> This makes the law seem even more ridiculous to me.
Why is it more ridiculous? We already have laws against discrimination based on gender. If the issue isn't being solved, while being hands off, it seems natural to try something different.
> It feels like they treating us like children incapable of tying our own shoes or something
Well it does seem employers are incapable of eliminating the gender wage gap so perhaps the treatment is appropriate. Not that I blame them.. being unbiased is extremely difficult and requires a conscious effort.
Except for the fact that male and female pay for the same job, and experience level are statistically the same and there is no actual pay gap.
The $0.79 on the $1 shit has been debunked a million times yet is still persists for some reason.
The last good study I read showed a gap of something like 5% which was in the statistical margin and was largely accounted for by negotiation tactics.
For an anecdote I (a male) earn less than many other men in my same job, and same experience level. Why because I am TERRIBLE at salary negotiation, (or any other price negotiation, i.e I prefer the CarMax pay what the sticker says model to the haggle over every last $1 model)
At the same time, I have been involved in the hiring of both male and female employees in the IT world, never once at any time I have ever seen, heard or been a part of discussions where a person would be offered to get a lower salary simply because of their gender.
Every hiring process I have ever been involved in the Pay scale is always set long before we even have any applicants. We have a budget, wages for each position are set based on the budget the gender or personal circumstances of the person have no factor in it. We have to find someone that not only fits the job requirements, but also the salary requirements. That can be a challenge, and we have had to pass on candidates simply because we could not meet their salary demands.
Moving jobs is the best way to get a large pay increase, especially if you're underpaid in your current job. Once you tell them how much you currently make, you've screwed yourself. This is a negotiating tactic used by employers to know how much they'll set as their upper bound for pay.
Your employer may have strict pay bounds set, but a lot of places don't. The pay can vary highly between candidates, especially if the candidates are weak negotiators. If you disclose your current salary, you're a weak negotiator, but employers put a lot of pressure on you to disclose it. I tend to tell employers that I'm not allowed to disclose my salary, which ends that part of the conversation, but most people don't know to do this.
This law benefits you just as much as it does women.
I dont disagree with much of what you said, I am mainly speaking out against the pay gap myth.
As far as disclosing pay, I alway deflect it and treat the question as them asking me what my salary expectations are, which likely ends up doing the same thing, but I dont think I have ever told a company what my salary was at a previous job
My current employer never asked, they said "this job pays X per year" did get a small increase over that first offer but not alot.
At this point in my career though (17 years in) I focus less on raw salary and more on working environment, I would rather take a lower salary to have a care free easy environment than make 15% more but have a high stress high demanding employer. Been there done that... not for me.
[1] - this is a good report, but it uses a different definition of "gender pay gap" than parent - it does not analyze a "pay gap" for the same position/same experience(i.e. gender discrimination), but rather the aggregated difference in payments men and women receive for their work, which are affected by a multitude of factors(referenced in the study) - men working more, full-time, longer careers, different types of jobs, etc..
[2] - there are no sources or data analysis in their report, it's just infographics. Even then, their definition of the gender pay gap is similar to [1]:
"The report flags a clear risk, however: the choices that young women undergrads are making now are setting them up to enter the workforce with fewer digital skills, less mentoring advice and lower interest in pursuing high-paying jobs, compared with their male peers. "
"Adding to this imbalance is the fact that women are much less likely than men to have paid work (50 percent and 76 percent, respectively). This contributes to a hidden pay gap that increases the economic inequities between women and men. Based on the hidden pay gap, our research shows that for every $100 a woman earns, a man earns $258. Since women are usually responsible for the bulk of unpaid work, such as child care and housekeeping, the
effects of the hidden pay gap for them are immense."
At a minimum it does appear I have a better ability to read and understand what I am reading because none of those sources refute what i stated.
Number 1 is not comparing Equal Work and experiance, infact one of their summary bullet points is how part time women earn less than Full Time men... ummm yea. Part time people earn less than Full Time people.. That is not a earth shattering fact nor it is a symptom of sexism
They also point out that Part time women earn MORE than part time men...
Further most of the study looks at Overall wages in general with out comparing actual job roles to job role. This is a general misdirection often used by people that want to invent sexism where there is none. The fact that women often choose careers in fields that are traditionally lowering paying like Social Work, or Teaching is not a symptom of sexism
> Once you tell them how much you currently make, you've screwed yourself.
This is the truth. When I finished my CS degree and started looking for work, I had a recruiter tell me I shouldn't expect any pay over my previous job, and since my previous job was a software testing internship for $12.75/hr, I shouldn't expect more than $15/hr or so. I said "Yeah, no. I'm not taking a software engineering job for barely over $30k/year." He insisted that's how the industry works, even though my previous job was just an internship and wasn't even an engineering position.
I basically told him to pound sand, especially after he told me that at that position, I'd be expected to work 45-50 hours/week. Sure, I needed work, but I wasn't destitute.
I've been through 2 employers and working at my third. I've never disclosed my salary pre-interview. All three jobs at Bangalore, India. So no, that's not how the system works.
The best response to 'here's a penny more than you were making' is multiple offers.
The second best response is 'your offer is better, but inspires zero loyalty. If you want me to stay for longer than it takes for your competitors to get back to me with an offer, you'll improve that offer.'
> Except for the fact that male and female pay for the same job, and experience level are statistically the same and there is no actual pay gap.
Sure, but if women have a harder time getting promoted then they also have a harder time getting the same job and experience. Thus, even if women are being paid the same when they have the same job and experience, the discrimination still exists and they are still as a group prone to being paid less. Perhaps we should name it something more appropriate than wage gap though since the nuance is lost.
That still doesn't support the idea there is a need to "minimize the wage gap" by controlling what questions an employer can ask. If such a bias does exist it won't be eliminated because they aren't allowed to ask a single question.
Most research I've seen show that it's the women who are failing to take initiative in asking for raises, rather than the employer purposefully holding them back.
Yet the pretext of these laws is always under the assumption it's the employer actively doing something to block it instead of passively not offering it to people who don't ask (for whatever cultural or biological reason), likewise the women are not active but also passive in this situation.
Additionally you made the same jump in logic to assume women aren't getting the same jobs, the study was limited to promotions and this can't be easily assumed either.
This isn't about blaming the victim either but if you're going to micromanage it at least have to clear motivations and end goals that are being controlled for...
> If such a bias does exist it won't be eliminated because they aren't allowed to ask a single question.
Agreed.
> Most research I've seen show that it's the women who are failing to take initiative in asking for raises, rather than the employer purposefully holding them back.
Yet the pretext of these laws is always under the assumption it's the employer actively doing something to block it instead of passively not offering it to people who don't ask (for whatever cultural or biological reason), likewise the women are not active but also passive in this situation.
I don't get that impression but that's a fair point.
> Additionally you made the same jump in logic to assume women aren't getting the same jobs, the study was limited to promotions and this can't be easily assumed either.
Is it unreasonable to assume that someone with a higher position and more responsibilities would have an easier time landing a higher position job at another company? Or perhaps I'm not understanding what you're saying?
> This isn't about blaming the victim either but if you're going to micromanage it at least have to clear motivations and end goals that are being controlled for...
> The $0.79 on the $1 shit has been debunked a million times yet is still persists for some reason.
Because a certain group of people insists that the original $0.77 on the $1 statistic DID control for career choice and the like...even though it didn't. Any claims to the contrary are obviously misogynistic lies continuing the patriarchy. \eyeroll\
I've always said...if the pay gap really WAS that big, then why would employers bother to hire men?
That questioning of the gap being that big makes me think about this exchange Milton Friedman had with some college students in like the 70s or something regarding equal pay for equal work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsIpQ7YguGE
Yes, it's a real average that proves that a female teacher makes less than a male mechanical engineer. How does that help anyone, other than pushing a false narrative?
Well, it might tell us the shape of discrimination is less overt and more structural. Why exactly was it that out of my CS graduating class of 100 there was 1 woman?
Given the supplied anecdote, it is because 99 men and 1 woman completed the requirements for a CS degree, for whatever reasons the individuals decided go do so.
Let's step aside the point of generalizing one anecdote to be representative, however. Can we really assign the disparity solely to microaggressions against women? Would we feel the same if the split were 75/25,or 51/49? What is the threshold of equality with respect to noise?
> Can we really assign the disparity solely to microaggressions against women?
No. Did I suggest that? I don't think I did. All I mentioned was structural disparity, which is likely multivariate. Microaggressions is a strange thing to jump to from the conversation, compared to say, the effect of video game marketing on preferences, the attitudes of parents and guidance counselors, or parental fears about internet predators and private PCs for children.
I don't have data readily available on this, but there weren't that many women declaring CS to start with, and I kind of expect that if we divided CS freshmen men into 'has written a program before' and 'has not', attrition rates for women would track the 'has not' fairly closely.
> Would we feel the same if the split were 75/25,or 51/49?
I don't know where the bright line is, and there probably isn't one. If it exists, it'd probably exist be between those to ratios. But the fact is it's more imbalanced than either ratio suggested, which should probably motivate policy changes more strongly.
I don't... don't really get why the above poster's observation is not inline given national graduation rates for CS. Seems within the expected distribution, no?
> Can we really assign the disparity solely to microaggressions against women? Would we feel the same if the split were 75/25,or 51/49? What is the threshold of equality with respect to noise?
Why don't you use your powerful male thoughts to do some basic bayesian modeling and come up with some proposals? Many people have so maybe you can borrow their work, if that sounds like too much effort.
Here's a fun one: Stats suggest in the US that men:women declare majors ~3:1 across all engineering disciplines but ~2:1 in computer science at the outset. However, when we look at graduation rates proportional to the whole of their class in 2016 we saw: computer sciences (17.9%), engineering (19.3%), physical sciences (39%) and mathematics (43.1%).
Computer science has an abnormally high attrition rate despite a increased chance of declaration for major. Other similarly complex and abstract disciplines such as mathematics (which CS leans upon heavily to get any real work done) do not have such a falloff.
So gosh. Where do YOU draw the line? Care to show us the work for how you derived it? I'd love to know.
I could probably get numbers for major vocational education startups. I think I might go pursue that. Since many of those are online, they'll have less noise from on-campus harassment.
This has been brought up so many times that it would be off-topic just for bone-crushing tedium if it weren't already off limits as ideological trolling. Feel free to search HN for the countless flamewars we've already had about it. It's a perfect example of the kind of unsubstantive, inflammatory discussion we don't want here.
You took the thread into a tedious, pointless flamewar and broke the rules by being uncivil as well. We ban accounts that do these things, so please read the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow them from now on.
Janitors tend to be male. Housekeepers tend to be female. It is similar work with a different name. This is really common. It has been documented that when a job becomes a predominantly female job, society tends to pay less than when it was a male job.
The crux of the issue here is that no matter how you slice it and dice it, on average, women make less money than men. Arguing that it isn't really due to sexism and that women just have interests in fields that happen to pay less is a pretty crappy justification for a well documented, unarguable fact.
>>Janitors tend to be male. Housekeepers tend to be female. It is similar work with a different name
Except it is not really the Same Job. Janitors tend to be the job title for Commercial, Industrial, and Business crews that do far more than just some light cleaning. For example the janitorial staff at my company operates medium duty equipment (Zamboni Style Scrubbers, polishers, large compactors, etc), has specialized training in hazard waste disposal, and does light maintenance tasks such as painting
Housekeepers are an occupation that is mainly Residential the involves primary light duty cleaning with limited exposure to non-household type chemicals
Calling the 2 jobs "similar" shows your ignorance of the occupations
>Arguing that it isn't really due to sexism and that women just have interests in fields that happen to pay less is a pretty crappy justification for a well documented, unarguable fact.
I believe I have, and will continue to argue these points, as they are not actually facts. That are ignorant statements with no basis in reality
You are cherry picking. You did not reply to these parts of what I said:
It has been documented that when a job becomes a predominantly female job, society tends to pay less than when it was a male job.
The crux of the issue here is that no matter how you slice it and dice it, on average, women make less money than men.
We can debate all the live long day exactly why women tend to make less than men, but that is an established fact. Furthermore, when teaching was a male profession, it paid better than after it became a female profession. This is such an established phenomenon there is a term for it: The Pink Collar Ghetto.
Your original remark top which I was replying was this:
Why are you not asking why out of 100 janitors, or 100 trash collectors there are only 1 women?
I love how every time this subject somes up it is always how there is a lack of women in tech, never pluming, janitorial, auto mechanics, etc. Only Tech.
And I am telling you women already do similar work to janitors. It just has a different name and pays less. You are moving the goal posts. Your position seems to boil down to "No matter what you say, I am fine with women making less money than men and I will justify it to the end of time."
So, I regret trying to engage you. This does not seem to be a good faith argument and your remarks come awfully close to being personally insulting to me.
One of the reasons people talk a lot about the lack of women in tech is that it is a highly desirable job. You know that. You know that janitorial work and plumbing is not nearly as cushy, attractive or well paid as IT. You are de facto objecting to any concern expressed about "Why are the cushiest, best paid and most prestigious jobs held almost entirely by men?" and tossing in a lot of flak to distract from that question.
> I understand, I would hate to be proven wrong as much as you have been in this exchange.
What a revealing sentiment. It speaks to your desire not to engage people here, or share insight or build consensus, but rather a desire to score debate points.
What's more, your entire argument is about addressing tangential (and debatable) inconsistencies and not actually addressing the larger point. If you think observers are blind to this, you're dead wrong.
If you really want to argue that there isn't a wage gap, scoffing and sniping won't work. The overton window, as they say, has shifted. The burden's on you now to provide an alternate hypothesis and shift the consensus.
Consider what this website is for. Folks with math, science or computer education are going to demand a higher standard than sniping around the edges of an argument attempting to discourage the debate.
> I am not arguing there is no wage gap, I am stating a proven fact there is no wage gap.
Oh, you have a proof? Can I see the analysis and its methodology that prove this? What techniques were used? What data sets we're incorporated. How did this model interpret attrition?
> Outside extreme left authoritarian circles,
Sorry, but this doesn't work for leftists or arch conservatives on Hacker News. You make an assertion, you gotta back it up. No appealing to "these bad people" politics here. It's quite off-topic, and speaks the aforementioned lack of sincerity in your engagement with people here.
> To narrow the focus more to what we seem to normally come to "Why are there not very many female programmers", that is not a symptom of employment sexism, that demographic is not going after those jobs. Now we can debate the reason for this, often tracing it to High School or other teenage development factors, not to employment sexism.
So, this really isn't the wage gap your aiming talking to. This is that silly, unsourced, appeal-to-fringe-evolutionary-biology argument Damore posited.
But as I've pointed out in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15509045), your appeal to a home&hearth bias sabotaging pipines is not really supported in the data. NSF's data shows better enrollment in CS but more attrition, a phenomenon that is striking considering we don't see it in equally difficult and computer-engaged fields.
Ultimately this is a common argument that says, "Women just prefer less valuable work. They love being cheap or unpaid labor." It's a very just-so argument that let's anyone paint a bullseye around any wage gap and say, "Women just prefer it this way who knows why but it sure is lucky for us!" It's striking in the CS world given the staccatto series of sexual harassment and discrimination claims and suits that 2016 and 2017 bring us. Women are saying, in public and in court, that it's not so. But curiously, listening to them brands you "authoritarian left" and "anti-male."
You claim to be a Libertarian in your writing here. Are you sure though? Unfair systemic bias goes against the heart of the libertarian ideals. If you don't have a commitment to meritocracy, what do you stand for?
It seems to me like you're deliberately avoiding the wealth of data showing a 3-7% in-band pay gap between women and men in our industry. Why?
> You claim there is a wage gap, and have no "backed it up" so show me your research because I guarantee any study you post I can show you how your are misinterpreting the data.
Sorry, you cannot respond to a request for proof with a "well you prove me wrong then!" You entered this conversation with the positive claim divergent from the consensus. The burden is on you.
And again, this shows a profound bias in your thinking. You pre-discard any and all evidence. You're here to demand people assume your point of view, not to have a conversation or expose truth. You're here to browbeat people.
> The reason for women are on lower paying job roles can be debated but it is outside the topic of a pay gap.
So demonstrate, with the data, that women's pay follows the same distribution as men's pay. This is not proving a negative, you made a positive claim. You can prove it. Lots of data is public. Go present the evidence and your analysis and demand people refute it. You cannot simply assert it by force of will and expect it to be taken seriously when so many studies exist on page 1 of google that suggest otherwise have survived scrutiny.
> What this conversation is about is an employer paying a female lower wages for the exact same job simply because she is female.
And yet every refutation you have offered takes this substantiated claim as already disproven then searches for a hypothesis for why the average exists. That's bad analysis.
> Again you have conflated 2 things.
I am trying to focus on the wage gap but you've repeatedly broached alternative hypothesis. I'm just trying to keep up.
> You seem to want to expand this discussion to more than just a gender pay gap
Given the substantiation of the existence of a pay gap, I question the value of listening to hollow and unsubstantiated refutations which as a preconception dismiss any evidence as "misinterpreted."
I think you're being intellectually dishonest here. I think you want to disprove the pay gap because you don't like it. But you lack the techniques or motivation to do so, so you are trying to push that forward via pure force of will, inverting the burden of proof as if the null hypothesis is not a testable and verifiable claim.
I've given you a great deal of my time and been as gracious as I know how to be about calling you on these tactics. I will not reply further unless you bring concrete data to the thread. Good luck & good day.
"that’s the median (midpoint) for all women in all jobs, not for women doing “the same work” or even necessarily working the same number of hours. Furthermore, the raw gap for all women is not quite as large when looking at weekly earnings rather than yearly earnings."
"Female bookkeeping clerks and stock clerks actually made slightly more than their male counterparts, for example. Registered nurses made nearly 96 percent, elementary and middle school teachers made 91 percent, secondary school teachers made 94 percent, and police officers made 99 percent."
"however wide or narrow the gap, discrimination by employers isn’t responsible for all of it. In fact, a women’s pay specialist in Obama’s own Department of Labor — even as she was arguing that pay discrimination is not a “myth” — said research shows discrimination accounts for less than half of the raw pay gap."
"flatly wrong to say that women are paid 77 percent of the pay of men for the “same work.” And the fact that women’s median annual earnings are 77 percent of men’s isn’t all or even mostly due to discrimination, as the ad implies."
" Statistical analysis that includes those variables has produced results that collectively account for between 65.
1 and 76.4 percent of a raw gender wage gap of 20.4 percent, and thereby leave an adjusted gender wage gap that is between 4.8 and 7.1 percent.... Additional portions of the
raw gender wage gap are attributable to other explanatory factors that have been identified in the existing economic literature, but cannot be analyzed satisfactorily using only data from the 2007 CPS. Those factors include, for example, health insurance, other fringe benefits, and detailed features of overtime work, which are sources of wage adjustments that compensate specific groups of workers for benefits or duties that disproportionately affect them. Analysis of such compensating wage adjustments generally requires data from several independent and, often,
specialized sources.
"The size and pattern of quantitative results found in those studies and their coherence with the corresponding quantitative results in this study indicate that the results in this study describe wage differentials experienced by people who actually interrupted their careers, rather than wage adjustments imposed broadly on groups of workers with specific attributes"
Basically they conclude that there is a small pay gap, that is often attributable to other factors then gender discrimination such as employers that offer more family benefits longer vacations and have more lack sick time policy often pay less as well. In additional to many women taking more time off for leave after having a child than a man does, this interruption in work experience has a negative impact on earning potential
Time has some good sources
http://time.com/3222543/wage-pay-gap-myth-feminism/
"No matter how many times this wage gap claim is decisively refuted by economists, it always comes back. The bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure or hours worked per week. When such relevant factors are considered, the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing."
Not a study but I think it is a good read on the subject (https://fee.org/articles/truth-and-myth-on-the-gender-pay-ga...) and more or less lays what I have been attempting to say, that there likely is sexism but it is not at the employer level at least not when it comes to wage setting
"All the economic studies say is that differences in skills, experiences, and preferences between men and women explain the clear majority of the gap. What such studies do not address is the degree to which the differences in men’s and women’s skills and knowledge (their “human capital”) is due to sexism before they come to the labor market. Nor do such studies ask whether differences in preferences or job experience by gender are also due to sexism or other aspects of socialization.
For example, if girls are told from a young age that girls aren’t very good at math and science, and are thereby discouraged from majoring in those areas and earning higher salaries as a result, those factors will contribute to the 80% figure. But notice, that’s not because employers are discriminating. If sexism pushes women into lower paying fields, that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily being paid less than men for the same work in that field. What’s causing their lower wages is sexism in places other than the markets. "
You are focusing on the aggregate earning gap when you take all the wages of all women, and then compare them to the wage of all men.
While that might have value in social science on some wider scale, in the this topic today it has none as we are talking about a law that prevents potential employers from asking about previous wages and how that can "help solve the pay gap", that type of pay gap does not exist female programmers do not earn significantly less money than male programmers at the same company, with the same experience. The problem is not a employer pay gap, but the fact there are not as many female programmers
Go work on that, not attempting to solve a none problem of a mythical pay gap
I don't have any problem with being proven wrong. You haven't proven anything I have said wrong. You are merely being contemptuous and not engaging in a good faith fashion.
Which false narrative is this? That women get paid less?
If an average exists then an average exists. We can talk about how it's structured, but the existence of an average pay gap is hard to dispute at this point.
If you find that narrative offensive, ask yourself why. I suspect the motivations are not very laudable.
> Why are you so eager to assert the labor of women is obviously worth less?
What an insane and condescending assumption.
I support focusing effort on training women for high paying jobs. I support researching why women don't study STEM degrees as much as men, and working to mitigate that gap.
I do not, however, support paying those that study less valuable "feel-good" degrees more money just because more women choose to go down that path.
And finally, I don't need to actively "support" women making the same as men within the same professions, because that's already the reality we live in.
The next step I'd like to see is for them to prohibit asking where you went to college. You still need to show credentials, but if you went to an accredited 4-year institution and got a BS in, say, chemistry, you would say you had an accredited BS in chemistry, and there would be a gov't database against which that claim could be checked. Someone who couldn't afford the tuition at a ritzy private school but still completed the same requirements for a BS in chemistry from an accredited state school would have the same access to jobs requiring an accredited BS in chemistry.
The next step after that would be for accreditation to be made more flexible, accommodating combinations of work-study, self-study, community college, private lab classes, and standardized testing to qualify a person for an accredited degree without having attended a traditional university at all.
Competition for admission to expensive, elite schools that apparently don't teach any better but simply pick the applicants who have already made themselves elite and charge them exorbitant fees to grant a brand-name credential which then boosts the value of the brand itself is distorting actual EDUCATION beyond all recognition.
The sooner employers have to judge applicant quality by means other than perceived eliteness of their school, the more diverse the paths to employment success can become, which ought to be a goal of both the left and the right politically.
> The next step after that would be for accreditation to be made more flexible, accommodating combinations of work-study, self-study, community college, private lab classes, and standardized testing to qualify a person for an accredited degree without having attended a traditional university at all.
You can already get an accredited 4-year (or graduate) degree without traditional University; e.g., through Western Governor's University, which is an accredited but non-traditional, competency-based, online school that’s been operating for almost 20 years.
Why is it more ridiculous? We already have laws against discrimination based on gender. If the issue isn't being solved, while being hands off, it seems natural to try something different.
> It feels like they treating us like children incapable of tying our own shoes or something
Well it does seem employers are incapable of eliminating the gender wage gap so perhaps the treatment is appropriate. Not that I blame them.. being unbiased is extremely difficult and requires a conscious effort.