #133
paganel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women (normalizing parental leave for fathers with newborns is a good Don't have a kid, but I would think that an infant is better off having his mother close to him in his early months of life compared to having his father, for the simple biological reason that the mother can breast-feed, while a father can't. From what I remember reading kids who…

In some Nordic countries it's becoming the norm that mom takes breast-feeding time and dad takes toddler-time... ...for the simple biological reason that fathers can generally run faster and thus chase down the kid... ok, that's just trolling :P

The second I walk in the door when I come home work, my toddler expects - as if it were some inviolable law of the universe - that we take turns chasing each other through the house. This made me chuckle :)

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#345

Post by thesimpsons1022 »

4bpp wrote: post #217
losteric wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree with everything here, especially getting rid of stereotypes around nurturing roles. My question is, what happens if many women and men aren't funneled towards those roles? What if it's a natural preference given our evolutionary history? I'm not saying that's the case, and my parents had no problems reversing nurturing roles over 20 years ago... but given our hyper-"PC" society, I am curious how far soc…

I think that a lot of people approach these sort of issues by constraint propagation from their political axioms - so for instance if they hold that the total work done by all men must be equally valuable to the total work done by all women and there is a set of arguments that together imply this is not the case (such as, for a crude hypothetical setting, "the value of work is proportional to the amount of physical w…

i agree. and this goes both ways. some people start from the axiom that racism/sexism don't exist and modify their interpretation of the data to match that. "There's no pay difference".

others perceive racism/sexism everywhere and only read that the 95 percentile and unweighted pays are different.

We can get off the political topic and start with other axioms as well. IE some believe more women need to be involved in tech, while others want less competition in their respective field (lower vs higher salary).

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#346

Post by mynameisvlad »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #291
mynameisvlad wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because, shockingly, both parents caring for babies helps society as a whole. Maybe you should stop being selfish instead of making it hard for others to have families. There have been studies that have shown fathers are far more involved in their kid's lives by taking paternal leave. It also means that the parents will both be far more productive post-leave as they would have developed more balanced responsibil…

Society is helped by having healthy babies, yes. You haven't provided any support for your argument that I , as someone without children, must be made to subsidize the family choices of others. The resources to cover the extended work absence of the parents has to come from somewhere. In many cases, it'll be one past parent covering a new parent, and then vice-versa. But those of us who can't have children (a) don't…

> So how is it that you get to make the decision for all of society, such that it must be a one-size-fits-all law, and people aren't allowed to negotiate for the terms that make the most sense for their own personal situation.

Yeah, societal decisions are generally one-size-fits-all laws because it's virtually impossible to make it any other way. In short: tough luck.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#347

Post by thesimpsons1022 »

npunt wrote: post #333
apta wrote: post #240

> What if it's a natural preference given It is known that women tend to be more emotional than men for instance. As such, they do well in nurturing roles like you described. I'm not saying that men can't do them, it's just that more women feel "at home" doing that kind of work.

Define 'emotional'. The sum of emotions (can you measure that)? The lack of rationality? The presentation of emotion? I'd love to see these studies, as I'm pretty sure it is not 'known'. A common HN refrain is the lack of validity in most social science research - to what degree that is true remains to be seen, but on this point of emotionality it seems apt to point this out. Perhaps it is only college students in th…

also look at men committing almost all violent crimes, this seems pretty emotional and not rational to me.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#348

Post by coldtea »

coldtea wrote: post #54

Gender Gap obligatory video link (Maddox): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDj_bN0L8XM

Downvotes? I can understand not liking the humor, but it's a well researched video full of arguments for the subject matter. Better arguments in fact that several comments.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#349

Post by shkkmo »

nickff wrote: post #327
shkkmo wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who work less and have a better work-life balance can get more done in less time. Companies with poor work-life balances often have a culture of 'long-hours' that pushes people towards spending (or acting like they are spending) more hours working that are necessary to complete their tasks. I haven't seen anyone pushing for 'higher compensation per unit of output', but many employees would like their employers…

I agree that happier and less stressed people often (but not always) have higher specific productivity (output/hour), but they are usually less productive per week/month/year. I also agree that companies should focus on increasing work output rather than hours worked, and many books have been written on this subject (by people like Deming). Indeed, productivity has increased, though I am sure we are all aware of defi…

> they are usually less productive per week/month/year.

You have evidence that this is true? If so, do you have evidence that the lower productivity is caused by (not simply correlated with) people being less stressed and happier?

> "you are begging the question by assuming that people want to work less

I am not. I said "if we want this".

However, I think I would have a much easier time backing up the assertion "people want to work less" than you would have backing up " happier and less stressed people often (but not always) have higher specific productivity (output/hour), but they are usually less productive per week/month/year" as a causal relationship.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#350

Post by thesimpsons1022 »

bcook wrote: post #283
jahewson wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is known No, it really isn't. It's just your biased stereotype.

Yeah, men & women are exactly the same & any conclusion otherwise is sexist/biased/anti-feminist/whatever. /s We (men & women) are different... (not "better or worse"). There is nothing offensive or biased about that.

I agree. But i don't see how you can go from that to assuming women are necessarily more emotional. You kind of need some data to back that up. Note that men murder and kill and rape at a high rate due to their emotions.
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