Live data from Hacker News

Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

insights.dice.com

351–360 of 562 posts

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most studies about the gender gap in pay find that most of the 77% figure is attibutable to differences in career choices/training/&c., but there remains a rough 5% difference in pay that is not attributable to those things. Ask most men if they would take a roughly 5% pay cut, and they would not say that it insignificant or something that can be ignored. Maybe the tech industry is just immune to this, but this artic…

And that approximately 5% difference can be solely attributed to the fact that men are more likely to negotiate for their salaries than women. I don't remember the study off the top of my head but there was a YouTube video that was investigating the pay gap and referenced the study looking at men's and women's willingness to ask for more pay.

That might be part, but there are even simpler explanations. Taller people make significantly more money per inch. Why that is, who knows, but just by itself it can explain around half the wage gap - before correction. In other words, after correction, if you also correct for height, then women make more than men.

Of course no one should make more money just because they are taller, but that's the reality. No one seems interested to try to correct this, though, because it's not obviously tied to any popular political movements.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#352
post #15

This is fairly consistent with other studies. The "77%" number is arrived at by comparing the median wage of full-time male & female employees. It doesn't account for differences in industry, job title, experience, etc. It's super broad. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, but it means we need more granularity. Coming out of uni/grad school, male and female salaries are equal in comparable fields. They depart a fe…

I like the idea of "mandatory paternity leave", to make up for the biological asymmetry. Even if you have a stereotypical breadwinner/housewife relationship, you are legally mandated to take time off, even if you don't want to. That way you avoid the "you're allowed to take paternal leave, but real go-getters don't!" game altogether. edit: The way I see it, the responses just prove my point. "This would just make peo…

Just to clarify, your ideology requires legally enforced social engineering to deny an aspect of biology?

That should be the hint that your first principles are incorrect.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#353
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> male go-getter with supportive female companion Do you have any objective reasons why this is suboptimal? Maybe we should go the other way; for example in the Netherlands, many women (with children) choose to work part-time (because they can). So maybe the "status quo" is by choice.

Maybe it's a biological choice, maybe it's cultural and social momentum from hundreds of years of forcing gender roles legally and violently. Impossible to tell with our current experimental setup. I lean towards the latter though.

The precautionary principle would say not to do your experiment until you can be assured it won't damage your research subjects.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#356
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't just paste quotes from the article into the thread.

I saw that it was a very small article and thought it might benefit mobile readers who think twice before clicking a link, won't happen again.

Thanks. We appreciate the helpful intent, but it's better to leave the thread for discussion.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#357
post #15

This is fairly consistent with other studies. The "77%" number is arrived at by comparing the median wage of full-time male & female employees. It doesn't account for differences in industry, job title, experience, etc. It's super broad. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, but it means we need more granularity. Coming out of uni/grad school, male and female salaries are equal in comparable fields. They depart a fe…

>We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules.

Why do we 'need' to do this? Jobs with very rigid shifts should be at a premium shouldn't they?

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#358

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…

> society still sucks at gender equality when it comes to enabling parents to equally contribute With very few exceptions, mammalian females are almost entirely responsible for child-rearing across the board. So all signs point that its also hormones too. We as a society need to start equalizing hormones. Women need to start taking testosterone and men need to take estrogen. We will only be equal once there is a sing…

I suppsoe there is a hormone for washing dishes and doing laundry also.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#359
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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".

Yes, of course. Really, for all the talk about convoluted biases clouding people's decision-making, it's pretty telling that most of the time, they don't even manage to get past the basic challenge of actually letting the evidence lead them to a conclusion.

Re: Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries

#360

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 significa…

That is a bad assumption that will mislead you. The gender roles are not baked into our DNA.

There are 'baked-in' DNA traits, that have emergently caused cultures to adopt those gender roles in their historical contexts.

'Baked-id' DNA traits are now emergently leading to the abandonment of gender roles in the context of western cultures & economies.

Please re-evaluate your assumptions because they are wrong.

Post reply on HN