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

#581

Post by hhjinks » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 12:57 PM UTC

jurassic wrote: post #471

HeroOfAges wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Men, especially clients, often forgot my name. E.g. Janice vs Janet vs Jan (none of these my real name, but you get the idea. The point is that I wasn't important enough to these men to remember.) Are you aware this kind of thing happens to everyone? Do you expect people to remember your name just because you're a woman? Or would you rather they remembered your name because you've accomplished something beyond the…

I’m not talking about one-off meetings where the name doesn’t stick. That happens to everyone, of course. I’m talking about working on projects with the same group of people over a period of months. I have not seen the Matts and Ryans of the world have this problem.

Tough shit. Some people just don't manage to attach names to faces, and it sucks way more for us than for you.

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

#582

Post by jstanley » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 12:59 PM UTC

roguecoder wrote: post #505

wisty wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem like the system dampens. Instead, there seems to be some kind of anger that for 99% of men "privilege" means working hard, making compromises, and other stuff that's roughly as crappy as being a housewife. Men aren't all that happy they've got this "privilege", and when women have the option of being a salaryman they feel like they must have been cheated because it's not a top-floor office where every…

Having to deal with men who "aren't happy" that they exist sure sounds like something that would make the job suck more for women than it does for men.

Why?

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

#583

Post by kbutler » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 1:23 PM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #467

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:…

> Elementary school teaching: a teaching certificate and a Master's degree FTFY

Does any state require a Masters for elementary ed?

Generally only specialized teaching areas require a master's degree.

A Bachelors and a teacher training program w/ possible test is generally sufficient - and you can usually begin teaching with an interim/provisional certificate, and work on the certification as you go.

https://www.teacher.org/how-to-become/ https://www.alleducationschools.com/teacher-certification/

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

#584

Post by naasking » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 2:12 PM UTC

dv_dt wrote: post #456

denzil_correa wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it is difficult to understand why people accept this as fact when the empirical data of systematic isn't all that solid. It would help if you posted the empirical data you refer to.

Here's a study, comparing gender, after adjusting for experience, hours worked, and education. It calculates 0.79:1.00 women to men. https://www.epi.org/publication/womens-work-and-the-gender-p...

No, what it shows is that women choose different careers that overall yield the ratio you cite. Everyone already knew this, the point is that such a statistic is misleading.

The authors also conjecture that this is due to cultural biases, but obviously cannot prove this.

For instance, their overview that women arrive in college less interested in STEM, and they hint suggestively that this is due to discrimination. Except this hypothesis doesn't at all explain the gender equality paradox; in fact, it predicts the exact opposite of what we see.

Normally in science, a falsification this strong would immediately dismiss a hypothesis as a viable candidate theory. It's suggestive that it hasn't.

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

#585

Post by OJFord » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

krn wrote: post #121

As a side note: I have recently come over a university which promised a gender equality in "all our science degrees", which it explained as an "admission of 50% males, 50% females". But how can it be a "gender equality", if 80% of the applicants are males?

Equality vs equity: http://interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/I...

(Equity being what some here are referring to as 'equality in outcome'.)

In this image, it's hard to argue that equity isn't clearly better. In other cases like admissions, it's much more debatable, and personally I think equality ('in opportunity') makes more sense there.

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

#586

Post by rtkwe » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 2:40 PM UTC

sleepysysadmin wrote: post #531

rtkwe wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'people just choosing different careers' throws a lot of inequality under a rug and calls the problem solved. 1) If we tell women their whole childhood that some jobs are for men and some are for women and vice versa for men then ask them when they turn 18 what job they want we'll get horrendously unequal outcomes even though people are completely free to choose. 2) Valuation of jobs is based partially on the vie…

1. Could you provide a source showing this discrimination in school? I went to school, men and women were definitely told they could be anything. Also the schools are extremely left-wing SJW(Canadian schools teach children that the right-wing are all racists) so I find this assertion to be immensely unlikely. 2. Teachers in Ontario receive ~$140,000/year for 8 months of work, 5 hours a day. This is publicly available…

> 2. Teachers in Ontario receive ~$140,000/year for 8 months of work, 5 hours a day. This is publicly available via the sunshine list. If you're using teachers as an example of bias. You're barking up the wrong tree here these inflated teacher wages raise the wages of women on average.

"5 hours a day" because all the material and lesson plans just appears out of nowhere along with all the graded work and administrative work...

Also I'm very happy that Ontario seems to have a good grasp on the value of teaching but that REALLY isn't true in the US where our average salary in 2016-17 was ~$38k [0].

Also my point wasn't that women are being paid less as teacher but the kind of 'social jobs' typically filled by women that the OP was talking about are valued less. Gender equality within that job isn't particularly relevant there I was talking about the profession as a whole vs other professions.

[0] http://www.nea.org/home/2016-2017-average-starting-teacher-s...

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

#587

Post by dgudkov » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 2:50 PM UTC

maxxxxx wrote: post #541

dgudkov wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you understand fairness of pay from that information?

You can’t. It depends on the situation. I am sure the people working there can put it better into context. I still don’t understand the thought experiment. How about: Car A costs $30000, Car B costs $50000. Which is the better value? Makes as little sense.

Exactly. That's the point. Just pricing information (be it salary or car prices) makes little sense.

Market transparency that you mentioned earlier makes sense only for standardized goods/services. Software jobs are not standardized and many people don't want their colleagues to know how much their earn.

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

#588

Post by dahart » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 2:58 PM UTC

pas wrote: post #563

dahart wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What large scale white & Christian discrimination has existed historically, in the US? When were white Christians not allowed to vote or paid less? What's wrong with a conference for women, how exactly is that different than a conference for engineers, or a store for pet owners?

It probably creates an unhelpful artificial environment. (Which is okay for teaching, learning, healing, etc.) But society supposedly tries to integrate women into higher paying fields. Those fields are not going to be all women. Now, of course as we see from the stats, anecdotes and other hints, we're pretty far from a women dominated higj tech sector, but there is already polarization. There are already women run c…

> there is already polarization

Yes there is already polarization, the global polarization that exists already is known and documented to be in favor of men, on average. There is still a pay gap in favor of men. You’re trying to argue there is reverse discrimination, but without any evidence. There are some affirmative actions for women. Do you consider affirmative actions for women to be discrimination?

If a cultural polarization occurred naturally without any intentional effort, meaning people exhibited and acted on biases without knowing it, and it was hurting a class of people, what would you do to fix it?

> There are already women run companies actively trying to hire only women. This is not constructive on the long run. Just as the X-gender-only conferences.

Those seem like two different things to me. Do you see the same difference I do between a job that pays you and a product you have to pay for? While it depends quite a bit on what conference we’re talking about, I don’t see a general problem with conference products made for women. I don’t believe that is automatically discriminatory or polarizing. If you do, I’d like to hear more about what you think is wrong with it. Tampons are made for women, and I don’t know any men that are mad about it or think is polarizing.

There is a reason that there are laws surrounding job discrimination and no laws surrounding conference discrimination. It’s because it is perfectly fine to sell products to a specific audience.

Jobs are required by law to not discriminate, though I’m sure there are some jobs that require a woman and not a man. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was legal and acceptable to hire a woman to teach Women’s Studies.

Personally, I’ll wait to be concerned about jobs reserved for women until women are the majority of the workforce and management structure at all companies on average. Right now, they’re not.

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

#589

Post by ben509 » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 3:10 PM UTC

romwell wrote: post #267

ben509 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the talk of discrimination against women requires that they be helpless damsels in distress in all this, when their dominance of college graduation suggests the opposite. Biology is not "preventing" women, it's directing their inclination. Women have a ton of opportunities, and it's just as likely that as CS blew up they decided they didn't want to and didn't need to take on the long hours and relative social iso…

>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.

When you can make a new person and shape their entire life vs. being largely secondary to that role, that completely alters your horizon of opportunities.

Visualize it like large numbers of people are creating characters for an RPG.

For the female version of the character generator, "mother" is a class with a shitload of XP bonuses and it's the only way to complete the "bear a child" quest. Not all of them are going to do it, many will multi-class, but they have very strong non-economic incentives to do so.

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

#590

Post by belorn » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 3:24 PM UTC

waterhouse wrote: post #579

roguecoder wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which specific biological mechanism are you hypothesizing is responsible? In combination with which specific cultural construction of computer science that is somehow inalterable? Whereas we have pretty good evidence that by improving the signaling of ambient belonging for women we can significantly increase their interest in computer science: http://ilabs.uw.edu/sites/default/files/Cheryan_Meltzoff_Kim... Few things…

> Which specific biological mechanism are you hypothesizing is responsible? Testosterone, causing male-female behavioral divergence in general. Excerpting from an email... "The amount of eye-contact shown by infants at 12 months of age is inversely correlated with prenatal testosterone (Lutchmaya, Baron-Cohen & Raggett, submitted), and prenatal testosterone is higher in males than females." That study seems to be her…

There is general two conflicting answer to that last question. One is that the effect is very minor and testosterone make certain behavior more likely to occur if and only if specific environment is present. It is very possible that testosterone effect on sex-typical play is dependent if it is the father or mother playing with the child. In addition such experiments in recent time has undergone a lot of methodology criticism. In new studies on primates they found that testosterone secretion is increased after physical fights among males which correlate to how much they fight. Behavior in this case causes high testosterone levels, rather than high testosterone level causing behavior.

The other answer is that practically every behavior is influenced by a combination of hormones, genes, and environment. Everything from athletic skills, obesity, teeth health, stress, sleep, diet, honesty, politics, and so on. To quote a profession, free will likely do not exist and is only the result of all the different biological systems interacting with each other, the environment, and random chance.