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

nytimes.com

381–390 of 626 posts

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

#381
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://ngcproject.org/statistics > Women earned 57.3% of bachelor’s degrees in all fields in 2013 and 50.3% of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees.

Your truncated quote is woefully incomplete at best, and intentionally misleading at worst. The full passage reads as follows, emphasis mine: Women earned 57.3% of bachelor’s degrees in all fields in 2013 and 50.3% of science and engineering bachelor’s degrees. However, women’s participation in science and engineering at the undergraduate level significantly differs by specific field of study. While women receive ove…

Odd that somehow medicine doesn't count as STEM. Too many women would distort the narrative?

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

#382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is something wrong with ballet since it's mostly women?

Possibly? Or at least in the social pressure at school that stops boys from dancing, and/or the way that dance is taught.

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

#383
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everybody is underpaid, but among the underpaid, they found men as well as women. As random illustration, they might pay 200k+-5% to 80% of all level X developers, and the other 20% might only earn 150k+-5%. I still agree that 'underpaid' is a difficult term here. Maybe the 80% are overpaid? The only hard fact in this example would be that the salary is more skewed than it should be for a 'fair' compensation.

If you believe that developers are within a factor of 33% of productivity (defined notionally as “value created per week”), then there is excessive skew in the numbers you propose. I believe the productivity figures are at least a factor of 2, and probably a tail out to a factor of 10 or more versus the median developer (and then a left-going distribution under the median where a substaintial number of developers do…

I wrote this in the context of the article, where a Google developer with 33% more productivity would already have progressed to the next role level. At least, that is what I would assume for large companies.

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

#384
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a third possibility: men and women really do have different interests. Further evidence for this comes from the observation that: The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

That doesn't seem like a third possibility — it sounds like the same thing as "The groups who haven't traditionally been in power are in that position because they are innately less capable." It's theoretically possible that women just generally suck at computers, but if that's someone's argument, I'd prefer they come out and actually make the argument instead of throwing around smokescreens about "equality of outcom…

Capable isn't the same thing as interested. I know many smart people who have no interest in programming (and wonder why I enjoy it). As The Atlantic said:

> Then again, it could just be that, feeling financially secure and on equal footing with men, some women will always choose to follow their passions, rather than whatever labor economists recommend. And those passions don’t always lie within science [or technology].

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

#385
Here's what I think happened: women become a hot commodity. Tech companies have been trying to get their diversity numbers up for years know and the best way to do so is to hire some URMs, but the supply is still low, thus the cost to hire URMs has risen, leading to the higher average salary, and the subsequent adjustment.

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

#386
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not act as though those are in any ways similar. Elementary school teaching does require less academic rigor than a university professor. Same applies to RNs vs an anesthesiologist. I do not mean to belittle those career choices (if anything, I myself want to become a k12 school teacher at some point in life). But, there are a certain set of traits that are needed to excel at the 'prestigious' careers. Disposit…

> Elementary school teaching does require less academic rigor than a university professor. But you replace that with a need for a lot more knowledge of teaching and child psychology, so I'd say doing a good job is significantly harder even in the sense of requiring a lot of education.

> a lot more knowledge of teaching and child psychology

Do they really though? In my experience, school teachers don't really have either and both are either learned on the job or academically taught when pursuing the major. Being a great teacher is tough, but very few teachers are actually great.

Being a university professor is IMO, among the hardest positions to get. In my experience, the smartest people I know are university professors.

If anything, many university professors are grossly underpaid (for what they offer) in exchange for job security and complete freedom to pursue what they love.

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

#387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High school, college, any STEM fields are all overwhelmingly biased in terms of favoring women. My daughter who is finishing the primary school has recently asked me if it's okay if she doesn't like math, but likes animals and babies. Sounds like some pressure is being applied...

> Sounds like some pressure is being applied... Maybe, rightly so? It doesn't matter if you like reading, you need to learn it. For a toddler in 2019, I think coding and some math is getting close to this level of importance.

She didn't ask if she has to learn math at all, but if she has to like math.

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

#389
post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't seem like a third possibility — it sounds like the same thing as "The groups who haven't traditionally been in power are in that position because they are innately less capable." It's theoretically possible that women just generally suck at computers, but if that's someone's argument, I'd prefer they come out and actually make the argument instead of throwing around smokescreens about "equality of outcom…

Capable isn't the same thing as interested. I know many smart people who have no interest in programming (and wonder why I enjoy it). As The Atlantic said: > Then again, it could just be that, feeling financially secure and on equal footing with men, some women will always choose to follow their passions, rather than whatever labor economists recommend. And those passions don’t always lie within science [or technolog…

It is when we're talking about outcomes within a field. Either you think women deserve to be paid less or not — there isn't really a third possibility there. If they do deserve worse outcomes, then either they suck innately or they suck because they're not interested, but either way you're saying they suck.

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kantian second stage For those who slept through the philosophy class, what these stages are?

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic#Hegelian_dialectic

Kant and Hegel are... different.
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