Some points of discussion are (unrelated to article):
1. If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits?
2. Women are less likely to negotiate salary and assert themselves, as women in general are more agreeable than men. Is this behavior based in biology or is it social construct?
3. Women tend to choose lower paying jobs, such as teacher, caregiver etc. In general women tend to care about people, while men care about things (STEM). Again: biology or social construct?
So perhaps occupation differences are healthy and natural. Of course, in Sweden engineers don't earn 300% more than teachers, so it's not a huge problem like in the USA.
The logical solution would be to increase pay in women dominated professions. But this kind of thing spits in the face of capitalism.
It's a tough problem to solve, and I still have no idea how to go about solving it.
> 3. Women tend to choose lower paying jobs, such as teacher, caregiver etc. In general women tend to care about people while men care about things (STEM). Again: biology or social construct
Social construct. Look at Asian countries that by all accounts have less gender quality than the west but have more women science graduates. India is double the U.K. on that metric.
The fact that Sweden has skewed representation doesn't capture what I call the "princesses and fairies" problem. Just because society doesn't explicitly discriminate against women doesn't mean that it's not telling women that they should be interested in princesses and fairies instead of legos. My daughter, four, is the only one of a few girls in the STEM programs I signed her up for at summer camp. This is entirely parents projecting gender norms onto their kids.
My mom grew up in bangladesh in the 1960s. She majored in chemistry as did several of her sisters. The expectation was that an upper class woman would be educated so she could marry well, not for work. But the western gender norm about women being suited for certain professions doesn't exist.
> graduates. India is double the U.K. on that metric.
How do you conclude "social construct" from that data? When external pressures are greater, gender differences equalize. When external constraints fall away, gender differences are allowed to express themselves. So it is no surprise that self-segregation is pretty much directly and positively correlated to measures of societal progress and gender equality. Just to repeat that: the more egalitarian and progressive the society, the more the genders self-segregate in the workplace.
Here's a quote from a BBC article asking "Why is Russia so good at encouraging women into tech?" The answer is in the article: necessity.
"Most of the girls we talked to from other countries had a slightly playful approach to Stem, whereas in Russia, even the very youngest were extremely focused on the fact that their future employment opportunities were more likely to be rooted in Stem subjects." -- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39579321
"Most importantly and contra predictions, we showed that economically developed and more gender equal countries have a lower overall level of mathematics anxiety, and yet a larger national sex difference in mathematics anxiety relative to less developed countries."
"Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N = 17,637)."
"What might be surprising to most people, as we shall see, is the specific pattern of cross-national variation in the gender gap in authority. To cite just one example, in the United States, the probability of a man in the labor force occupying an "upper" or "top" management position is 1.8 times greater than the probability of a woman occupying such a position, whereas in Sweden, the probability for men is 4.2 times greater than for women."
> Social construct. Look at Asian countries that by all accounts have less gender quality than the west but have more women science graduates. India is double the U.K. on that metric.
India has massive and pervasive poverty and tech especially is seen as a way out of poverty. Many programmers there earn 5x the average wage.
Comparing that to the UK where programmers are not paid particularly well compared to other professions is disingenuous.
I don't know if it makes sense to cite India as an example given a rather large social preference for Tech and Engineering (and Medical Science) to begin with.
>>Just because society doesn't explicitly discriminate against women doesn't mean that it's not telling women that they should be interested in princesses and fairies instead of legos.
In my whole life I haven't faced a single situation where parents literally force a doll on their daughter instead of a Lego Kit. You are over stating the whole problem.
>>This is entirely parents projecting gender norms onto their kids.
Kids are not bots that you train them. Acceptance into peer groups is a major factor, and most kids gravitate to what friends around them are doing, or they go to friends whose area of interest attracts them.
Also I'm not a great fan of forcing things on kids. People should do what they are interested in, else it creates meaningless pressure and kids are generally slotted and forced to make up to unrealistic expectations from parents.
Here in India, this is a huge problem where every single parent wants their kids to get into STEM. Most don't want to and when they do bad at school and exams, they have to face routine humiliation among social circles and peer groups as losers. Many are driven to suicide. These people will do way better in other walks of life and must be allowed to.
>>The expectation was that an upper class woman would be educated so she could marry well, not for work.
As an Indian where social norms are similar to an extent this is not only ok, but rather even preferable.
If you look at how life unfolds here, there is massive pressure on men to be efficient and provide for their families to the best of their abilities. This not easy, forget about all this empowerment new age talk, in reality most men slog away whole life, working insane hours, doing weekends and working very difficult conditions to make it happen.
This is hard for women to do for many reasons beyond the scope of this discussion. Given this, financial security becomes way more important than making up to virtue signaling from other people. Hence marrying a rich spouse that can provide for life is more important than making careers in our culture.
For most men here, things don't feel like freedom and empowerment. Its a swim through an ocean of hellfire to provide for families.
I would be more than happy to sit at home and be oppressed. And let women have all this empowerment. But deep down everybody knows what the real deal is, which is why no one signs up for something like this.
>>In my whole life I haven't faced a single situation where parents literally force a doll on their daughter instead of a Lego Kit.
>>Kids are not bots that you train them. Acceptance into peer groups is a major factor, and most kids gravitate to what friends around them are doing, or they go to friends whose area of interest attracts them.
US female, born in 1977. By the time I reached sentient age, my mother had bought, and encouraged relatives to buy for me, literally dozens of dolls, because she had decided at my birth that I would "collect" dolls. I was never very interested in the dolls and she never "forced" me to play with them, but the expectation was nonetheless clear.
For my slightly younger brother, Transformers and Star Wars figures were bought. I played with his toys and preferred them to my own "girl" toys, but it never occurred to me to ask my parents to buy "boy" toys for me. I think they would have if I had asked, but the environment I (and they) grew up in was such that I (and they) were incapable of conceiving of the possibility.
And of course other girls at my elementary school had grown up in the same environment, so all I learned from my peer group/friends was to be interested in stereotypically girly things.
I agree that "society" is such a vague term as to be almost useless, but it doesn't make sense to assume all this behavior is based on conscious decisions by people truly aware of their own preferences (and the alternatives among which they can select a preference).
> I thought that Swedish kindergartens and schools make sure not to force gender roles on children
The problem is, even if they didn't do that what about parents who grew up thinking that and then project it on their kids? What about TV and other media consumption that shows stereotypical roles?
It's hard to account for and eliminate all types of gender roles because many are more subtle and / or "normal" to most people who grew up with it.
A quick anecdote: my daughter, who loves science and computers, was playing 'house' with her classmates in preschool when several children told her she had to play the role of mommy while they go out and work in this pretend scenario they created. This made my daughter think "I want to be a boy because girls can't have cool jobs". Those kids she was playing with weren't ever told this is how things had to be but they all had stay-at-home moms so they just assumed it was normal and how things are supposed to be. My wife is also a stay-at-home mom which likely helped reinforce it regardless of how much encouragement we both give our daughter.
So everything influences kids. It's hard to control for all of these variables.
Watching their moms also has a major influence. My wife works long hours as a lawyer. Our daughter role played the other day having a baby, handing it over to me (the au pair) and going to work.
"Delusions of Gender" has a cool anecdote along these lines.
Parents claim they've learned nature trumps nurture. They gave girl firetrucks, found her tucking the firetruck to bed. Parents conclude it's the nurturing feminity.
Psych asks "who tucks her to bed every night?". Oops.
This sounds more like a fault of the parents than of the society. "The Constructs of Society" seems like too vague a notion to be able to measure or determine its impact. A person may be dissuaded from pursuing something because "society" really is doing so, or because they perceive society is doing so. In some instances it's easy to determine which is the reason, in others I think it's more difficult.
At the end of the day, part of being a good adult and parent in 2017 is not just accepting whatever constructs * you feel "society" is shoving down your throat. Think critically to form your own principles and beliefs, and act on them (so long as they are within the bounds law). Obviously this is easier said than done, and also there are probably places on earth where this isn't feasible. But I feel that in most of the developed world it is.
* not you rayiner, I mean you third person (I'm not accusing you of being a bad adult/parent!)
HIRED has a report out which reveals demographics on what the employees themselves ask for, and what employers offered them.
It reveals, as in a piece of data that wasn't typically part of the conversation, that some groups ask for less to begin with while the employer offers them more. But this 'more' amount is still less than employees that asked for more than that to begin with.
The average of black candidates, and women candidates, simply asked for less than the average of white male candidates. Got offered more, took the 'generous' offer and retroactively find out they are on the lower side of the pay gap, again on average.
Much of the discussion seems to place a blame squarely on employers, describing a cabal of shadowy prejudiced men in the board room ensuring someone gets 30% less or 30% more just because. And I think that is not an entirely productive discussion, if all the reactionary HR training fails to find this while other aspects aren't even discussed at all.
> Much of the discussion seems to place a blame squarely on employers, describing a cabal of shadowy prejudiced men in the board room ensuring someone gets 30% less or 30% more just because
Nobody says that. It's the larger society, which also teaches black people and women to ask for less
it seems to me that if you spend all your time telling people they are oppressed, they'll believe you. There are certainly aspects of society that are unfair on women and racial minorities but hammering the idea of privilege and that as a person of group X you'll never be as successful as a white male you're just teaching people to accept and expect less.
I hear what you are saying. There have been tests on groups of student test takers:
group 1 is told they are talented and that the test is hard
group 2 is told if they work hard they wil prevail
that was the gist, but I could be getting the wording wrong. The work-hard group did much better at the test than the talented group. I'm going from memory here and will try to find the test to post here. But don't you think it is valuable to prepare those who might have a tougher time with knowledge about how discrimination operates within our institutions that confer power for situations they may face and that certain strategies are better (based upon data from history) than others in understanding the basis of these? When one understands how the opposing army operates, one can create a more effective and hopefully victorious strategy. Especially if one is told that winning battle strategies productively use insider knowlege of one's opponents strengths and weknesses in an innovative and sustained counter-measure.
I think we agree that we should address it, but I have heard .... things. The understanding of this topic is a wide gradient, with lots of incomplete and incorrect information repeated by authoritative political figures including Presidents.
> The average of black candidates, and women candidates, simply asked for less than the average of white male candidates
I agree that the phenomenon is much more complex than conspiratorial movie villains, and it's unproductive to simplify things that way (often out of anger). But I'll add some complexity to what you said: They would be wise to ask for less because that is what the market will bear, due to widespread discrimination.
It seems beyond debate that discrimination is widespread, though again I agree we need to understand that simple statement in detail. The black, female, Latino, etc. candidates would have to be deaf and blind not to be aware of it, and would need unusual courage to try to ignore it.
Anecdotally, I was at dinner with a retired female biologist. She was discussing the challenges of being a female scientist in her generation, and how today's women in science take their opportunities for granted. Later in the meal, she told me that women are naturally worse at math and computer science, and that males of northern European ancestry are naturally superior (which flies in the face of even current discriminatory hiring in IT). It wasn't anything I haven't heard before, unfortunately; even in my personal experience, explicit discrimination is not so rare as to be shocking.
Good point. And those who have been discriminated against internalize it. It is the water they have been swimming in their whole lives, so it takes a concerted effort from everyone to become more aware of how these biases operate if we wish to turn things in a more egalitarian direction.
>1. If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits?
I believe this is a very weird ponderation. The whole point is that capitalists don't do that because there is sexism among them. They are ignoring rational evidence because they have a preconceived idea that women are worse employees. If capitalists were actually these rational straw man devoided of human flaws, we wouldn't have sexism at all.
So this line of thinking is basically saying: if there wasnt sexism we wouldn't have sexism.
A more practical way of making my point. In past decades black athletes werent admitted in competitive sports teams. Would you say that you believe that wasnt racism because if it was, team owners would be tripping themselves to hire talented black athletes that were being ignored by most teams?
No, they werent because they were racists. It took a lot of civil right activism to give black athletes the same access to sports jobs as white athletes. And today we know for a fact that black athletes werent worse athletes back then.
Why are today employers more enlightened that past team owners?
And your model only requires that all men are equally sexist.
There are, believe it or not, women entrepreneurs (and btw the very conservative Poland is leading the rankings[1]), so even if all male employers were in fact equally sexist, that would just mean female-led companies would out-compete them.
As long as we're playing with thought-experiments, soneca could just say: "oh no, women have internalize misogyny too". Which is kind of backed up by research? (I remember reading an article about how female Principal Investigators tended to be biased against female grad student applicants? Couldn't find it in a few minutes of googling.)
But you're right, there should be _some_ data-driven company with an analyst that would say something like: "Oh hey. We're getting as much productivity out of men and women, but the women are cheaper. Let's keep one guy on to manage and interrupt them and fire the rest."
civilian has a point, but what would fix my model, I believe, is that good hiring practices is one among a myriad of variables that affect the bottomline.
Business books for ages are trying to give the "formula" to make a business success (and no one succeeded). It is irrealistic to assume that a company with undoubtably better hiring practices would necessarily and immediatelly (or in a short term) beat the competitors with worse hiring practices.
This even assuming the company would be hiring more productive employees. If the assumption is that it is the same productivity but less cost (as it is in the case we are discussing), the impact at the bottomline is even more diluted.
EDIT: I would add that if the impact was such straightforward and objectively measured it would be much easier to fight it as a society. This (how subjective is to measure productivity and business impact of knowledge workers) is the may reason why we are discussing pay gap as a gender issue and not still voting rights)
There must be at least one example of an all female company you can point to with clear advantage over mixed-gender competition if the pay gap is at all real, and certainly if it’s over 30% as claimed by, among others, president Obama.
Either the pay gap is too small to matter, or it simply does not exist. So far all evidence favors the latter.
This shouldn’t be surprising—after all wage discrimination has been illegal in United States for over 40 years.
The claim that there’s some widespread corruption, perhaps even a conspiracy, should be treated as any other extraordinary claim. With extraordinary skepticism.
It might be a pay gap too small to matter to the bottomline, but large enough to matter to women earning less.
I do not have an opinion If there is or there is not a pay gap (I do have the opinion that sexism is a real problem at workplaces regardless of the pay gap). But I dont think the argument "if there was, someone would benefit from it" is reasonable.
> And your model only requires that all men are equally sexist.
Hardly. It just requires that enough men are sexist to discourage women from entering a field in large numbers. One abusive person in a position of power can have a hugely disproportionate impact.
> They are ignoring rational evidence because they have a preconceived idea that women are worse employees.
wouldn't this imply they would avoid hiring much, if any? why bother hiring people you don't feel are worth hiring?
> No, they werent because they were racists.
racists hire people they're biased against all the time if there is some advantage in doing so.
i'm more inclined to believe the circumstance you speak of was avoidance of socioeconomic consequences. there was a time when having a team with too many black athletes (heaven forbid mostly, or even all black) would tank your ticket sales.
> Why are today employers more enlightened that past team owners?
It's more complex than that, and it's important to understand the mechanisms: My poor understanding is that racism was (and is to a great degree) a social norm, and as social science and life experience will tell you, humans are hardwired to follow social norms. Think of the common phenomenon of large numbers believing the same erroneous fact (as an easy example, in matters of science) - did they all coincidentally reach the same conclusion, or just follow the norm of their social networks. We unconsciously accept and assume norms, we hardly notice them (they are the everyday 'normal', after all), and to challenge them is to make yourself an outcast, which is dangerous and against human nature. Who even wants to be the only one going against the group in a meeting, much less challenging centuries of culture and your entire community?
I'm not excusing the actions of those team owners at all. But I would guess that there were a few advocates of racial discrimination and many who went along with the established norm. To veer OT: IMHO, standing up to those norms is a responsibility of all of us - if you silently acquiesce, you support them as norms in everyone else's eyes. By speaking you may not change the world by yourself, but consider how it looks from someone else who is questioning the 'norm' in their mind but afraid to speak up, just like you: Seeing one other person speaking out may look insufficient, but it's leaves a far stronger impression than if nobody says a thing, and that one person is more likely to yield two or three speaking out next time.
I don't think that this line of reasoning is very solid, because (a) men running companies definitely have some variation among them and (b) sports teams are small groups and not really representative of the problems facing larger organizations. One difference is that lots of people really want to play sports -- there will always be a huge surplus of eager applicants. In a situation like that, you can be discriminatory and still manage to get together a team, and even a moderately good one (but not the best).
Large companies, on the other hand, have to hire thousands of people a year; and for jobs that are not much fun and which often require considerable training. The effect often has been to reduce discrimination. To take examples from an earlier era -- many immigrant populations in the US found their way into one or another industry this way.
Notably they did not find their way into every industry equally; and some minorities have benefitted less from this effect; but it did happen. The comparable effect would be that we should see some industries adapting to the lower cost of women's labor in something -- though probably not the most elite (posh and desirable) industries.
You didn't consider that men who are less sexist, or not sexist, would have an advantage in the market. Your mental model requires you to generalize all men as equally and utterly sexist in order to work. Does that seem realistic?
I currently find an explanation based on incentives to be best in resolving why there is gender segregation in the work place and a strong correlation to pay grades.
The way women selects men is heavily weighted towards how much the man earns. According to dating statistics from dating sites, its the biggest single strongest attribute to predict if a message sent from a man will give positive response. This can also be seen in surveys around the globe, like one which said that 90% of women in china would not consider dating a man who earn less than the median income.
So if this incentive based explanation is true, lets make some test by making some predictions. If its true then we should see that boys during adolescence think in a higher rate than girls about selecting a profession based on earning potential. We should also see a higher number of young non-married men around the age of 20 trying to enter the work force as early as possible in order to improve their own status and impress the opposite sex. Those men should be more eager to get higher wages and attempt more risky ventures in order to compete with other men. The need and risk taking for higher wages would be correlated to how much other peers of the same sex earn in their perceived environment.
Increase pay in women dominated professions would lower the earning difference, but it would not change the incentives. In order to get that we would need to change our culture so that either women stopped prioritizing earning when selecting a mate, in which men would loose that incentive, or men need to prioritizing earning when selecting a mate, in which women would get that incentive applied on them.
It doesn't take much to see adverse selection at work, here. Men who accept lower salaries -- as salary equality more or less requires, during a certain interim period -- will disproportionately find themselves without mates, esteem, &c. Their influence will be correspondingly less. The men who figure out how to maintain higher salaries -- relative to other men, and to women -- will be the ones who most shape the communities they are a part of.
As mentioned elsewhere, doesn't this article sort of refute the idea that women don't negotiate salary well if their pay for the same rank/role is just 1% different than that of their male counterparts?
Negotiation doesn't just happen in the room. Negotiation is heavily affected by what you do before you enter the room. Someone who is, for example, looking at multiple offers and who wants a high salary is going to "negotiate" a better salary than someone who has only one offer -- not because of some magical skills of course.
Negotiation starts from a base point though. It is exceptionally difficult to right a lifetime of wrong. By that I mean, women with work experience have lower salaries from the get go and when negotiating for pay at a new employer she starts with a lower pay history than males. Most employers will not jump a salary from say $78,000 to $100,000 AND most women are fearful of pricing themselves out by asking for such a jump. For those who will ask will rarely get the salary they deserve but may make up a little ground is they have been underpaid for an extended period of time.
True, but it could support the idea that women don't negotiate for promotions as well or as often. Or that they are less likely to be promoted in general, for whatever reason. Whether the underlying reason is innate personality, socially-conditioned personality, or sexism, this seems like the simplest explanation for why the pay gap looks the way it does.
That definitely seems possible. I have also read some interesting stuff around how women tend to end up a few years behind their male counterparts due to child care, maternity leave, and them choosing not to take less demanding positions to spend more time with kids. There is a lot in there to unpack and you could still argue it is a societal discrimination thing (women are expected to do more child care duties), but that is not an argument supporting pay discrimination at a corporate level, but more of a societal shift that has to happen between child rearing partners. I don't know if this matches up with data and studies, but just logically, it is inevitable for a woman to have to take at least a little more time out than a man due to the biology of child birth and child rearing.
I think all of this points to women not attaining the same rank/position as the key factor in gender differences, not a discriminatory pay gap.
my wife does not know how to negotiate, multiple times have i said to her that she should fight for more, but she will not or does not know how to do it.
but there is also another side. women that i have worked with have used social norms to ask for more.
like in some conversation make a joke about how they deserve promotion and pay incrase, like hehe im such a great team member/worker i deserve a pay incrase, wink wink, and such comments multiple times. I never heard a man use this method. If its from a man then he asks to speak to you and directly says what he wants.
> 1. If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits?
Here's another claim I've heard many times and never seen refuted (or even challenged): Tall men are paid more than short men (extending into non-physical work such as programming.)
A company that recognizes this should hire a bunch of short programmers at a discount and trounce their competition...but they don't.
I'd suggest these factors:
1. Despite the fact that short men get paid less, you can't just take a tall candidate, find a shorter one with equivalent skills, and hire him at a discount. Finding and identifying the optimal fit for a job is already beyond our abilities--adding in this extra restriction just isn't feasible.
2. This bias isn't an explicit bias like "I hate short people". It's a subconscious "I feel better about this candidate". Our decisions are based on black box gut feelings, so offsetting our subconscious bias is extremely difficult.
3. Tall men might actually be more effective in programming jobs, simply because we afford them higher status as a society--that adds value in a job that involves working with other people...such as programming.
Suppose 3 is true--I suspect it is. Even if I overcome my bias and hiring challenges to get past 1 and 2, 3 means the rational thing for me to do when hiring is to pay the extra for tall programmers, because in our society, they'll perform better.
But an alternative universe where no one has this bias in the first place will result result in a more optimal allocation of resources.
There are times where you can get an advantage by overcoming a bias others experience, but there are times where you can't and the only fix is to fix society at large. (Maybe I can just fix that bias in every one of my employees, but limiting myself to the small set of people who lack a pervasive bias means reducing my talent pool--probably so much that it offsets the competitive gain I get.)
The advantages of tall people (not just men) has been researched. The research doesn't confirm your assumptions very well.
Part of the reason they get paid more is that they actually are smarter and healthier. Height correlates with good health and a well nutritioned childhood.
You don't see how all these surprising facts where people are doing things that go against their best interest, can be explained by irrational but strong forces such as sexism?
It's more actionable than you might think. Attitudes can be changed - by social pressure, through the media, and through education. And while legislation may not directly change attitudes, it can also help create pressures that reshape them indirectly.
I think the parent's point is "sexism" (and most "isms") themselves aren't specific enough to be actionable. There are many beliefs and actions that can be classified as "sexist". These specific ideas may be corrected. But "sexism" is too vague to be addressed itself.
The first step is to understand that the problem does exist, even if it may not be apparent, or even if we can find other, simpler or more comfortable explanations. That's all my reply could hope for at best. There are many smarter and better people than me offering plenty of detailed analysis and paths to action.
Do women choose jobs that are lower paying? Or do we pay less for careers that are female-dominated?
There are some observations (sorry, don't have the links right now) that typical salaries for careers such as teaching and primary care medicine have decreased as they've transitioned from being male-dominated to female-dominated.
> There are some observations (sorry, don't have the links right now) that typical salaries for careers such as teaching and primary care medicine have decreased as they've transitioned from being male-dominated to female-dominated.
Of course. What did you think would happen when a field gets an oversupply of new employees who aren't pay-sensitive?
As an aside why do you think big tech companies are pushing for more women in tech? Because nerds and women don't focus on pay as much as men in general do.
No they will not trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits. Remember, women take maternity leave; they must stay home when the kids are sick; etc. If they had a workforce of women then men I have worked with in the past would talk about the lack of stability in that workforce because of the extended leave time that women take that men do not typically require and or utilize.
Further women choose teachers, based on a number of studies, because they want to be home in the summer with their children and because they want to nurture. The one thing that most school systems do that is go is they have a pay matrix that determines pay on a step system where education and years of experience determine your pay scale and gender is not a factor. The downside to this pay system is that high performers make the same as sub par performers.
"The logical solution would be to increase pay in women dominated professions. But this kind of thing spits in the face of capitalism."
The problem is that "thing" work often scales better than linearly while "people" work does not. You can't really socially engineer yourself out of that reality.
Point (1) makes perfect sense, except that historically the answer has very clearly been "no", as it has applied to capable women, people of color, LGBTQ, etc. etc.
the answer is yes if you simply look at how many Chinese and Indians there are for entry-level software engineering jobs.
if the answer is "no" for women or any other particular group then it just proves the point of the article, i.e. there's barely a pay gap when factoring in exact job responsibilities.
It's interesting to consider that many of these lower paying jobs - such as teachers/caregivers are very hard to tie performance to profits.
Therefore the market forces are different or nonexistent, who hires a $500,000/year rock star grade school teacher? Even if such a thing exists and has real impact.
Not at all. As a parent I have limited choice in who my kids teachers are. Where I lived I didn't even get a choice of schools.
But the market is clearly there - plenty of people here pay $25-$30k/year for private school. With a small class size of 10-15 students that's $250k-$450k/year.
On top of that most people here pay maybe $10-$15k to schools via property tax. So that's another $100k-$150k.
But that's a different issue, I replied to a comment about compensating performance.
There are already metrics for teacher performance (at its crudest: What's the average grade going in and out of the teacher's class?) which could be used to determine salary. (And maybe it is in some places.)
When you say that women are "more agreeable" than men and "tend to care about people" more than men, you should consider that there is a social expectation that women have these qualities. You should also consider why the link between "lower paying jobs" and "jobs that women tend to choose" exists in the first place, and that "jobs that people of a certain gender tend to choose" is a self-reinforcing notion that limits your options no matter what your gender is.
As for why capitalists don't trip over themselves to hire only women to increase their profits, well, what makes you think they don't, at least in industries where margins are low and there isn't a strong counteracting social force? Take a look at the gender ratio in the notoriously low-margin garment industry, for example.
There has been a lot written on these topics, if you look around. You can learn a lot very quickly if you move beyond the realm of HN comments. =) That might make it easier to decide what to believe.
> Women are less likely to negotiate salary and assert themselves, as women in general are more agreeable than men. Is this behavior based in biology or is it social construct?
Something to consider, though I can't back it up: Perhaps the whole method of determining salary, the negotiation process, is a social construct. I mean, it is a social construct almost by definition, but maybe that process, and many other constructs of the business world, are creations of an era when business was populated by men and when therefore the processes and customs naturally were based on the way men interact.
Sometimes I try to think of it this way: If the business world had been populated only by women for generations, and if men were now trying to break in, how would things be different? Perhaps an aggressive negotiating style would be unprofessional, and people would say that men don't get equal salaries not because of discrimination, but because they don't represent themselves well.
If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits?
Invert this: what explains capitalists paying women 25% less for the same skills? Why aren't the salaries of men decreased in light of actual proof that the work can be done for less?
Their point is that women wouldn't be getting paid 25% less if they actually were as good as the men, that they aren't doing "the same job?" That's the only interpretation I can think of that supports the explanation.
> 1. If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits?
Spot on. Decades of outsourcing should have convinced everyone that businesses are not out to help the working class white man.
"For example, women are often found to be more agreeable than men (Feingold, 1994; Costa et al., 2001). This means that women, on average, are more nurturing, tender-minded, and altruistic more often and to a greater extent than men."
I won't speak to the veracity of that...I have no scientific knowledge on that. I wonder if part of the solution involves women understanding that if you want to look out for your self interest, then you don't need to be agreeable all the time.
For #3 see 'Gender Differences in Personality and Interests: When, Where, and Why?'[1] The difference between being thing-oriented and people-oriented is larger than the things we think of as obvious gender differences like physical aggressiveness or attitudes toward casual sex.
"For the people–things dimension of interests, the results in Table 1 are clear, strong, and unambiguous. Men tend to be much more thing-oriented and much less people-oriented than women (mean d = 1.18, a ‘very large’ difference, according to Hyde (2005) verbal designations"
> If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits?
THis is not how it works. at all. There's not some cabal taht decided they should pay women less. Instead, the larger culture prootes behaviors and attitudes and devalues others that, as a consequence, lead to women getting paid less. Those are unconscious biases that influence hiring or promoting decisions. One example: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09585192.2015.107...
> I find it useful to adapt to other people, and I believe my cultural background is not as important in my work
> I find it useful to be different than other people, I believe I can make use of my unique cultural background in my work
So the recruiters in that study decided candidates that make an explicit issue of their ethnicity in their CL would not be the perfect fit for a team (they were asked to select for coherence). What a bunch of racists!
I hate these kinds of statistics because all they say is "If we discount all the things creating the pay gap, basically no pay gap exists". Industries typically inhabited by women getting paid less? Predominantly male/female industries suddnely decreasing/increasing in average pay when women/men enter it? Women having a lesser likelihood of getting promoted? Women having a lower likelihood of getting hired for higher-paying positions (recruiter biases)? Those are some of the reasons
The purpose of the article is to refute the claim that "women get paid significantly less for the same work as men". It does not try to prove that there is no discrimination in hiring or promoting. Most people think that the pay gap is as simple as managers deciding to pay women less, which is wildly inaccurate and nearly never happens, as the article shows. It is up for debate what has the larger impact on what jobs women take and how far they advance: their personal preferences or discrimination.
But the article didn't say you have to discount "all the things." The title did, but it was a poor title. The article notes many of the same reasons as you as contributing to the overall pay gap.
The point is to focus on the right thing: if pay within roles is more or less equal, then focusing on negotiation tactics, salary disparity and so forth is not going to accomplish much.
The term 'meritocracy' entered the popular lexicon with the publishing of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy, a satirical work that lampooned the idea. But the term was adopted seriously and has persisted.
I think it's self-evident that the notion accomplishes nothing, rather just kicks the can to a debate over what you consider meritorious.
That's still a much simpler debate, at least morally. As far as pay is concerned merit is how much money you are paid in a competitive, free market.
I think it's best to focus on two types of merit. There is potential merit ( how much you could be making ) and capturing merit ( how good you are at capturing your potential merit ).
let's take an example. If there are two hotdogs sellers on the street and they sell the exact same hot dogs at the exact same location but one charges two dollars and the other charges four dollars - and the guy who charges more ends up making more money. does the guy who gets paid more have more merit ? yes. they have the same amount of potential merit but the guy who knows the correct price to charge has more capturing merit.
Then why don't you go start a company and employ minority women for half the price of the competition and leave them in the dust?
In a competitive free market, people are paid according to their worth. And their worth is what they are paid. Arbitrages are naturally found and eliminated.
Except that's not true in the least. They're not paid according to their worth; they're paid according to what they can negotiate. These are two entirely separate things. I guarantee you that at least half the people on this board have a story of someone at one of their jobs who was paid quite handsomely, but was extremely incompetent. TheDailyWTF is filled of stories of "Highly Paid Consultants" who write some of the most WTF-worthy code ever seen.
This blind, religious-like faith in the "free market" you exhibit doesn't serve to help anyone.
"More people sharing a larger total benefit doesn't imply that the average individual receives a larger benefit."
I may have taken one more probability class than you, but the expected value for a woman's taxes over her life is 0. There is no such thing as "the average woman", so whatever point you are trying to make is entirely lost.
Holy shit is that reblog of a blog post facetious. Have you looked at the original research cited?
Curiously enough, that blog post doesn't bother to post the charts of the immensely high market income gap and consumption gap between men and women in New Zealand. Those wholely explain the tax gap, because well, men are earning and spending much more, 50%-75% more for most cohorts.
As for the income support gap, the authors themselves explain that the gov income support is for poorer women who need the money to supplement their own or their spouses' incomes, especially during child-rearing years.
You seem to be correctly noticing some symptoms, but you're misdiagnosing all the problems at hand.
There's actually a complete set of research showing that men as a group pay all taxes in the US and women as a group pay no taxes and receive all benefits. I've read it all before, I just couldn't find it.
Women don't advance in rank as fast as men, and so end up being paid less. Thus article doesn't refute that because it admits that level is factor in the pay gap.
As to why women don't advance as fast ... my opinion is that it's primarily motherhood that does it. It puts a career on hold for 6 months times the number of children, and women are socially expected to be primary caregivers so they feel pressured not to work long hours (and so advance less). Before they get pregnant employers will suspect impending motherhood and offer fewer opportunities so as to rely less. It's not fair, but it is how it is.
The "for the same work" piece of it rings hollow and is fighting a battle that didn't need to be won. It's enough to get across the point that women are socialized into lower paying roles and held back professionally because of child care obligations.
My daughter is four. Her summer camp has all sorts of course choices every week. So I signed her up for "little engineers," "little scientists," etc. (There was also princess and fairy-related options.) Fast forward a couple of weeks and she's the only girl in "tech machines." I had to flip out at my wife, au pair, mother in law, etc. not to let anyone hint to her that there might be anything unusual or undesirable about this.
These are four year olds, they have no preferences. It's purely parents projecting gender roles onto their kids. My kid is super into princesses and fairies, but also comes home every day with a new project and says it was "the best day ever" because she learned about buoyancy or whatever.
> It's purely parents projecting gender roles onto their kids.
I don't think this statement can be made so strongly. There is certainly debate within the academic community on this topic. For instance this meta analysis[0] found an extremely large gender difference along the "people/thing" dimension, which could easily explain why more men are in STEM.
Of course, the person is not the population, so it's obviously very possible that while on average women tend to be more people-oriented that your daughter is more thing-oriented and drawn to STEM.
But I don't think it's reasonable to generalize from your one experience that gender roles come entirely from parents. It could just be that 1) your daughter would be interested in STEM regardless of how she were raised and 2) at a population level that's less common (which is not to say rare) in daughters than in sons.
"These are four year olds, they have no preferences. It's purely parents projecting gender roles onto their kids."
Without litigating this specific case in any detail, I just want to argue more generally that of course 4-year-olds (and much younger) have gender-based preferences and that there is loads of research confirming this. It's remarkable that this is considered even remotely controversial.
I'm talking about preferences regarding science camp versus princess camp (or a chemistry degree versus an English degree). My daughter is incredibly gender normative. Everything is pink and frilly and she refuses to wear pants. But she has no idea that science is for boys.
It's not that testosterone and estrogen don't exist. It's the conceptual leap that testosterone and estrogen explain why women go into one work field versus another. Especially when those proportions vary dramatically across countries. (Do Iranian women, where the majority of STEM majors are women, have different estrogen than American women?).
"Third world" enrollments might not be a valid comparison as STEM is seen as a road to riches. A valid comparison would be a country where women have the privilege of choosing to not seek money.
Personally I think the biggest caveat avoided "when job differences are accounted for" is the care of children. Women, by-and-large, really get hosed with the negative externalities of having children (time off, career halting, etc). Most Western countries are not generous or equitable by half, and the USA is downright savage.
Sure, women who take time off to raise kids will take a hit to income. In a married family, the husband compensates. If the woman is unmarried, she gets child support/alimony to make up the difference. So, either you're arguing that child support/alimony is too low, or that married couples get hosed with the externality of having children. This is recognized in law, and people with children get tax deductions, and if they don't earn enough, they get government provided healthcare, food stamps, WIC, housing assistance, etc. On the other hand, the married couple gets the joy of raising children, the satisfaction of contributing to the next generation, and hopefully someone to look after them when they're old. You can argue that this isn't an equal trade between society and parents, but it's not an issue of male/female discrimination.
The giant issue with this argument is that the state of being married/single/having children/etc. is not a fixed state. If a woman who is married takes a hit to her income (and thus all future income) when she has children and is later divorced, has her spouse pass away, or other life event that changes her status, the burden of that inequality is again placed on her. Child support is difficult to collect, social safety nets are not an answer to the quality of life gained by earning a certain amount.
I don't have answers to these questions, but the long term economic burden of children will more often than not fall to a greater degree on the woman should there be any deviation from the social norm of a nuclear family.
> Sure, women who take time off to raise kids will take a hit to income.
There's a lot more to it than just that. If there was only a one-time hit to income, everything you said afterwards would hold true, but that's not the only issue, and you're quite naive for thinking so.
Also it shows poor faith in the community to hide behind a throwaway. I wouldn't down vote you for stating the opinion you just stated, but I will take the argument you just made less seriously because your making it in a cowardly fashion.
I take downvoting someone very seriously and will only do so if I think they are harming the community with their speech.
That's a fair point. However, alimony can most certainly extend beyond the age of majority for the kids, and marital property is usually divided in such a way as to compensate a woman for taking time off to raise kids. Social Security also allows divorced women to partially receive benefits based on their ex-husband's income, even income earned after the end of the marriage.
Regarding my lack of faith in the HN community, I like your attitude, and I also take downvoting seriously. Unfortunately empirically the comment was downvoted, so obviously not everyone agrees with us. It's become politically (both here and elsewhere) unacceptable to have a belief that perhaps being a woman in America isn't so bad. I think it's worthwhile to have this discussion, but I'm not interested in having my head put on a pike for it.
I think it's true that being a woman in America isn't all that bad if you're in a privileged group, but under-served populations tend to get the shaft (in more ways then one), and especially women.
While the wage gap between men and women is close when you adjust for "job differences", I think the strong reaction against that caveat is "adjusting for job differences" equates strongly with "behaving like a man".
Fair point on the community our regard for being politically correct is obnoxious, and I definitely don't think you should have been down voted for expressing an intellectually earnest opinion, c'est la vie.
Hacker news is an absolute shithole full of liberal pinheads, with a few libertarians thrown in. It's amazing that you can be capable of programming and not be able to see the forest for the trees.
I always wonder when they say 'Same work' do they mean same output, or same job title? I've seen this argued both ways in the US and have no idea what to believe anymore.
The article uses the definition that "same rank" == "same work", which is ridiculous for many reasons, one in particular being that title often corresponds to a pay level for an area of work covered by a ladder of such titles so by definition it will be true that such a gap is insignificant.
> According to data for 8.7m employees worldwide gathered by Korn Ferry, a consultancy, women in Britain make just 1% less than men who have the same function and level at the same employer.
There's another way to frame that... too few men put their career advancement on hold when they choose to have children. Instead of sharing the burden, society expects a disproportionate sacrifice from women.
Typical example: Nobody asks a male CEO or politician who is staying home to take care of the kids.
Let ask our self why anyones career advancement should be held on hold because they got children.
8 hours work day for 5 days a week was fought for and became standard by the work force during a time where men worked and women stayed at home. The balance became that the home got half the work force and the work got the other half.
Today when both adults are expected to work and people decide to have children, that change in society comes to a breaking point. It is problem that a disproportionate amount of women need to sacrifice their career to restore some part of the hours needed to raise children, but is the solution really that men too should sacrifice their career in equal amount, or is the problem on the 8hrs work day that was based on a society that no longer exist?
Of course, missing out on your kids growing up is also a sacrifice itself, even if it's something that maybe we as a society value less than a big salary - and it's certainly something men are expected to value less.
Absolutely. I have two children and I got to be much more involved in the early childhood of one than the other. It's a sacrifice that I've felt personally. It's just not anywhere close to a level playing field.
This rigged need to prove the same work is being paid the same always rings pretty hollow for me.
In my first corporate job I was the most technical employee by far, I did the work of far senior roles because my managers were wise to use a lot of my technical skill to get complex work done all the while having HR tell me I didn't have enough years and experience to have the higher paying job title.
Just because someone has the job title they have and the pay to go with it often has nothing to do with the work they do.
>This rigged need to prove the same work is being paid the same always rings pretty hollow for me.
That's not about "the same work being paid the same" in general. Individual businesses can pay more or less for the same tasks, even the same business can pay people differently for the same task. Senior employees might be paid more while junior employees do all the real work, etc. Those things are true.
But this article is not about that, it is about whether on average women and men are paid the same for the same jobs.
Spitballing, but I have read that when an industry begins to be dominated by women the average wages decrease and when they are dominated by men the average wages increase. This could be due to women being less likely to negotiate salary which has an effect not only on themselves but on every other worker in the industry.
So a woman in a female-dominated industry may suffer not only from their own negotiation tactics but also the negotiation tactics of most of the workers in the industry
As someone that works in the biotechnology industry, I can see a lot of corollaries. Scientists love being martyrs and there is a strong culture of "don't care about your pay - only care about the work." I could see how women could be more susceptible to this line of reasoning and/or taught to care more about "passion" than their bottom line (compared to men).
>This could be due to women being less likely to negotiate salary which has an effect not only on themselves but on every other worker in the industry.
It could also be due to men leaving industries that have ongoing lowering of wages.
How unsurprising. Firstly, for most professions there are plenty of resources documenting what typical salaries are for degree/experience, so if you end up making less than that, well that seems like that is on you.
It flies in the face of economic common sense that if you could hire an equally skilled women and they would consistently accept 75% the pay as a man, then companies would have taken advantage of that fact. Just like they do with lower paid immigrant workers.
Generally speaking the problem isn't that individuals get paid less.
It's systemic issues - which are harder to fix.
For example: women as a whole are less likely to be in higher paying jobs in STEM roles. Or CEOs. Or high level Politicians. Why? Multiple reasons but the overall point is there is institutional and social pressure (mostly unconscious or learned) for women to avoid those fields.
So the average gets lowered.
This is also true of socially acceptable behaviors causing issues: women are usually less comfortable pushing for raises for example. Or negotiating for a higher initial salary after an interview.
So the average gets lower.
Then we get to what is the more contentious issue (at least… in places like HN) - community behavior. It's inarguable that many STEM fields have a very hostile default behavior that women (even if it's not directed at them) find unpleasant enough to avoid. The level of drop outs of women in tech due to this is very high.
This is the point that usually is the "sexism in tech" conversation.
But arguably that's just a symptom of the previous problems.
Less than 20% of students who take the AP Computer Science test are female. [1]
So whatever makes women uninterested in programming happens before college.
Men are much more thing-oriented than women, who are more people-oriented. The size of the effect is "very large", larger than any other difference in personality [2]. Programming is obviously a thing-oriented activity.
Anecdotally, this split seems to happen at a young age - little boys play with cars, little girls play house, etc.
Anecdotally, kids are far more sexist than any adult I know. Try being a 5 year old boy who likes to play with dolls.
(EDIT: maybe not 5 year old. I don't have kids of my own, I forget exactly when kids start thinking the other sex is gross, maybe a bit older)
I don't know how to even begin to fix this, as far as I know children learn most of their culture from each other and older peers, not from their parents or teachers [3].
I'm willing to bet that most of the problem comes way upstream of the workplace. The tech industry can do as much hand-wringing as they want over sexism in the workplace, it's not gonna fix the fact that adolescent girls are choosing to not take the AP Comp Sci test.
My kids will be taking every AP test they can reasonably handle, including the Comp Sci AP, regardless of whether they are male or female, simply because tuition is crazy now, and only getting crazier.
I want to retire someday, and I also want my kids to be free of student loan debt. So I guess all it takes to defeat sexism once and for all is massive financial stress upon the middle class. Way to go, everybody!
> The level of drop outs of women in tech due to this is very high.
But if that were true I'd expect women would be underrepresented in tech compared to AP Comp Sci. As it is they are slightly over-represented.
If you have clearer evidence on that point I'd like to see it. I've heard convincing anecdotes of women dropping out because of sexism but I find it hard to reconcile with the data.
You're comparing different things - one is current levels of CompSci (small, limited, sample size - hell I wouldn't show up in CompSci numbers) which is also basically at an all time high. The other is a total size metric that won't show churn.
I get what you're trying to show but the comparison doesn't follow.
I'm not disagreeing, but "systems" is the reason I've often heard in this discussion without ANY real hard data expanding on what these systems precisely are and how they aren't a reflection merely of, let's say, biology. All I see generally when referring to "systems" are anecdotes and high-level conclusions based purely on personal experiences. None of which helps further the discussion. If you can find these systems, prove them, I'll be right there with ya tearing them down.
Then it should be easy to enumerate the issues, and offer some ideas for solutions. As someone who follows this issue quite closely, I've seen neither.
This entire thread illustrates the confusion – and that there is absolutely no consensus that even an issue exists in the first place.
So whatever makes women uninterested in programming happens before college
I don't think that, by itself, lets industry off the hook completely. We still have to make a culture that isn't downright repulsive to half of the population.
the overall point is there is institutional and social pressure (mostly unconscious or learned) for women to avoid those fields.
Is it wise to assign a heavy weighting to an unmeasurable, unverifiable, ethereal sense of discouragement?
What is measurable are character traits that tend to exhibit themselves more strongly in one sex over the other (of course, this varies from individual to individual), and this could help to explain why men and women tend to choose different career paths.
If you believe that women, as a whole, tend to possess the qualities of caring, empathy, and compassion more than men (the cause of which could be biological), it stands to reason that careers which allow them to actualise these qualities would be more attractive, at the expense of monetary gain.
The result of this is, on average, more women occupy a subset of jobs that are difficult, worthwhile, but ultimately of lower economic value in our version of capitalism.
While this does and could not account for the entire issue, it offers one plausible reason that's worthy of some merit.
Why should the differences in attraction for jobs with a stronger or weaker human communication component necessarily be institutional and social ? It might be genetic as well. In that case, good luck "fixing" the situation because it requires tweaking the human genome.
That's could explain why even decades of public policy in countries like Sweden didn't even come close to a situation of near 50% STEM workers.
You should at least consider the possibility that intelligent, charismatic women may not be as willing to pursue 'STEM roles' as equivalently advantaged men.
If someone is able to teach occasional yoga classes, do little PR work, and still travel internationally 3 months out of the year... who is to say that is less desirable than a full-time, higher paying job?
I read your comment as supporting the idea that women forgo STEM roles due to gender-specific negative pressure (certainly true in some cases), while I'm suggesting (also) that some may be choosing different career paths to achieve more fulfilling lifestyles than STEM offers at its best.
There are even less women in construction or waste management.
But we don't hear as many complains there. My guess? Those jobs are known to be hard. STEM seem like a breeze from outside (that's just office work) but when you work there you realize it may not be physicaly hard but the stress is there. So people who value a better work-life balance decide to get out. People who have the option to decide to not work will do it.
The flip-side of the gender role is the number of articles lately shaming young males who decide to work part-time and enjoy life instead of working for a family. Also, the number of high achieving women who complain about the lack of available good men. Marrying down? That's for the males.
Yes, the gender roles discussion is important - feminist literature for 30 years has been talking about how patriarchal social roles affect women and men.
This isn't news to me - or anyone with any interest in this area.
I think the whole issue of "unequal pay" seems very made-up and political and does not make any sense at all, at least in any way anyone can do anything about it... bear with me while I try to explain it.
Lets say there are differences in how much certain demographics of people get paid over another. Lets take short vs tall people or black vs white or with blood groups positive vs negative. Lets say that there is a difference in average pay for people with positive blood groups vs negative blood groups. So what? It could be completely arbitrary or there could be an underlying cause that makes employers pay one type of blood group over another. Either way, why should an employer pay any more than what they think the position is worth as long as someone is willing to voluntarily work for that amount of money? What's in it for any employer to pay more than the employee negotiated to work for?
Do you think it's possible and worthwhile to change attitudes? If we once believed (and no doubt some still do) that black people are worth less than white people, and so black people were effectively forced to accept less (though nobody was holding a gun to their heads), was that an acceptable state of affairs? What was in it for any of the (non-black) people to change anything about it?
Given the stories we regularly hear from female employees in the tech industry (of being harassed and/or left out of the "inner circle"), it seems unreasonable to conclude that the effects we see might be "completely arbitrary" as opposed to caused by those attitudes (in addition to other causes that have been pointed out, such as difference in priorities, of course).
>Do you think it's possible and worthwhile to change attitudes?
Depends.
>If we once believed (and no doubt some still do) that black people are worth less than white people, and so black people were effectively forced to accept less (though nobody was holding a gun to their heads), was that an acceptable state of affairs?
Yes. Westerners didn't arbitrarily decide that blacks were worth less to them, it was because they were. Blacks could not contribute anything to the westerners other than slave labour... and they were too ignorant of the western power structure to organize themselves to fight for equal worth from the states they were in. When they figured it out however, they did get the same worth from the states they were in.
>What was in it for any of the (non-black) people to change anything about it?
Not sure about all non-blacks but the Republican Party of the US which was founded by anti-slavery activists who believed in independence and freedom for all people. They already had examples of free blacks who were just as capable of learning and contributing to the society and letting some people own some of them and treat them as animals wasn't acceptable to them and a lot of others. So, they used it for political leverage and were very successful.
>Given the stories we regularly hear from female employees in the tech industry (of being harassed and/or left out of the "inner circle")
Nobody is stopping women from having their own niche occupation where they make their own inner circles... oh wait there are those occupations, they are called nursing and teaching. Men and women in general have different life goals and different preferences in their careers. Also, "harassment" happens to men too (specially when everything is harassment)... men just deal with it differently i.e. by not complaining about it to others and doing something about it themselves.
There are significant societal costs when a group is undervalued. Young members of that group choose not to participate. Members of other groups decide to extend the discrimination in other ways.
Businesses are not automata, independent of their environment. People own, run, and work for businesses; people care, or should, what the world will look like for the next generation.
This notion that businesses exist solely for a short-term profit for their shareholders is patently destructive.
does anyone have any studies on breaking this down further to pay per hour? as men generally are seen as working more hours which could lead to why they get more pay too
Thomas Sowell dug into various figures on this debate over the course of several decades if I recall. He's pretty entertaining to watch on old Uncommon Knowledge videos.
> Although the average woman’s salary in Britain is 29% lower than the average man’s, the bulk of that gap results from differences in rank within companies, firms’ overall compensation rates and the nature of the tasks a job requires.
If Software Engineer II makes less than Software Engineer III, and women of equivalent skill and experience to men have a significantly higher chance of being Software Engineer II than III, then the wage gap exists for "the same work".
This is particularly difficult to measure, but still possible with proper diligence, because rank throughout a career is a compounding advantage.
yeah this pretty much invalidates any conclusions they are trying to reach. i've noticed at my company that competent women seem to be stuck at the same title for a pretty long time.
This whole debate about gender pay is based on the flawed assumption that marriage is not an integral part of human society. Humanity has functioned since time immemorial with marriage as a fundamental human institution. Sure, it's not honored in many cases, but by and large it is a part of human social fabric. Today, however, we are experimenting with disposing of time tested marital roles, instead expecting both spouses to do the same things. Business 101 would instruct you to pick a partner with an opposite skill set from what you have and each work on what they are good at. Yet today we reduce efficiency by having both man and woman split both tasks, or worse, do the task both by him or herself.
It's time that we start considering the family as a unit again.
The whole point is that society systematically undervaluing women-dominated professions is sexism. It makes sense that the pay gap disappears when the job differences go away, because the job differences are the pay gap.
A good example is teaching. Teaching is an incredibly valuable job. It's also dominated by women. It also happens to be way, way underpaid.
> The whole point is that the way society systematically undervalues women-dominated professions is sexism at work.
What? Can you explain how that is possible? As far as I know, people value things according to what value they obtain from them. There is no way for that to be 'sexist'. People are paid according to the value they produce. To call that sexist is just completely inconsistent with any reasonable conception of economics to my understanding.
EDIT: In your edit you added the example of teaching. And that is, fairish. I'd grant you that teachers are underpaid, but that isn't sexism, it's a consequence of the structure of our education system. They're not underpaid because they're women, they're underpaid because they're being paid by a bureaucracy.
Well, imagine a scenario where women are initially not in the labor force. But they want to work, same as anyone
Then, one day, society changes. "You can work, but you can only be a nurse, teacher, or secretary".
You don't think there'd be a supply glut driving down wages in those areas? Suppressing them over a long period as women gradually enter the labor force there?
And by the same token, that society that says you can't be an engineer or a CEO because you are a woman - that severely punishes those women who do seek those jobs - you don't think women would respond to that? That even if they could produce more economic value, the societal pressure can override the capitalist tendencies of organizations and individuals to maximize wealth?
Certainly that was the case in the past, and cultural inertia is real. This allows inequities and biases to persist over time. So although women are not forced to choose teaching, for example, there are more teaching role models who are women and culture nudges women towards that career.
This causes the persistent inequity in career pay that was caused in part by the original influx of women into the field when explicit sexism was rampant.
Cultural inertia is surely a factor, but I doubt it's as severe as the parent is insinuating. For instance, how do you explain women overtaking men in say, veterinary medicine? At one point, the field was entirely male dominated.
So was nursing, and really most(all?) fields. Of course going from nursing to veterinary work is not as huge a leap.
And in all cases, somebody has to be the first one; somebody has to show a path, often against institutionalized sexism. Once the door is open (especially when there are few doors) I can see careers tipping fast.
Of course computer science used to have a lot of women; especially when they were being used as human calculators(!), so I don't know what exactly changed that made it a boys' club.
Regardless of the cause, it has the perception, which makes it self perpetuating in some sense - women see articles about how tough it is to be a woman in tech, and are turned off by it, even if the higher pay is there and it's all just rumors.
I suppose though there is something of a reverse impact in some fields (in terms of labor force participation) - like nursing, which is so female dominated, there's actually negative pressure for men who try to enter it . But it also just isn't held up as high as medicine at the MD level.
Because it would make sense 50 or more years ago, when women were openly shut out from other professions. That's not to say the after-effects of those outmoded cultural traditions aren't having an impact, but to claim that this accounts entirely or even majorly for the professional disparity in female representation demands evidence.
Sure. But women are free agents. They don't all need to be teachers, nurses, and secretaries. They can be whatever they want to be.
Now, I fully admit, there is a degree to which women at a young age are socialized into those sorts of professions. And I am absolutely willing to call that sexism, and totally support every effort being made to change that.
"People are paid according to the value they produce" grossly simplifies compensation. If we must generalize compensation: people are paid the lowest amount they will accept.
Supply and demand and value are central to the equation, but large variability in compensation among near identical profiles in the US and Canadian software sectors is an indicator that the individual isn't good at knowing their value.
The problem is gender roles. Women are taught by society to think that, as women, they should go into certain careers. These careers, like teaching, tend to be lower paid than the careers men are encouraged to go into.
Men are pressured to be breadwinners, so they are more likely to pick careers based on pay.
Women are not pressured to be breadwinners, so they're more likely to pick careers that sound fulfilling and satisfying, but are less lucrative.
Media likes to focus on the pay gap, but has anyone investigated the fulfillment and satisfaction gap? I wouldn't be surprised if overall men are less fulfilled and satisfied by their jobs.
Men are typically raised from a young age that you do defines your worth.
Women are typically raised with the idea that they have value in and of themselves.
There are pros and cons to both sides of encouragement.
I'd say both men and women at some level value themselves in their attractiveness to the opposite sex. Women feel value by being attractive to men. And Men feel value by being attractive to women. Men are attracted to women who display youth and beauty as a proxy for reproductive value, and women are attracted to wealth and status as a proxy for support.
Sure, but women are taught (mostly subconsciously but in some ways explicitly) that their primary value as human beings is in physical attractiveness when young, in their fertility in their 20s, and in their ability to nurture when older.
We teach men that their value is in their accomplishments, which is a) more empowering; b) more under their control; and c) more conducive to independence and pursuit of self-realization (in career or in other aspects of life), positions of power, and yes, powerful and high-paid careers.
Men are not valued for their accomplishments, they are valued for their resources and ability to gain more resources. No where in any data that I have seen, for example dating, can we see that people who travel or achieve personal accomplishments are out competing people with wealth.
For example, let say we take two groups of men in the age of 30. Those in group A have traveled and accomplished a bunch of personal goals, but are at this point jobbing at minimum wage jobs. Those in group B stayed put and studied and work hard to position themselves at high earning jobs. Which group is rewarded highest by society? My bet if they did such study would be group B with a very clear margin.
Men are being taught that their primary value as human is to chase wealth. This causes men take more risk, die at a earlier age, and have a smaller social network to take care of them at old age. Regardless of gender, neither men or women live a life of roses, and being valued for physical attractiveness rather than wealth has benefits and drawbacks.
If I have a high income, I have many options to swap that for fulfillment and satisfaction. I can buy stuff, I can go on interesting vacations, I can have expensive hobbies, I can donate to charities, and I can partake in a large number of experiences that are only available to those who can afford it. And finally, I can give it all up and pursue a life of simpler pleasures. Those are all options I have.
If I have a low income, I might still feel satisfied and fulfilled, but that could change. What options do I then have?
Women seek men with resources to reproduce with. Men tend to only care about youth/fertility. It's not like men can start reproducing with women who are no longer fertile, so they can't possibly lower the bar any further. Since women don't have social pressure to gather resources in order to reproduce, men are going to dominate in higher paying professions. This is similar to the same argument Christopher Hitchens famously made in his Vanity Fair article about why women aren't funny. It's not that women can't be funny, obviously many are. It's that they don't need to be funny to get laid.
If you want to resolve this problem you need to either ask women to lower the bar and not seek men with resources or ask men to raise the bar and demand that women not only be youthful/fertile, but also have resources. Good luck.
Now that is an explanation I can get behind. I think that there is a degree to which society socializes women to prefer lower paid jobs. That I think is absolutely legitimate. But the idea that sexism causes us to value those jobs less is, I think, absurd.
That's such a silly article. There are so many confounding factors as to make any attempt at determining causation specious. Women's employment rate grew massively over that time period. This means that jobs requiring no specialized skills would receive an influx of job seekers. If we assume the employment rate of men stayed the same over that period, we would expect all jobs that require no specialized skills or physical demands would reduce in wages as the demand for those jobs increased. As far as computer programming goes, it literally was a clerical job early on. Wages rose as the job started requiring more specialized skills (which apparently women couldn't or didn't want to get).
i think one forgotten issue is the part-time economy. I know in retail just as the work shifted to part time on demand hours, women's participation increased because it's easier for women to work part time than men.
In other news, economists discover that supply and demand balance to create price! When the supply of a thing goes up but the demand doesn't, the price goes down.
>The problem is gender roles. Men are taught by society to think that, as men, they should go into certain careers. These careers, like software development, tend to be higher paid than the careers women are encouraged to go into.
Kinda works both ways as an argument.
If they were so concerned about pay, they can try and negotiate for more. Men are taught/encouraged to do this more from a young age. If you want to be paid more, you gotta haggle, you can't just accept the price on the sticker.
or it could be these careers speak more to women's aspirations than others. If an important goal for a woman is to have a family and children, working at higher paid jobs that require tremendous hours and travel are not going to be attractive. If the same is for men, likewise...the family man who turns down traveling or relocating, and can't work massive overtime will see his prospects decline too.
A lot of the problem with gender roles is many feminists have internalized male actions as the norm and female actions as inferior...so they see women as underpaid over as having the flexibility to raise a family
feel free to source that in a way that can be proven. The assertion is just pseudo intellectual excuse making. Society is NOT telling women to NOT be sanitation workers. Society is not telling women not to work on offshore oil rigs. Society is not telling women not to be surgeons but to in fact be veterinarians. Society and "gender role" excuses don't hold up to reality. Time to accept that the women you know, or imagine you know make their choices, largely based on their own interests.
You're welcome to try to convince women to become sanitation workers rather than paralegal interns in climate controlled offices. Good luck on that.
I don't see how you can possibly claim that society doesn't discourage women from pursuing "manly" careers. By the same token men are discouraged from pursuing "feminine" careers.
If a man says they are going to work on an offshore oil rig they are much less likely to get societal push back than a woman because it is seen as a normal thing for a man to do but not a woman.
If a woman is an elementary school teacher it is considered completely normal, whereas men are often looked down upon for doing so. The same happens with male nurses.
How can you read all the stories about sexual harassment in our industry and not think women are being discouraged from pursuing careers in tech?
You're just saying words, you've got no examples of where rubber meets the road. Just that "men are looked down upon for being elementary school teachers" What? Where? And female oil rig workers get "societal pushback" Again just words. Where? How? You've got nothing here so far.
I mean if you want to talk about cultural influence there's way more news articles celebrating women doing various things, celebrating women entrepreneurs, women soldiers, women and minority events and special recognition or conferences.
Read all the stories about sexual harassment? Anecdotally I've seen just as much sexual language coming from women in IT as men in terms of workers. Project mgrs, network admins, probably a few more. And those instances were miniscule and didn't make up anywhere near a day to day problem for people.
I have seen instances where a guy who was being a dick treated women poorly. He got a talking to and cut that out. I've seen women take their day out on men and women and never got any kind of talking to. It's really funny you're pointing to some sort of dysfunction and not demonstrating or sourcing anything but "all those stories"
> As far as I know, people value things according to what value they obtain from them.
Yes. But I think you miss one point. People are not rational beings (even trained ones are not), and "value they obtained" is a result of some psychological process which is not strictly rational. And if people estimate value obtained from employee by sex of that employee, it would be not surprising at all.
> To call that sexist is just completely inconsistent with any reasonable conception of economics to my understanding.
Conception of economics is a theory. Reality is something different, theory is just simplified description of reality. Theory is much more formal, more simple and more understandable. Theory exists only in human mind as some entity of informational nature, while reality... well, reality is just a reality. Theory offers us laws that works in most cases. Or more precise, that laws works while axioms postulated by theory are fulfilled. But reality just works, it does not follow our laws and rules, it just works somehow.
No absolute truth exists. Every one axiom sometimes is not true. In a case when axioms are not true, theory becomes unreliable. If you think to rely on laws of some theory, then first you should check whether all relevant axioms are fullfilled in your case.
People use word "economics" and mean either theory or reality depending on context. This leads to confusion and inability to see the difference. Train youself to separate theory and reality on every occasion, try every time to use different words for theory and reality and you'll become immune to such mistakes.
As I undestand such a theory as economics, "people value things according to what value they obtain from them" itself is axiom. Here you see some case where axiom is false: its just a matter of fact. So reality and theory are different here substantially. You should choose some other theory to deal with such situation.
> Yes. But I think you miss one point. People are not rational beings (even trained ones are not), and "value they obtained" is a result of some psychological process which is not strictly rational. And if people estimate value obtained from employee by sex of that employee, it would be not surprising at all.
I agree in part. I agree wholeheartedly that the rational actor model is (at best) incomplete. We are not rational beings making perfect value judgments moment to moment. I further admit it is possible that, in individual interactions, the gender of the employee/agent we are interacting with may be a factor in price considerations.
However, ultimately prices are set by supply and demand. What the OP is positing, is that demand is suppressed by sexism. What would this mean? Some female-dominated professions are: Nursing, teaching, and social work [1]. Now think about what would have to be true in order for the OP's point to be correct. People would have to systematically demand less nursing, teaching, and social work in order to achieve the result they were implying. Do you think that is plausible?
When thinking about intra-profession discrimination, I would have no problem attributing that to sexism. That is, if you said to me that female teachers are systematically paid less than their male counterparts, i'd be all for labelling that sexism. But that's not what's being posited here. What's being posited is that because certain professions are dominated by women, people consume them less. People want less of them. But what is a profession's role in the world if not to generate its own demand? If people aren't demanding your services, you find a new profession.
In other words, if demand for the services women choose to provide is so elastic that it can be depressed by sexism, then maybe they ought to find better services to provide. Services that are important enough that the demand for them is non-negotiable, and can never be suppressed by sexist preferences.
Pay and prestige of educators has diminished as it has become more female dominated. This is a pattern seen across many industries when they shift from male dominated to female dominated. This suggests that there is a relationship between gender distributions in a job and its prestige and value given by society.
Not all jobs have direct "money in, money out" relations that you can use to judge value. This opens the door for all sorts of cultural bias that affects how people decide how much a particular job is "worth".
Has prestige also dropped for doctors and lawyers? They're not professions dominated by women AFAIK, but women've become quite well represented in them since the ~mid 80s, so one might expect to see this effect there.
I know job prospects aren't as hot for lawyers as they once were[1], but it's still one of very few professions that I'd expect to reliably make someone's parents' eyebrows go up and an "oh!" issue from their mouth on hearing their kid's dating one, ya know? So the prestige is still there, unless I've missed something. And doctors are doctors, so certainly in that category, too. I really doubt "software developer" automatically gains one anywhere near as much social capital, in general company and without further favorable details/context.
[1] as you correctly wrote, "Not all jobs have direct 'money in, money out' relations that you can use to judge value."
Absolutely agree. It is sexist to socialize girls into specific professions. It is sexist to say "x is work befitting a woman". But women-dominated professions being paid less is not sexist.
I don't know. There are many possible explanations. One is sexism. Another is that women are less likely to negotiate. Another is that maybe women tend to be CEOs of companies that are less valuable, or that rely less on the expertise of their CEO.
Ok, so why are they less likely to negotiate, why are they more likely to ascend at less valuable companies, etc. The whole point of talking about the wage gap is figuring out why it exists. And inevitably, there are only two possible ends to this investigation. Either there are inherent biological differences that cause women to be less effective and valuable in our economy, or some societal manifestation of sexism is causing these differences. As far as I can tell there is no other possible answer.
Yep, that's correct. And it's almost certainly a mixture of the two. I'm not saying there isn't sexism involved, i'm just saying that it's more likely to be on the side of socializing young girls into choosing less remunerative professions.
Women are less likely to negotiate because of the societal views of women who are shrewd negotiators. The societal pressure on women to be passive is immense. Just look at women in politics for numerous examples. That's what's sexist about it. There are different expectations of people based solely on gender, and that further divides into race with black women at the bottom of that pool.
You need only listen to the experiences of women founders in Silicon Valley to realize your comment really doesn't match up with what really happens. Women, especially in the tech sector, are treated like personal sex objects of some VCs.
There is not a single situation you listed above that cannot be attributed to similarity bias or cultural bias against, both completely unintentional.
> As far as I know, people value things according to what value they obtain from them.
That's not true. Very easy counterexample: negotiation. Women are generally less inclined to negotiate then men, causing them to earn lower salaries. Does that mean that people value jobs performed by men who negotiate more than jobs performed by women who don't? Of course not - it has nothing to do with the value-add at all.
Doesn't this article refute that idea? If the pay gap is less than 1% for same rank/same job that means whatever is causing that 1% delta is pretty small. How much of that can you attribute to a lack of "negotiating" and is that 1% significant ?
That would mean basically a woman accepted 99K where a man accepted 100K. At that scale negotiating and gap is almost non-existent.
And you don't generally negotiate position and or rank. You apply for or get recommended for a job and get it or not, negotiating is usually about the dollars and cents after being in strong consideration for a position or after being given an initial offer for a position.
If women /are/ discriminated against you might even argue, based on this data, they are better at negotiating than men and that could make up for them being so close in pay for same rank / same role jobs. The point is the data doesn't support it.
To the extent that women negotiate less due to biology, it's almost definitely not purely down to biology.
That means there's likely some kind of societal pressure keeping them from negotiating as much. There have been plenty of studies that show assertive women are seen as just being bitchy while assertive men are seen as strong leaders.
That societal difference is sexism. Individuals don't have to be consciously sexist for implicit bias to affect women.
No, it isn't. The world doesn't need to be designed to produce equality of outcome. Just equality of opportunity. Women may choose to negotiate less, and that's fine. They'll get paid less. If women want to choose to negotiate more, they can do that too, and be paid more.
If you want to argue that it's sexist that we socialize women to negotiate less, i'm all for that, though.
> If you want to argue that it's sexist that we socialize women to negotiate less, i'm all for that, though.
If that's the road you feel comfortable walking down, I think it's fine to compromise at that point. Regardless of how it happened, the result - women not negotiating - is still the same.
Yes, but how you get there matters. If society is socializing women to negotiate less, that's society's fault and society should try to correct that. If women are simply biologically predisposed to negotiate less, that's nobody's fault and women can try to correct it if they want, or not. But it's not a social, collective problem.
To me this is moot. At this point you're fighting against the natural inclinations of the human mind. I'd pick my battles more carefully. There are other issues related to sex that are much easier to attack, with much greater potential impact.
It's not individual sexism, but it _is_ systematic sexism.
Women generally don't handle negotiating the same as men. But negotiation skills aren't relevant to most jobs. So if that's a factor in how people get paid, it's _systematically_ sexist.
Do you agree that negotiation skills don't matter for most jobs? And do you agree that people should be compensated based on the value they bring to a job?
Because sexism or no, I think it's a tremendous problem when people get ahead for completely tangential reasons to their job performance and skills.
I agree it's a problem. But it's women's problem. If they want to get ahead - start negotiating. It's not incumbent upon society to bend over backwards to facilitate every subgroup's predilections. Salary negotiation is a necessary part of the job market. It performs a useful and important function - price discovery. It is not sexist if women are maladapted to it.
In that case I'm missing your point. If everyone has equal opportunity to negotiate salary regardless of sex, then how does it matter whether or not salary negotiation skills should be awarded, from a gender equality perspective? Isn't that a separate issue then, not related to sexism?
Unless your point is that the sexism is at a larger cultural level that fosters the average woman to be less effective at salary negotiations. In that case I completely agree.
> Women are generally less inclined to negotiate then men
This blanket statement seems sexist. Some are inclined and some are not.
Besides, as soon as one leaves the world of small business, the corporations stick to salary bands attached to specific titles. The variations within the bands are usually driven by longevity with the company as well as performance reviews. It makes things easier in HR department, and creates a paper trail on compensation decisions in case someone decides to get litigious later.
"Miller and Douglas discovered that women who had experience with successful negotiation were superior negotiators to men, even when they rated themselves as only average negotiators."
Well, I was simply taking the person I was responding to at their word. I'm not aware of evidence on either side of the issue of whether women negotiate more or less, I was just granting them their supposition, because I think its irrelevant.
Most of the research around the topic quotes a study on negotiated prices at car dealerships, where women ended up with higher prices offered at the start of the negotiation and ended up with higher prices by the time the process ended.
Which is a very specific use case of a specific environment with mainly unknown opponents (as opposed to work relationships, where you typically know the boss), tight deadlines (need a car immediately) and little wiggle room (shopping around car dealerships is time-consuming, sending resumes to competitors to test the waters is less so).
You can't pick on education and then talk about negotiation; educators often are represented by unions, which means that you're talking about a completely different ball game.
Whoa, people value things higher than or equal to what they pay for them(unless there is coercion as in the case of paying health insurance premiums in the US). In other words, price must be lower than or equal to value.
And job differences are individual decisions. We can finally stop the "women are being paid less/discriminated ...yadayada..." -horseshit.
Teaching is done/funded by the society in most cases and paid with tax dollars. Some jobs being "underpaid" or paid too much are problems that come from the lack of real capitalism where everybody would be paid their actual market value and we could remove the whole word "underpaid" from the dictionary.
It embarrasses me to see someone not realizing this.
Isn't capitalism about the use of capital to control and manage markets? If I will £5m on the lottery and then set up a company investing that money am I worth the 4% a year I should (probably would) make?
The value of your teachers (or lack of value) will only become apparent over time - a long time. The value of your doctor may become absolute to you, several times over your life. God forbid that you or yours fall sick, but should your doctor be able to demand all of your worldly goods to heal you? What about farmers - should they gang together and refuse to supply food until starvation set in would that allow them to demand all of the cities wealth? If no then what is needed - is it a rule of law that enforces particular norms of behaviour?
While I never said societies should implement full 100% free market capitalism, all the problems that you mentioned cannot exists in that system.
Free uninterrupted competition will destroy people/companies overpricing their services or force them to compete as well => lower their prices. Basically, offering poor/expensive service in capitalist system will naturally invite competition until the optimal price/value point has been reached.
But like I said, that works in pure free market capitalism, which no politician would ever want to try because it would take power from them and give it to the people and markets.
> Basically, offering poor/expensive service in capitalist system will naturally invite competition until the optimal price/value point has been reached.
If all the farmers form a cartel, where does this mythical competitor come from? Farmland is a limited resource. And food doesn't just magically appear the day you start a new farm.
You discount the abilities of monopolists to prevent new market entrants. They can lower prices only when there is a new player, until that player goes bankrupt, and then raise them again, discouraging others from trying again. They can lock up suppliers in exclusive contracts, preventing competition from sourcing parts. They can run massive disinformation campaigns. They can launch a series of baseless lawsuits. Etc... It's straightforward to have an abusive hold on a market without any government involvement at all, all you need is some deviousness.
I think that your argument depends on perfect markets - perfect flow of information and 100% market efficiency (no transaction costs) and also perfect computability as in the capability for all actors to compute the optimal clearing of the optimal transaction system for the transaction at hand.
I am pretty sure that teaching and medicine are the kind of good that would break these rules - political implementation, people and markets or no.
What? So you became a (I assume) programmer due to yourself alone? You didn't have any help learning how to use a computer from your parents, you didn't have any encouragement of your peers to continue, you weren't influenced at all by society and how it favors certain behaviors, no good teachers helped you learn the requisite math or science or critical thinking? It was all entirely a decision made in a vacuum?
I don't know why you care about anecdotes, but if you do:
I became a software developer because I though computers were interesting. My friends called me a geek. My father tried to stop me because he wanted me to work in a construction industry LIKE THE REAL MEN DO. My mother wanted me to become a lawyer because it is a respectful profession unlike being a nerd. For about 10 years my parents continuously tried to prevent me from using computers and told me to "go outside and play" etc.
So did I become a construction worker or a lawyer? Nope. Did I become a software engineer? Yes. How? Individual decision. I make my my own decision in life. Sometimes definitely influenced by others, but so what? If I get influenced by them it's my responsibility to handle it in the proper way and look for other opinions too. People pretend to be a weak and try to shift responsibility to other people/society deserve no pity.
I don't share your embarrassment. There's a significant chunk of the country that doesn't understand the issue - they think the claim is about blatantly discriminatory practices. In some cases, I'm not sure that even the people who do advocate for solutions to the pay gap truly understand what the core issue is. Both of this caused by the way all of this has been worded.
Worth clarifying all of this as much as possible to work towards putting everyone on the same understanding of the situation.
Yes, the wage gap isn't literally about cigar-smoking men in dark rooms deciding to systematically pay women less. It's more like someone who claims not to see gender paying women less because men negotiated or "seemed more confident".
I'm embarrassed because this kind of stuff can and will be used to continue the narrative of "women make just as much as men" which isn't true.
Teaching is an incredibly valuable job. But it isn't really subject to market forces the way software engineering is. A better teacher doesn't bring in more revenue and profit for a public school. Most teachers work in public schools. I am not disagreeing with you in general (I am not taking a stand either way) but this is a pretty silly example.
Is the system setup to value them with money? Can a parent walk into a school and agree to higher property taxes if their kid is placed in a specific teacher's classroom?
Male teachers face the same issue. But really, salary is only one component of what they are paid.
Just about any teacher that survives to an old age will beat me earnings wise with their pension, which they don't have to fund. I have to fund my own 401K or IRA, as well as pay into the teacher's pension fund with my property taxes.
They're not paid more because their unions negotiate a fixed salary schedule through collective bargaining, and most teachers support this state of affairs. It's hardly a pure value judgment on the part of "society".
Then what do you say to all the men who either die or lose their health doing difficult and dangerous jobs, often for
peanuts?
If you can't prove me men teachers are being paid more, your argument is invalid. Women choose very different careers and that's fine, but the choice is there.
Why do discussions like this always avoid any talk about market value? Teachers are paid relatively less because its not hard to become a teacher and there are a lot of people willing to do it.
I don't see how it's "embarrassing" for this article to be on HN. It addresses your point exactly in the first few paragraphs:
"These numbers do not show that the labour market is free of sex discrimination. However, they do suggest that the main problem today is not unequal pay for equal work, but whatever it is that leads women to be in lower-ranking jobs at lower-paying organisations."
My essential argument is that sexism creeps in when you say that women select lower-ranking jobs by default. I don't think that's actually true. I think it's more that society views the jobs women work as lower-ranking.
But there's no reason to think that when you consider that jobs generally considered "women's work" require (relatively) less education, or aren't inherently dangerous or physically demanding. There is a glut of supply so the market value of those jobs drops.
Consider nursing which is relatively high paying precisely because of the education requirements, specialization, and difficulty of the work. Wages are even rising now because of the shortage. Market forces explain the salary distributions much easier than sexism collectively driving down prices against market forces.
But even in nursing we see men being promoted faster than women.
When we ask why there are so few women tech leaders, or women in tech, we're told it's a pipeline problem: not enough women in STEM education.
But that's not the case for nursing. So why do men get promoted over women?
Here are some numbers from England. I've picked midwifery and ambulance staff, because there's some contrast there.
Midwives
Payband Men Women Total Ratio men:women
Band 5 11 2301 2312 0.00:1.00
Band 6 57 18294 18351 0.00:1.00
Band 7 36 4663 4699 0.01:0.99
Band 8a 2 183 185 0.01:0.99
Band 8b 1 31 32 0.03:0.97
Band 8c 2 15 17 0.12:0.88
Ambulance staff
Payband men women total ratio men:women
Band 4 2222 1479 3701 0.60:0.40
Band 5 5986 4072 10058 0.60:0.40
Band 6 3553 1889 5442 0.65:0.35
Band 7 610 202 812 0.75:0.25
Band 8a 85 25 110 0.77:0.23
Band 8b 49 10 59 0.83:0.17
Band 8c 14 1 15 0.93:0.07
Band 8d 14 1 15 0.93:0.07
>But that's not the case for nursing. So why do men get promoted over women?
Hard to say as I know very little about these fields. Presumably people in these fields are promoted because they show leadership or managerial qualities of some sort. Is there a reason to expect leadership or managerial qualities, or the interest in positions with those responsibilities to be unequally distributed among the sexes? Maybe. The differences in assertiveness is one potential explanation. Also the differences in status-seeking behavior. I'm not saying these differences explain it, but they're potential causes that can't be ruled out from the data alone.
I suspect many people understand the "pay gap" as being that women get paid less for doing the same work with the same qualifications as men.
Whereas the socio-economic dynamic of women being driven by various forces, at play throughout their lives, into lower paying jobs (in which men are also paid less), which is what you seem to be writing about, is something other than "pay gap".
You summarize the exact point of the article perfectly: women are paid less not because they have the same job and are paid less, but because they are offered different jobs which pay less. To address sexism we should focus on making sure women have the same opportunities to do the same job that men do, rather than just trying to make sure everyone in a certain job category is paid the same.
What about this is embarrassing? Do you fee that women don't deserve the same high paying jobs as men?
It seems you are demonizing an article for saying the exact same thing that you are...
That graphic assumes that doctors work 59.6 hours per week, which sounds like a number pulled from somewhere, and that teachers work 40 hours per week, which sounds like they're assuming a "standard" work week. But that only makes sense if you assume teachers barely work more than the school day itself, which seems implausible. It also assumes that teachers work 38 weeks per year. That would mean a 3.5-month summer break, which doesn't really match with reality.
My SO is a high school teacher and it's actually pretty close to reality for her. She has had the entire summer off and still has over two weeks left before she goes back to work.
During the school year, she probably does average more than 40 hours per week, but the excess is flexible and often done at her convenience and at home. That's quite a bit better than a 3AM emergency call to the operating room. And it's never 20 hours of excess.
She also got a signing bonus and all her undergraduate tuition debt paid off as part of the job offer. And she really does get a fully-funded pension.
The infographic in question specifically referenced thoracic surgeons, who are considerably more likely to experience on-call rotations or emergencies than, say, a family physician.
I honestly don't know what your second sentence is referencing. I was simply stating that, contrary to some claims here, many high school teachers absolutely get the entire summer off and don't work much more than 40 hours per week during the school year.
Oh, thoracic surgeons, you say? Well, that just goes to show what utter nonsense the infographic is, because the average thoracic surgeon's salary in the US is not $202,948, but $473,927[1]. 150+% more than claimed. If you told a group of surgeons that their average salary was only $200k, you'd be laughed out of the room.
I tell you what else the infographic leaves out: all the free shit doctors get. Doctors get free shit from all over the place, and sure, they don't get that long summer break that teachers get, but they do get to jet internationally to conferences/drinking sessions.
Not to mention that having twice the lifetime earnings means much more than having twice the disposable income. A carton of milk and a box of cereal cost the same for a doctor and a teacher, and nourish them just the same as well. Basically, that infographic is ridiculously slanted.
As for the second sentence, a maserati is a fancy car, and I was using it as an allegory for the difference in lifestyles between doctors and teachers. That difference is more than you could make up working a few extra hours per week on a teacher's wage.
Edit: even more nonsense: the infographic claims 20,000 hours worked in residency, with only $150k payment for same. There are only 8760 hours in a standard year. Given that residents are paid around $50k (it actually rises throughout the residency, but hey), that means that the infographic has granted only three years for residency. There are only 26280 hours in 3 years (+24 if you're lucky enough for a leap year). That means that they're claiming that residents work 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, no breaks, no days off.
That's working from, say, 4am to 10pm, for three years solid, and the rest of the resident's life has to fit in the remaining 6 hours per day - sleeping, eating, washing, commuting.
Also, a GP, whose salary is bringing down that $202k average (it's not specifically for thoracic surgeons), only has to do a 1-year residency. You can't fit 20k hours into a 9k year. And there are tons of GPs out there.
> Also, a GP, whose salary is bringing down that $202k average (it's not specifically for thoracic surgeons), only has to do a 1-year residency
This is false in the US from what I can tell. I have several friends who are GPs and every one had to do a 3 year residency.
For the rest of your post, I think you're arguing less against anything that I said or wrote and more against an imaginary opponent that you've probably met in various forms online in the past and are projecting onto me.
Again, all I wanted to emphasize was that there are many teachers who absolutely get the entire summer off and who do not work much more than 40 hours a week during the school year, if any extra at all. Please consult the original comment I was actually replying to. If you don't contest this, then you probably don't actually disagree with me. I agree with most of your analysis of the infographic, but I never championed the infographic to begin with.
For clarity, here's what I was actually responding to and debunking:
> that only makes sense if you assume teachers barely work more than the school day itself, which seems implausible. It also assumes that teachers work 38 weeks per year. That would mean a 3.5-month summer break, which doesn't really match with reality.
No hate on teachers but generally speaking, teachers are not the ambitious type. The school of education at many universities is seen as a joke for people who wanted to party all day.
Considering that there is an entire "Equal Pay for Equal Work" movement, this is actually extremely relevant. TFA addresses this issue specifically. It's saying that people who are shooting for "equal pay for equal work" are barking up the wrong tree. This article, which you say is embarrassing, is actually agreeing with you.
Almost no job is paid the full value it produces. There's always a split between the buyer of the job (whoever is paying the wage) and the seller of the job (who is receiving the wage). If the job-buyer didn't get any value, why would they buy it?
The question is: How is the split determined? Basically it's about negotiating leverage. Someone who is nearly irreplaceable (like Koby Bryant or Paul Buchheit) has a lot of leverage and can demand a lot. Someone who can be replaced easily has little leverage and gets a lower wage.
The problem with teaching isn't that it's female dominated. It's that too many people want to be teachers, because they enjoy teaching. Also because teaching doesn't measure the output of workers it's harder for the great ones to demand higher wages; they just get the average, like the bad teachers.
I don't get why this article embarrasses you. Surely it's important to figure out exactly where the sexism resides, so we know how to fix it.
If the pay gap almost disappears when accounting for job differences, then the problem can't be solved at the workplace. It's too late at that point.
Further study might reveal that women choose less profitable majors at University, for example. If that were the case, the problem won't be solved at University either, it would be too late at that point.
Further study could look at how women are socialized at high-school, middle-school and so on, until we find the cause. Complaining about people who study that stuff because you think they are insufficiently committed to the cause is counter-productive.
Let me know when the US has "market forces" unattached to rent seeking behavior. There are no major markets that aren't receiving mass amounts of corporate welfare in the form of tax breaks, incentives, or monopoly protections.
You've got the causation backwards. Society pushes women into jobs it values less. There is nothing about teaching that makes it a woman's job--the majority of teachers in India for example are men.
I think we discount the behavioral effects of testosterone across the board. T is known to increase status-seeking behavior which surely has an influence in career choices.
And risk taking. Assuming more risk on average yields higher returns. There was a study in Germany where under laboratory conditions, women still chose less risky strategies than men and therefore earned around 20% less in the scenarios they tried.
Maybe it is sexism. But I'm not convinced its sexism against women.
In our society men are mostly valued for their profession and how much they make. Women generally aren't. So of course men try to get into higher paying and higher status careers. They spend more effort to move up the ladder. Women don't have that same pressure. And I'm not sure that's a bad thing, for them.
A teacher's job security and pension plan aren't available in the private sector at all. It's a complete myth that they are underpaid, focusing on salary alone and not considering the value of the whole package.
My salary pays the mortgage, food, utilities, .... I optimize for keeping things payed for and running, my wife optimizes for family health and happiness. I'm not saying that is universal, but that is how it works for my family, and a good number of other families I know.
Because it's not socially acceptable to take a hiatus _instead_ of the mom and not economically viable for both parents to take a few months (or ideally a year or more) to take care of the newborn. Because men can't breastfeed. Because mothers are more attached to their children, instinctively and psychologically. There are dozens of reasons "why".
That's a great question, there are so many overlapping factors, such as not even having the right, or not being able to afford both parents on lesser-paid leave, to basic stuff, like they don't do the breastfeeding, or social stuff like there being no "mum's club" for men. That's before you even look at culture but I suspect that when people are faced with financial and logistical limitations then culture and preference are actually not the first place to look for answers.
I'm on paternity leave in California right now and if it wasn't for my wife's employer offering benefits far above those the government offers, we wouldn't be able to afford it.
Two things I've observed so far are that with my wife breastfeeding, she keeps her days full, but I'm bored out of my mind. It's not like the baby does anything other than eat and sleep. The other is that new mothers are typically accompanied by their own mothers - so my wife has her family around, which is great for her - but it's not the same as having my own family around.
For our family, I didn't take any significant time off while my wife did because I genuinely love my work and it's very highly compensated, both of those factors significantly in excess of my wife's job at the time.
She loves the outcome; I love the outcome; the kids love the outcome. It was about as close to a no-brainer decision as I've seen on an important topic.
Magnifying this effect, my understanding is that men are much more open to marrying down on the income ladder than women are. So the average gap within marriages/partnerships/whatever is even worse than you'd expect just from the base, general salary difference in the population.
Yep. And this reinforces the social expectation that women take leave when they have children and men do not, which leads there to be less institutional support for paternal leave. It's a cycle.
I took one (by being laid off 2 days before my child was born). I don't recommend that method, although I'm not sure how else I would've gotten 6 months paternity leave to help out at home.
The ladies at work here seem to be out for 1-3 months after giving birth, in most cases.
In addition to other reasons, two kinds of leave are conflated in the US system. There's the sort of leave that occurs when the kid is born. Women typically can spend days (sometimes more) in the hospital convalescing after a birth. Leave policies don't really distinguish between "leave to have a baby" and "leave to look after a baby," it's all lumped under "maternity leave."
Is it even a benefit to work instead of taking these hiatuses?
Parenthood can be a vacation or hard work depending on whether you are a good or bad parent. Just being a parent does not mean that it is difficult work. And if it is hard work, it can be easily argued that being a parent is more meaningful work than 99% of corporate jobs.
I sometimes wonder, what is it that makes those dull office jobs so much more important.
I mean, your kids are your own best bet on eternety. Everything else crumbles to dust - by now often in your lifetime. The device you program for today, your son/daugther wont even see in a museum.
So what if its not a caricature harmony like on stock photo? So what if they have completely diffrent plans?
Its life, its not machines, and thats why it will outlive them.
Touch your navel- there is a blockchain, going a way back.
The idea is that you're looking for the effect caused by gender/sex, so you have to remove the contributions of other factors.
Theoretically, what the comment is saying is that women get paid less because they take more leave, not because they are women. Again, theoretically, if men took leave to the same extent, their salaries would also decrease to the same extent. That's the point of controlling for other variables, so that you can tease apart the individual effects they have before they're all muddled together.
But given that the variables (like leave) are intrinsically linked to gender via biological and social factors... you can’t favtor them away with that excuse.
Some points of discussion are (unrelated to article):
1. If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits?
2. Women are less likely to negotiate salary and assert themselves, as women in general are more agreeable than men. Is this behavior based in biology or is it social construct?
3. Women tend to choose lower paying jobs, such as teacher, caregiver etc. In general women tend to care about people, while men care about things (STEM). Again: biology or social construct?
For example in Sweden, which is doing it's best to increase gender equality, sex differences between men and women maximized http://jamda.ub.gu.se/bitstream/1/833/1/scb_eng_2014.pdf
So perhaps occupation differences are healthy and natural. Of course, in Sweden engineers don't earn 300% more than teachers, so it's not a huge problem like in the USA.
The logical solution would be to increase pay in women dominated professions. But this kind of thing spits in the face of capitalism.
It's a tough problem to solve, and I still have no idea how to go about solving it.
EDIT: Additional explanations