I am sure the Labor Department will absolutely love Google giving raises specifically to men whilst under investigation for "systematically" underpaying women.
I've seen a couple of studies that suggest that the pay gap isn't so much sexism as it is men just being better at negotiating in general. But with all generalizations it's not true for the entire group, so there will be some women who are better at negotiating and some men that are worse and have salaries that reflect that.
Basically the real world is a lot more complicated than people think and there are many factors that lead to pay discrimination. Claiming that it is due to sexism is an oversimplification.
That's the explanation when men get paid more than women.
When women are getting paid more than men, there are no known explanations beyond sexism. Especially at Google who notoriously fired Damore for stating that maybe men and women have different preferences - it's pretty clear from the article, biased though it is, that the issue here is really Google managers systematically awarding pay increases to women rather than men, in order to try and boost their numbers.
A lot of people's pay at big tech companies is based on ability to negotiate at time of offer, not on job performance at the company. I know some women in the same role as me that got better initial offers because they were in a better position to negotiate. My assumption is that women that are underpaid because they didn't negotiate, or due to some other bias, or just due to random factors, would also want men in similar situations to be compensated equally.
Ideally two individuals in the same or similar roles, with similar performance over time in that role, should have the same salary regardless of background or negotiation ability. The major issue with this is that you can't reduce pay of rockstar negotiators (who may or may not be rockstar performers), and a correction that pays everyone as much as the highest earning equivalent employee might be hard for even Google to swallow.
It's really not difficult to understand that women are systematically paid less than men, and also that minorities (men and women) are systematically paid less than non-minorities. And that beyond pay disparity at a given job title, there is also an issue with higher titles underrepresenting women in general, as well as minorities.
> It's really not difficult to understand that women are systematically paid less than men, and also that minorities (men and women) are systematically paid less than non-minorities.
It's not difficult to understand why people believe this might be true, but it is difficult to understand why people accept this as fact when the empirical data of systematic underpayment isn't all that solid.
Not OP but almost every one of these studies takes the total sum of money men make vs the total sum of money women make and compares it that way without taking into account the job title, years of experience, time off, etc.
Those are mainly mainstream articles, politicians' and celebrity talking points. They don't even account for the type of job, hours worked, danger of the job, etc.
There are some good studies on this subject that I've read over the years though, for instance one among lawyers in a firm in which women were paid about 2-3% lower than men, on average IIRC. But these often don't or can't take into account personality characteristics. For instance, women on average are more agreeable and so often don't negotiate as hard as men on their salary.
When controlling for all factors, wage differences largely disappear.
Agreed.
Granted if anyone has actual evidence of gender pay discrimination I'm 100% for fighting those battles when they come up, but I'm tired of the same old "Women make 77% what men do!!!!1" headlines and people taking them at full face value.
No, what it shows is that women choose different careers that overall yield the ratio you cite. Everyone already knew this, the point is that such a statistic is misleading.
The authors also conjecture that this is due to cultural biases, but obviously cannot prove this.
For instance, their overview that women arrive in college less interested in STEM, and they hint suggestively that this is due to discrimination. Except this hypothesis doesn't at all explain the gender equality paradox; in fact, it predicts the exact opposite of what we see.
Normally in science, a falsification this strong would immediately dismiss a hypothesis as a viable candidate theory. It's suggestive that it hasn't.
That's why we need salary transparency to really address this. There are a lot underpaid men and a lot of overpaid women. Making this into a male vs. female issue does nothing to address the fact that people are underpaid.
I think it would quite quickly turn into yet another source of conflict between employees. The problem with "equal pay" is direct comparisons only work in jobs that are essentially assembly line work, e.g., person A and person B do exactly the same thing every single day, and their output can be measured in exactly the same way, namely how many widgets each person produces in a given time period. Finding a difference in pay in that situation is cause for concern.
But that's not how a lot of jobs, software development included, work. It's entirely possible for someone fresh out of school to be a far more valuable team member than someone with ten years experience... yet we would point to a disparity in pay between those two people as [sexist, ageist, whatever-ist]. Now let an experienced employee find out they're getting paid less than someone with far less experience? Hooo boy, talk about creating a toxic environment.
Performance is one explanation between differences between two people but will it explain differences between one sample of thousands and another sample of thousands? Are men really less performant than women on aggregate?
> Are men really less performant than women on aggregate?
I don't think that's the conclusion being reached here. What I'm getting at is performance is a VERY hard thing to quantify to everyone's satisfaction (after all, I doubt anyone thinks that they aren't a valuable employee, and everyone has numerous examples of "well this other guy sucks, I'm much better than him"), but it has a major impact on pay.
But for this specific case, there's one of two things happening:
1. As another poster said, "men" is code for "men working under H1-B visas."
2. In an effort to not look sexist, Google let the pendulum swing the other way and pay women more out of general principle.
I think this only really comes up when pay disparity is as extreme as it is now, when some people at a company (outside of C-level) are making 300k and others are making 32k there is a good reason to be aggressive about fixing pay disparity.
>when some people at a company (outside of C-level) are making 300k and others are making 32k there is a good reason to be aggressive about fixing pay disparity
Why? That's far too simplistic. Are you comparing e.g. a senior engineer to a part time janitor? Why should their pay be closer?
Look at the position and demand for it. Comparing salary without context is a waste of time (unless you truly believe market forces shouldn't be relevant, but I think you'll have a hard time convincing people in the US to join your side.)
>...when some people at a company (outside of C-level) are making 300k and others are making 32k there is a good reason to be aggressive about fixing pay disparity.
You're completely throwing context out of the window, though, and that's a dangerous precedent. Is the person making 300k in sales? Is the person making 32k merely the frontline helpdesk?
To try to "even it out, to decrease the dispairity, and - thus - the inequality" would mean the sales person and the helpdesk person making around 150k but only one of them is performing highly skilled, desired, sought-after work and the other is a generalist whom can easily be replaced. You intentionally devalue the sales person to add unwarranted value to the frontline helpdesk person.
So, your sales person leaves and your helpdesk person stays with your company until they either die or company runs under or what-have-you. They could improve themselves to move up the ranks but where's the onus for that, if they're already making gold bars, without having had to have done anything to actually earn that value?
The entire premise is wrought with problems because it doesn't address the principal fact that the desparities probably exist for a reason...
"I think it would quite quickly turn into yet another source of conflict between employees. "
there are plenty of environments where salaries are known and there is not more conflict than anywhere else. For example Congress staffers' salaries are public, there are huge pay differences for the same position but it sill works.
I think most arguments against transparency are spread by employers to keep the information asymmmwetry.In most markets the party that has more information will have the advantage.
> direct comparisons only work in jobs that are essentially assembly line work
Counter-example: pay on commission. Salespeople are "directly compared", but are not doing exactly the same work. Still, the work they are doing is fungible—you can compute the value in dollars both of closing one big account, or ten small accounts, and compare those.
This is essentially how a very small subset of IT people get paid, as well: vulnerability researchers, who make a living off of bug bounty programs.
Attempts have been made to expand this approach. Some FOSS projects have bounties on each issue, where whoever submits a PR for that issue (that gets merged) gets paid the bounty.
The question is how to scale this approach to work that requires more than a single person to complete. (I.e. how to distribute the "spoils" of a bounty among a team.) There are historical examples one could look at of bounty programs where the entrants were teams (e.g. the Netflix Prize), but IIRC in none of them were any of the teams really motivated by the bounty above all; rather, they were just in competition with the other teams to be the first ones to solve an eminently-achievable-but-challenging problem, and it was competition for competition's sake—essentially, a sport.
I don't think that's realistic to try and implement at many people's places of work.
Stable incomes are essential for most people's sanity. Always being at risk of having projects shift away from work you do, and to work other people do directly conflicts with that stability most people are looking for. You could be spending an incredible amount of time trying to catch up with another project, while still maintaining your own, all the while having the looming threat of not being able to pay your bills over you head.
Freelancer type pay isn't for everyone.
Which goes back to that issue of not having an objective measurement to pay by.
>I think it would quite quickly turn into yet another source of conflict between employees. The problem with "equal pay" is direct comparisons only work in jobs that are essentially assembly line work, e.g., person A and person B do exactly the same thing every single day, and their output can be measured in exactly the same way, namely how many widgets each person produces in a given time period. Finding a difference in pay in that situation is cause for concern.
When I was in industry, our company was a 20-person R&D house that paid everyone equally, from new hires like me to founders of the company. And it worked great!
The first company I worked for did equal pay for all new hires, but pay raises and promotions were variable and the raise percentages varied on company performance (so a promotion could be +7% on quarter and then +6.5% the next quarter).
We would all occasionally compare over the years and it would always come up that there would be a small difference (<$1k) where someone happened to hit a lucky streak of getting promoted in a better % year, and people's feelings would be hurt.
In reality, the person fresh out of school is likely being underpaid and would benefit greatly from salary transparency. I.e your example is working against the point you are trying to make.
I like to imagine (although it probabbly isn't true) that then I'd get less recruiter spam for jobs where they want to pay squat.... like "Did you check my salary and think you have something to offer? If so, let's talk."
Granted, that probabbly wouldn't stop recruiter spam and of course there is MUCH MORE to a good job than pay.
Seeing as how CV stands for Curriculum Vitae and is used by academics who do a lot of publishing in journals and I have never created a CV... I believe you are lying.
I think a lot of salaried Google employees have family members too.
If a woman is promoted over a man in the name of gender equality, are his three daughters better off because of the new equality? Are "women" better off?
I don't see how that is relevant. We should not take into account the size of dependant family members. In our field, our jobs should be flexible enough to accommodate anyone, with paid leave, sick leave, flexible schedules. We should also end gender/race/etc discrimination, and that means being more proactive about getting our culture to change, which often means having some affirmation action in order to break the cycle.
the issue is when do you stop that affirmative action. and if you pay lower level women engineers more to offset male managers pay and reduce your gender pay gap than I think you're doing it wrong. and this pushes people to the far right. I've seen it countless of times
yeah its literally ridiculous what the discrepancies are in information sources, and the informational asymetry just leads to more confusion and inequality. Ive found sources like levels.fyi to be a lot more useful than glassdoor/etc because you can see that breakdown and individual data points and see what you deserve to be paid
Why does a 3rd party need to nose into a consenting financial transaction? We should sooner have a 3rd party nosing into a sexual transaction. Oh I forgot men don't have agency over their financial matters because leftism has taken it away
Salary transparency is not possible and would be highly misleading because jobs are not standardized. A "senior Java developer" can be anything. Then you would have to provide a job description in a comparable format for every salary which is not trivial, if feasible at all.
Salary transparency without job descriptions would be akin to showing house prices without describing house details - location, square footage, number of bedrooms, etc.
IMO, companies should not be allowed to keep salaries private but I do think employees should be able to keep their own salaries private. I don't want coworkers or the public to know my income for all sorts of reasons. It's just not anyone else's business.
This whole notion that the only way for someone who thinks they aren't paid enough to get a raise is to know everyone else's salary and then use that as leverage is absurd. If you feel like you aren't paid enough ask for a raise and explain why you feel that way. If you're turned down look for a different job that values you at a level you're comfortable with. If you still can't make the amount you desire maybe then it is time to check your own assumptions and see what you can do to provide more value so that you can get it in return.
It's absolutely the business of everyone who works for that company.
People are trading their time based on certain assumptions, including the viability of the company; seeing the company's books is a vital way to do that.
"Trust me" is a shitty position for companies to put workers in, and yet we see again and again how they go under and leave people (individuals, families, etc) in the lurch.
Secrecy never benefits the person in the weaker position.
I'm not sure we have the same definition of "fine" - government workers are usually not a shining light when it comes to motivation, productivity, etc.
Compare two developers. One just codes and the other not only knows how to code but knows how to debug (native, runtimes, etc.). So, then you publish developer 1's pay salary and developer 2's pay salary.
Now, developer 1 has a rage-boner because developer 2 is being paid more but there's the reason of his/her desirable skills being utilised in the role. Yet, developer 1 doesn't see this qualifiable reason and just sees this as being unfair/unequal.
Pay transparency would only exacerbate the current problems around pay, not help alleviate them.
For what? For pay transparency look at Congress staffers, lot of state employees, a lot of CEOs, the military or some tech companies. For the second point I think it's pretty well known that markets can only properly function if all participants have the relevant information.
> markets can only properly function if all participants have the relevant information.
That's the reason why it's criminal for employers to punish employees for discussing compensation with each other and why employers try their hardest to prevent that from happening.
I posit that in a lot of (most) companies profit is born wholly by the underpaid employees.
All public servants or just those paid by your statea and/or federal governments? Could you find out how much someone made at the NSA, for example?
>Sweden.
Tax returns are not the same as pay transparency. In premise, yes, in practice, no, because a tax return is based on taxable income only. So, let's say I have tax credits for having three kids. My taxable income would be vastly different from yours, if you have no kids.
Professional sports is one that is brought up frequently. Athletes seem to be fine with being paid different amounts, and they too must work as a team to succeed.
>there are plenty of situations where that better dev gets paid less. salary transparency will address that
Plenty of situations? Where? Documented somewhere, I should hope, yeah?
Is that better dev from a subjective or an objective perspective?
The reason that I ask is because one dev can think that they're better than another and believe that they should be paid more but that could very well be the fault of fevered ego and not, necessarily, a reflection of reality, yeah?
Also, salary transparency wouldn't actually address anything. It would be a tool to address the salary issue with management and management (plus, HR) would address it, yeah?
"Also, salary transparency wouldn't actually address anything. It would be a tool to address the salary issue with management and management (plus, HR) would address it, yeah?"
The first step to address issues is to gather relevant data so an informed decision can be made. right now we have only very incomplete data.
not to mention the fact that there may be a junior developer 1a at a lower tier that can do everything developer 2 can do (and better) that is getting paid massively less...
Exactly. That's the point. Just pricing information (be it salary or car prices) makes little sense.
Market transparency that you mentioned earlier makes sense only for standardized goods/services. Software jobs are not standardized and many people don't want their colleagues to know how much their earn.
> a lot underpaid men and a lot of overpaid women.
As a fun thought exercise, imagine that you were the head of a multi-national conglomerate (or working in the interests of a multinational conglomerate) who stood to gain from paying people as little as possible. Would it be in your best interest to: a) standardize pay fairly or b) convince some people that they were being mistreated to the benefit of some other people and watch them fight each other while you laughed from your corner office, puffing cigars lit off of $100 bills?
I love the irony of this. Accused of underpaying women - their reaction is "let us get some data". Nope. underpaying men. This is the way you do things. You collect the data, analyze and react. Wash rinse repeat.
A similar thing has happened with companies that go to great lengths to make sure they don't have any gender bias in their hiring process (no face-to-face during interviews, voice altering during phone interviews, etc.) only to find that they still selected more men than women. The conclusion, of course, is that they must be doing something wrong because it's simply impossible that they wouldn't be selecting a perfect 50/50 mix of men and women.
Similarly, I think imagine Google will find similar flaws with how these numbers were generated.
It's extremely difficult to actually hide all signs of gender, even with the measures you mentioned. Even simple things like the way a job advertisement or a resume is worded can suggest the genders of the people involved in a statistically predictable way. For example: http://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com/static/documents/Gauch...
Given that Google's workforce is 69% men, it's quite possible that they found 3 men underpaid for every 2 women who were underpaid (60%/40%), which would mean they gave more men than women salary equity adjustments while still having a bias in the direction of the original complaint.
It's not a contest of who is more underpaid. This would indicate that Google systematically underpays, regardless of gender. THAT is the real issue here.
Lots of people want to work in game development. Lots of people do. Some people say game devs are underpaid. I tend to think that they're paid what they agreed to accept and that is based in large part on market forces (supply and demand, value over replacement, etc.). I also left game development because it wasn't for me long-term. (I was underpaid relative to what I could make in another industry, but I wasn't underpaid by my game-dev company. They quickly hired a replacement for me, I'm sure.)
A company like Google, paying substantially over minimum wage, is probably not underpaying most employees systematically, almost by definition IMO.
> I was underpaid relative to what I could make in another industry, but I wasn't underpaid by my game-dev company.
If a company underpays all its employees equally, it's still underpaying. Companies that do this are taking advantage of how people are not rational actors.
In the context of video game companies, it's the comparison to other software companies and positions requiring about the same level of experience and prestige. Game producers are well-known at this point for recruiting naive grads and paying them peanuts compared to what they could get even just making CRUD web apps.
It's likely that many charities underpay software developers, because the developers are working there voluntarily in part for the mission.
Political campaigns have the same property in a lot of cases.
So long as people want to express their preferences in where they work based on the content of the work, the mission of the organization, the laptops they issue, or any other set of criteria, I think it's fair game that those choices tip the supply/demand relationship in or away from their favor.
I think a key difference here is that a greater awareness of market-rate salaries preemptively affect those "want to work on video games" decisions much more than working for a volunteer organization. Corporate organizations in general put a lot of effort and culture into suppressing open knowledge and comparisons of pay rates.
Not literally everyone can be underpaid, but most people can be underpaid, with a very small percentage paid fairly (and a smaller percentage overpaid)
I'm not sure, but you seem to be asking many questions in a pointed manner on this topic, while offering no answers or even interpretations of your own.
I don't claim to have any of the answers, and it is a really hard problem. I'm just pointing out that it doesn't mathematically make sense to claim that everyone can be underpaid relative to each other^, and that the claim that software engineers are underpaid in general relative to the value they create is a separate issue.
^ That's like saying that two people can each be shorter than each other. It's not possible according to the way the "less than" function is defined.
If you're underpaid, that means there is an opportunity for you that will pay more. Aside from H1B, I struggle to see how anyone at google is underpaid.
Not everybody is underpaid, but among the underpaid, they found men as well as women.
As random illustration, they might pay 200k+-5% to 80% of all level X developers, and the other 20% might only earn 150k+-5%.
I still agree that 'underpaid' is a difficult term here. Maybe the 80% are overpaid? The only hard fact in this example would be that the salary is more skewed than it should be for a 'fair' compensation.
What does the ideal salary distribution curve look like, anyway? Should it be a bell curve? A long-tail distribution? Should it have distinct peaks, i.e. everyone with the same YOE is paid exactly the same?
Should the salary distribution mirror the talent distribution, or no?
Good questions. I think that compensation should mirror the value an employee provides to the company. However, in many cases, that is very hard or even impossible to measure.
In large companies with many career levels, the role level indicates the perceived value for the company. Then, the distribution within the level doesn't matter that much, as long as the difference between minimum and maximum pay is relatively small, and there is not much overlap to the neighborhood levels.
Of course, there is no objective criterion what "relatively small" means in this context.
And, as the article already points out, this only covers fairness within the same level. Maybe even more important is if everybody is evaluated in the same way when it comes to career progress.
If you believe that developers are within a factor of 33% of productivity (defined notionally as “value created per week”), then there is excessive skew in the numbers you propose.
I believe the productivity figures are at least a factor of 2, and probably a tail out to a factor of 10 or more versus the median developer (and then a left-going distribution under the median where a substaintial number of developers do not create any value at all). Under that set of beliefs, 20% making ~$150K and 80% making ~$200K is actually insufficient skew vs a “fair” system.
I wrote this in the context of the article, where a Google developer with 33% more productivity would already have progressed to the next role level. At least, that is what I would assume for large companies.
Promotion is not centered primarily around productivity, at least not beyond SWE2 or whatever the second engineering level is in a given company. Ability to lead/influence at a scope larger than self is largely disjoint from individual productivity in coding.
I'm not implying that you are purposely doing anything. You like most people on HN are not sexist.
What is happening though is a flaw within our logical frameworks. Our cultural biases are making something evident.
If more women are underpaid than men, then that it is obviously and overtly a form of sexism... logically this implicates that If more men are underpaid than women then it is also sexism.
Instead of calling out the logical implication why do people jump to an illogical conclusion?
The question is now, do women experience sexism in terms of compensation at google or do men? Or do neither?
> Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money.
So they were compensated out of proportion with their demographic makeup of the company--they made up a larger share but needed more money to "catch up."
I think there's not enough information in the article to determine conclusively. Suppose men represent 75% of the compensation (due to senior ranks being skewed male more than lower ranks), 69% of the workforce, and received 72% of the salary equity increases. Were men or women "more" underpaid previously (assuming the equity increases themselves were "fair")?
This is an "inside" indicator, referencing that ol' ungenerous-but-pithy paraphrase of a since-disavowed Bill Gates quote regarding 640 kB of personal computer memory. It's like the phrase "modest proposal", in that you only know it's marking something as insincere with some out-of-band knowledge.
I would actually be surprised if big corps didn't try to pull in more diversity from H1Bs, American universities are particularly bad at producing gender balanced graduating classes.
The only surprising part to this is that it was made public.
>Women and racial minorities often do not get the same opportunities and they must overcome certain biases when they are hired or compete for promotions.
My problem with these kinds of "intrinsic biases" that white men are accused of is that they can only be shown to exist by accepting the fundamentally unproven assumption that we all enter the workforce equally capable in all industries, a position which is clearly untenable at a minimum because of cultural differences.
This is practically the definition of ideological, institutional bias, and the results will either be reduced efficiency across the workforce, or a violent swing of the ideological pendulum.
But the study did not tell the whole story of women at Google or in the technology industry more broadly, something that company officials acknowledged.
Most significantly, it did not address ingrained issues that, according to workplace experts, cannot be overcome simply by considering how much different people are paid for doing the same job: Women and racial minorities often do not get the same opportunities and they must overcome certain biases when they are hired or compete for promotions.
The media really needs to stop this practice of just saying "experts say" without any attribution.
I suggest when reading any article, when you read, "experts agree" or "sources say" or "critics have said" or "others are saying" -- just replace it with, "I, the author of this article, think ..."
Seriously, I read that and I immediately wondered who these experts are and what their data actually says, considering the entire article is about how empirical data actually debunked the commonly accepted narrative.
Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a consulting company that advises companies on strategies for increasing diversity, said the pay gap correction only served “to benefit a group that is dramatically overrepresented in engineering, and that faces fewer barriers to access and opportunity in the field.”
Also, from the article:
“We know that’s only part of the story,” Lauren Barbato, Google’s lead analyst for pay equity, people analytics, wrote in a blog post set to be made public on Monday. “Because leveling, performance ratings, and promotion impact pay, this year, we are undertaking a comprehensive review of these processes to make sure the outcomes are fair and equitable for all employees.”
This is an example of a NYT reporter filling in context so that they don't get pubicly shamed. It seems like a lot of reporters think it's their job to stop readers from reaching the obvious conclusions of their reporting, lest a larger narrative be lost.
I don't think the context is completely unjustified. It just happens to be more complicated than this. The reason that women generally drifted into higher compensation compared to men was that their direct management chain was adjusting their compensation disproportionately (when measured in aggregate, across the company).
You could come up with a lot of explanations for this effect. Women could have been hired at lower levels than appropriate and were therefore outperforming men of the same level, for instance. Or, perhaps, there's a lot of emphasis in the company towards retaining and compensating women fairly, and the effect was that managers were primed to reflect that in their pay raises -- in other words, people were personally overcompensating for the intrinsic biases they were told that they had. Still another reason might be that women just make better engineers, in aggregate.
Google decided that the goal was "equity" here and decided to correct it, for better or worse, and yet it's false to say that we already understand the cause behind the disparity.
> there's a lot of emphasis in the company towards retaining and compensating women fairly, and the effect was that managers were primed to reflect that in their pay raises
Or more broadly, supply/demand. There is a heavy demand for female tech workers, which tends to increase their salaries (both when hired and when countering outside offers).
If I had to guess, a)Not adding anything to the discussion, b)the implication that Jordan Peterson has anything of value to add to the conversation, and c)the tone of the message.
Jordan Peterson has been controversial in this topic in the past. I'm not really read up on the specifics though and I guess OP could have added more opinions to his post
Reminiscent of Simpson's Paradox, the most famous example being a gender discrimination lawsuit alleging UC Berkeley discriminated against women in admissions (57% men vs. 43% women).
It turned out there WAS bias - in favor of the women!
"The lawsuit triggered a study. The study results showed that not only were women not discriminated against, but that women had a statistically significant advantage!
Here’s what happened. Some departments had high acceptance rates and some had low acceptance rates. Women applied to more competitive departments. Men applied to more accessible departments. Taken on the whole men had an advantage. When broken down per department it was women who were more favored."
Simpson's paradox is a statistical phenomenon where you can measure one outcome in aggregate (e.g. total average pay by gender) and the opposite outcome when you segment (e.g average pay by gender AND job).
Univariate analyses can hide lots of interesting things!
Simpson's paradox is easily my favorite paradox. Anyone interested in interpreting stats, even from a lay perspective, should familiarize themselves with it.
You got too distracted by the Simpson's Paradox reference to see the actual Simpson's Paradox in play. As sokoloff [1] pointed out in a below thread, Google having an overwhelming male workforce means that there could still be a large bias against women at the same time that more man are being underpaid.
There is simply not enough information presented in this article to know whether there is truly a gender bias (in either direction) regarding how Google pays their employees.
I think we're moving the goalposts here: are we talking an abstract man, on average, in general earning more than an abstract, average women or we're talking about a different pay for the same work?
My understanding is that we're talking about the latter.
Does "same work" also include the hours worked? Usually not. If someone completes x projects in y hours, and someone else completes the same x projects in z hours, are they the same? Both did "the same work," but one was more efficient and did it faster (presuming the quality of the work by both parties was equal).
Yet we don't know what jobs women and men do at Google. There can be bias elsewhere in the system. For example women might be disproportionately hired as administrative assistants and men might be disproportionately hired as senior engineers. Both groups could then be compensated fairly and it would result in men receiving a disproportionately higher percentage of the money.
You've missed the point entirely. The comparisons are among peers in the same jobs. But it sounds like Google can't get its own data together in a sensible way, so you can't really trust any numbers in this article.
This is a good hint, but it's not enough information. Specifically, the jobs where the pay imbalance is likely greatest also would also likely have a more skewed gender ratio. But we can't know, because the article doesn't say, and just trusts Google's word on everything.
The article said disproportionately more underpayment was to men. Therefore your hypothetical scenario (which posits that the difference was measured in absolute terms) is not what Google found.
It wouldn't be the first time a news article had a poor understanding of statistics. But more importantly, you may find men occupy high salary roles in engineering whilst women work in HR - resulting in the salary changes going disproportionately to men, because a % increase in their salary is far higher than the women on lower salaries.
> But more importantly, you may find men occupy high salary roles in engineering whilst women work in HR - resulting in the salary changes going disproportionately to men, because a % increase in their salary is far higher than the women on lower salaries.
The article says the opposite with regard to where the salary adjustments went:
> One effect of the adjustments was to create a pronounced imbalance in compensation among lower-level software engineers, one of Google’s largest job groups, with a large number of men identified as being underpaid compared with their female peers. To offset that, further adjustments were made. Google said it saw no pattern in the reasons women were receiving more discretionary pay.
The passage you quote makes it clear the disparity is in absolute numbers, not proportions, as your earlier comment suggests.
Btw, note that this passage (that I also quoted yesterday for a comment of my own) is now nowhere to be found in the article, that has been heaviy edited since it was posted on HN.
> The passage you quote makes it clear the disparity is in absolute numbers, not proportions, as your earlier comment suggests.
It says no such thing. The "large number" of underpaid men is not being compared against the number of underpaid women.
The article still contains these quotes, which clearly establish that the equity pay raises went disproportionately to men:
> The study, which disproportionately led to pay raises for thousands of men [...]
> In response to the study, Google gave $9.7 million in additional compensation to 10,677 employees for this year. Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a higher percentage of the money.
>> a large number of men identified as being underpaid compared with their female peers
This sentence compares the number of men identified as underpaid to the number of women identified as underpaid.
>> The study, which disproportionately led to pay raises for thousands of men
"Disproportionate" is used to signify something that is "out of proportion", in a lay sense, not in the mathematical sense of the ratio between two numbers. It is not a mathematical term that signifies a comparison between percentages, as your comment seems to suggest.
>> they received a higher percentage of the money.
This says nothing about the proportion of men or women who were found to be underpaid. It refers to the percentage of men who received more money. The justification for that is that there are more men in the company.
> This sentence compares the number of men identified as underpaid to the number of women identified as underpaid.
No, it is saying that the definition of "underpaid" is "making less money than women at the same level."
> This says nothing about the proportion of men or women who were found to be underpaid. It refers to the percentage of men who received more money. The justification for that is that there are more men in the company.
It says that men accounted for 69% of the work force, but received more than 69% of the money that went to equity raises.
We had something similar in France. There was enough people saying and believing that (ethnic) minorities are discriminated for employment to trigger a governmental supported study on the use of anonymous CV. The conclusion was that minorities were even less likely to get an interview with anonymized CV and were actually positivity discriminated against. Authors of study supposed that it is because some issues in the CV are judged less harshly if coming from a minority.
In a bid to eliminate sexism, thousands of public servants have been told to pick recruits who have had all mention of their gender and ethnic background stripped from their CVs
The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview.
Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door.
...
Leaders of the Australian public service will today be told to "hit pause" on blind recruitment trials.
There was no lawsuit in that Berkeley case. The article's source also does not claim there was a lawsuit. The author made that up out of whole cloth.
The real reason for the Berkeley study is that the seeming acceptance disparity worried administrators, who proactively asked Bickel to look into it. https://outline.com/2HMrKV
The study [1] didn't "show" what you say. It claimed there was a bias towards female
applicants.
To support this claim the study pointed out that the percentage of male
applicants _out of all male_ applicants that were granted admission was lower
than the percentage for female applicants, for all (examined) departments.
However, according to the study, there were 8442 male applicants and 4321
female applicants. So while a larger proportion of female applicants were
granted admission, it still meant that many fewer women were addmitted.
To clarify, a higher proportion of a smaller number can still be a smaller
number. 5% of 1000 is 50, 10% of 100 is 10.
Imagine we split a pie in 10 pieces, you keep 8 and I keep 2. I eat my 2, you
eat 4 of your 8 and then you accuse me of hogging the pie because I ate 100%
of my share while you ate only half of yours.
That is what the study actually showed happenned with admissions in Berkeley.
_________________________
[1] Sex Bias in Graduate Admissions: Data from Berkeley
> the study pointed out that the percentage of male applicants _out of all male_ applicants that were granted admission was lower than the percentage for female applicants, for all (examined) departments.
Where does the study say that? I find it saying that 44 percent of male applicants and 35 percent of female applicants were admitted, when totaled over all 101 departments.
It's on section "Pooling", on page 7 of the pdf (400 in the original), second column, last
parargraph starting with "We reanalyze Table 1, ...".
In that paragraph, the authors state that they estimate the probability of
admission of a female applicant "by multiplying the estimated probability of
admission of any applicant (regardless of sex) to that department by the number
of women applying to it", which I find reasonable.
However, immediately afterwards they compare that probability with the
probability of an applicant being admitted given that the applicant is female.
I quote from the end of the second column and the start of the third one:
"Thus, if the chances of getting into a department were one-half for all
applicants to it, and 100 women applied, we would expect 50 women to be admitted
if they were being treated just like the men".
In other words, bias depends on whether the proportion of applicants of one
sex, out of all applicants of _that_ sex, was higher than the expectation
formed for applicants of any sex. It's a little confusing and the language in the article is not very precise. But that's what's up.
Are you asking in general? That’s one of the first things a student learns in middle school English is that the title is all capitalized except for words like “the, to, and, or”, unless those words are at the beginning of the title.
This site looks like it has the rules more formalized, if you’re interested. I think it’s something most native English writers do without thinking by adulthood.
I've often noticed this pattern but only ask myself now, so, yes, in general. From what I remember I never learnt that in school, but I'm obviously not a native English writer. @Raphmedia already gave me a good link, but thank you for the one you gave me too.
> Kelly Ellis, a former Google engineer and one of the plaintiffs in the gender-pay suit against the company, said in a legal filing that Google hired her as a Level 3 employee — the category for new software engineers who are recent college graduates — in 2010 despite her having four years of experience.
> Within a few weeks of Ms. Ellis being hiring, Google hired a male engineer for her team who had also graduated from college four years earlier. But he was hired as a Level 4 employee, meaning he received a higher salary and had more opportunities for bonuses, raises and stock compensation, according to the suit. Other men on Ms. Ellis’s team whose qualifications were equal to or less than hers were also brought in at Level 4, the suit says.
This feels like a part of the issue, but could be really hard to analyze easily.
A lot of it depends on interview performance (which itself is an entirely separate can of worms, including potential gender factors). Many people who get hired on at a more junior level probably wouldn't get offers at all if they were mandated to be a more senior level based on years of experience.
The main thing is that Google prefers to downlevel people who have external experience. I (male) had 5 years of experience, still was hired at L3. I know many others who have the same story.
So the L4 person probably had some better story/negotiation which allowed them to start at L4. It of course could be bias.
It was really frustrating for me to be at the same level as new grads, though on reflection, I was not at a the same level as other L4 employees around. Some transparency around these processes I think could help candidates a lot.
I think the bigger issue is that new-grad phds are almost always hired at L4. They are often less experienced at software engineering than someone with a bachelors and a few years of experience. So unless the person is being hired into an area that actually makes use of their phd, it seems that Google is just willing to pay for the title.
Can I ask why you might think that you were not at the same level? Why is Google a special software snowflake and none of your external experience is transferable?
To use a sports analogy: Two people could each have 5 years of experience playing baseball, but one is in a AAA league and the other plays for an MLB team. Years of experience doesn't necessarily say anything about actual skill.
You just told me that Google is the MLB. I don't see any evidence for this. Many great software companies exist. You are working on the assumption that everyone applying to Google is coming from low-rate companies. Further, if I get hired into the MLB from an AAA team, it's likely I am playing at a professional level. I might get a rookie contract upfront, but that doesn't mean that my skill level is that of a rookie. The key difference here is that in the MLB it's much harder to quantify skills whereas that's not the case with software engineers. If I was part of a team that released a solid piece of software, even if it's from a non-giant software company, I'm not entirely sure why my experience isn't transferable to Google (outside of a different stack). By that logic, since people are stuck in the proprietary stack at Google, they would have similar struggles moving out of Google and should be down leveled.
You're reading way too much into my comment. It wasn't meant personally. I'm simply pointing out that years of experience by itself doesn't mean much. It's possible to spend lots of time doing something and nevertheless not be particularly good at it relative to others, for a variety of reasons. I've interviewed plenty of people with 10+ YOE who've sucked. They wouldn't get a position at a top-end employer at all, let alone a senior one.
I don't think a lot of L4 and higher engineers at Google are very concerned about stack, that's what makes them the "MLB". At a certain point, the tooling shouldn't really be very important, it's the ability for someone to jump in on a problem and use critical thinking and efficient engineering methods to solve it.
Say what you will about Google, but I don't think it's a very controversial opinion to say they do hire a lot of the best software engineers, and they are very good at it.
And none of this is particular to Google, either. There's other top-tier employers with similarly high salaries and talent. YOE at these kinds of employers is just not straight-across comparable to other employers, hence the baseball analogy. I know, I've worked at both kinds of companies -- the people at Big N companies are getting paid more for a reason.
"The key difference here is that in the MLB it's much harder to quantify skills whereas that's not the case with software engineers. If I was part of a team that released a solid piece of software, even if it's from a non-giant software company, I'm not entirely sure why my experience isn't transferable to Google (outside of a different stack)."
I'm sorry but that is completely the opposite.
In MLB and a lot of other sports now, every single play is tracked. Every player has rate and counting stats to measure efficiency and overall production in every category. Anyone in the world can subscribe to the tape library and watch your entire career on loop and analyze every single moment of your professional career.
No one can do anything like that in closed-source software. Infact, that is the big unsolved problem in tech hiring. No one can tell who the good devs are because your "track record", your resume is just not a reliable indicator of your ability.
From what I've seen, Google is just a different technology stack.
Much of what you've done at other companies, other on the Microsoft stack or open-source stack, doesn't transfer. Little of your tooling experience matters.
While you can jump from one Linux-and-Python-and-git-and-JIRA-based startup to another and hit the ground running, you'll be spending months ramping up at Google unless you've worked there before.
I'm not saying this is justified, especially when it comes to other ladders like graphic designers (where you see the same thing happening), but there does seem to be a certain logic to it.
My previous experience, though I wrote software, was more like "research code" instead of "software engineering". We didn't have formal processes (no testing, testing fixes in prod, etc). Our focus was more on the (cool) analysis we were doing and not on the reliability of our systems.
One of the reasons I chose to join Google over another security-related company (that would have done little coding) was that I wanted to learn how to write software better. I've learned a lot about testing, understanding the reliability of distributed systems, writing code for maintainability, etc.
The major tech companies in general down-level you on the way in. It's because the skills that lead to success within Google and success elsewhere are different skillsets that intersect on common engineering skillsets.
I tend to think of it this way: Google has tens of thousands of engineers. That's an ecosystem the size of a few thousand startups, except stuffed into one company. It has its way of doing things, and to move up in this ecosystem you don't just master your own startup, you master the ecosystem around you.
> Kelly Ellis, a former Google engineer and one of the plaintiffs in the gender-pay suit against the company, said in a legal filing that Google hired her as a Level 3 employee — the category for new software engineers who are recent college graduates — in 2010 despite her having four years of experience.
I worked for around 4 years before joining Google and was also hired as an L3. I'm male.
Two of my new grad friends were hired as L3's at Google too but make like 100k more than I do in total compensation. One is male and one is female.
I'm not saying there isn't sexism but I'm not really convinced by this example. It's pretty common that people get "demoted" when coming in from other companies.
I made the mistake of not getting competing offers (I wasn't actually looking to change jobs at the time).
No, its mostly because turning down a offer(no matter what that is) from Google screams privilege. There are a lot of things related to prestige, and other hiring marketing related things that have built up this enormous clout of you having arrived at a big place in life if you land a job at FAANG companies.
So people just take whatever is offered. Because, there are tens of thousands of people applying for these jobs. Most of them are likely to better than you and they didn't crack all competitive coding style interview to land a job like you did. So people just find it hard to turn down the offer and take it.
It's only later do they realized they are not building the next search engine. Nor building the next gen e-commerce platform, but building Jsons and posting to dataservices. By then you are conditioned to free food and you are not comparing your salary with people outside but inside.
Its always hard to admit you didn't negotiate well or fell for the marketing appeal of the company. Its easy to find conspiracies and accuse others of malice. The later story is more appealing, makes you a victim and makes the other side look bad.
> So people just take whatever is offered. Because, there are tens of thousands of people applying for these jobs. Most of them are likely to better than you and they didn't crack all competitive coding style interview to land a job like you did. So people just find it hard to turn down the offer and take it.
I don't speak for everyone obviously but the reason I took the offer is that it will still >50% what I was making previously. I didn't bother looking into how much other people make.
> It's only later do they realized they are not building the next search engine. Nor building the next gen e-commerce platform, but building Jsons and posting to dataservices. By then you are conditioned to free food and you are not comparing your salary with people outside but inside.
Somehow I feel you have a bone to pick? I've been on 3 different teams and this has not been my experience at all.
People at Google seem to be just like people at other companies. They're happy they have a good job but look forward to retirement.
Outside of the obvious reason of needing a job, I can't understand why she didn't immediately begin to interview and look for a job elsewhere. This goes for both men and women. If you are clearly being underpaid for your level of experience and skill, don't stay put.
A few years of google on your resume looks a lot better than a couple of months. And you also have to weigh the likelihood of running into the same problem at other places.
I've seen this first hand. I was hired into my position straight out of grad school. I noticed one of my colleagues (a black woman) was in a position below mine that paid about $20k less even though she had all the same knowledge and skills that I had. She had a PhD and had done a post-doc while I never even finished my PhD. She's older, more experienced, and better educated, yet somehow not qualified for my position.
I asked my boss about this and he said it was because this was her first real job. When I reminded him that this was also my first real job he just said "that's different" without further explanation.
Not all college graduates are created equal. There are many people with four year degrees that do not get hired by Google at all. You'd have to look at a case by case basis.
Also, a L3 at Google makes ~$200k a year. Someone getting paid that 4 years out of college is not being discriminated against.
It sounds like they took both of them into a room with a white board and found out he was a lot better of an engineer than her. Controversial...a man out performing a woman....
> Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money.
If women were underpaid, things are less equal on average. If men were underpaid, as the study suggests, things are more equal on average. That said, would it be fair to keep underpaying some people in order to keep it more equal on average? I think not.
Using aggregate measures like that rolls up the wrong numbers into a final metric. It tells me that the men who were underpaid had a lesser gap between what they were being paid and what they should be paid, or that the men who were overpaid were overpaid to a greater extent.
They needed to compare the number of men who were underpaid as a proportion of all men to the number of women who were underpaid as a proportion of all women.
Using bum-pulled numbers, your company has 1000 employees, 667 are men, and 333 women, and they all do pretty much the same job. Your payroll is $100M, and 70% of it goes to the male employees. The mean pay for men is $105k, and the mean pay for women is $90k. Mean pay is $100k--let's say this is fair pay for the work. Overall, the men are overpaid, and the women underpaid.
But the mean is a fool's game; the median is more telling. Now say 445 men get $90k, and 222 get $135k. 2/3 of men are underpaid. Now let's say 222 women get $101k, and 111 get $68k. 1/3 of women are underpaid.
On a per-person basis, a man working for the company is twice as likely to be underpaid as a woman, but the amount by which they would be underpaid is much less. Going by the aggregate numbers, one could say "men at Company X are overpaid, compared to the women" and then any given underpaid man might not even realize they are being underpaid, thanks to the misleading statistic. When one of the $68k-paid women complains (naturally, as the worst-off of the bunch), and the company analyzes its own payroll at a more detailed level, it realizes that men are more likely to be underpaid than women (and also that increasing its payroll by 8% would make no-one underpaid).
If you look at the amount they increased wages by, 9.7 million and by 10667 employees and just take an average... that's only 908 bucks a person.
Don't get me wrong, 908 bucks a year is 908 bucks.
But take into considering hours, that's only a pay increase of just under 44 cents an hour.
So at the end of the day, they weren't severely underpaying employees.
Good to see a company take this step. I had this happen to me at one company I worked for... it actually resulted in a pay increase of over 4 bucks an hour, now THAT was nice!
I've talked to one expert about a similar result in a company where I worked, and the flip side to results like this is sometimes promotion velocity - women looked "overpaid" for their level relative to the men, and that was often because they had been at that level much longer than most men at the same level.
If you set initial salaries fairly with respect to gender but promote men more quickly, then you end up with a company where it looks like women are paid more when you control for job title.
So would you say the accurate way to study this is to examine "lifetime pay"--look at the pay of demographics over a time period at the company? That would show if men are making more in 5 years of accumulated employment vs women, right, and potentially unearth some of this "promotion velocity" numerically?
That is one part of the picture. This situation is so complex that I don't believe everybody has actually figured out all the important parts to study in the first place.
Step 1: Let's agree that this is a complicated problem, and that quick feel good knee jerk reactions may end up having negative impacts.
Step 2: Work on solutions to complicated problems.
Easier said than done, but few things worth doing are simple, and there's already a lot of people doing great work on sustainable, informed solutions (but too many people just going "lets pay everyone the same, its the only way to be fair!!!" hurting everyone else)
> women looked "overpaid" for their level relative to the men, and that was often because they had been at that level much longer than most men at the same level.
Usually it's the opposite but for the same reason: women seem underpaid but when you correct for experience on the job, they make something like 98 cents on the dollar compared to men.
A little late on this thread, but did want to add - I'm not assuming that's what's happening here, but I know this has been overlooked in similar analyses. I think Google's hr team is probably smart enough to account for things like this, but I would really like for the report to say what other variables they controlled for in order to conclude that women are overpaid.
And I think someplace like Hacker news is exactly the right place for the community to discuss the many ways a company can get to a result like this - via Simpson's paradox, via differences in promotion velocity, or via simple economics, based on the fact diverse teams are desirable and women are more scarce.
Attacking someone for suggesting one not-yet-discussed possibility is not helpful to the discussion, imo.
Why do you feel like you were attacked? I think that's an ongoing issue today where people do not like to be challenged.
My observation is that news about men being disadvantaged comes out and people don't want to believe it.
I've seen people insinuate that the study was done by men and therefore the outcome would naturally happen. Another mocking that is was "scientific" and "numbers-based" Another claiming the women deserve more money. I bet if I challenged any of them they would claim to be attacked too.
I read the article first and then came in to read the comments. I feel that most people commenting did not actually read the whole article. To put it simply:
It is not just about pay equity in a particular level.
It is also about the ingress and egress rate of a level.
As the article mentions, some woman was hired as L3 while all of her co-workers were hired as L4. Was she overpaid as a L3? Maybe. But she was underpaid overall because she could've gotten L4.
Similarly, women and under represented minorities also face similar issues in promotions.
How is that moving the goal post? The question at hand is whether individuals are fairly compensated based on their amount of experience and ability to contribute. Compensation is affected by job title, therefore job title is absolutely relevant.
>Compensation is affected by job title, therefore job title is absolutely relevant.
Levels (on hiring) can be affected by negotiation. You can, quite literally, negotiate a better level before signing the employment contract.
Why Miss Ellis' level was only Level 3 and everyone around her seemed to be hired at a Level 4, I won't even presume to know but I think it is a disservice to argue over facets surrounding something not publicly known specifically because those facts aren't known.
For example, the man that was hired - after Ms. Ellis was hired - was also hired four years after he graduated university and came on at Level 4.
Did he graduate with a master's? Did he have the same (or more) experience dev'ing? Is there any other plausible reason than the nefarious one we assume?
If not, then, sure let's deride away.
If so, then are we saying that prior experience and education level[s] (or quality) should not matter? That there should be a "maximum minimum level" for all workers entering the force?
I don't even think there is enough information to say that. We have no idea how many people at Google are overpaid. Without more salary transparency, any company that pays market rates is going to have some employees that are underpaid and some that are overpaid.
The takeaway is that compensations are not perfectly aligned with whatever model was used in the study. Which is expected because compensations were not set using that model, so they won’t be exactly the same. And at that point, if the model is calibrated for everage compensation to be the same, it’s obvious that some people will get compensations below the prediction of the model and some people will get compensations above the prediction of the model.
> And at that point, if the model is calibrated for everage compensation to be the same, it’s obvious that some people will get compensations below the prediction of the model and some people will get compensations above the prediction of the model.
This is true of most models (in practice - any model which models salary in the real world) yet not every company is being accused of these payment discrimination lawsuits.
> In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple's Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google's Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other's employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators.
I don't work at Google, but my SO and many friends do. I will bitch slap anyone over there complaining about being underpaid. Most people can only dream of the compensation packages they give out. Nobody at Google is "underpaid", maybe just less extremely well compensated than others.
Or, in other words, some people are better negotiators than other. Since there's no objective measure of how much Google must pay anybody, the only benchmark would be comparing to peers doing substantially similar jobs. Fortunately, Google is big enough so that there would be substantially similar jobs to compare. Unfortunately, while jobs may be the same, negotiating skills of the applicants (and whatever HR workers they negotiated with) vary. And if somebody gets a better deal, that automatically makes everybody holding the same job underpaid.
BTW, in the same vein the article could be titled "Google finds it is overpaying many men (or women)" - since unless everybody has the same salary, half of the workforce would be paid less than median - thus being underpaid - and half would be paid more - thus being overpaid. Well, there could be lucky ones being paid exactly the median, but they are too boring to write an article about them.
The gender wage gap is real in the sense that there is a gap, but when you analyze it, they are comparing apples to oranges. I'm sure everyone here knows this.
The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Women in Korea are not treated poorly.
The important thing though is the people proposing that the wage gap is a problem has a solution. They are pushing equality of outcome. They want everyone to be paid exactly the same. That's the problem that they have. They don't care that they are comparing apples to oranges. They want pay to be exactly the same.
Calling it "apples to oranges" is overlooking how some fields are broadly underpaid, which often (though not always) overlaps with gender disparity. For example, primary and secondary school teaching is a 'traditionally female' field that gets massively underpaid compared to tertiary education, despite if anything being much more important to society.
Nope, not that, either: the supply of doctors, for instance, is deliberately restricted by the American Medical Association; whereas the supply of elementary teachers is not restricted by the CAEP. Supply and demand are still second-order effects here.
If the supply of doctors is restricted, then you'd expect them to get higher pay, and vice versa with teachers. I agree it is a secondary effect. The cost of training/education required to perform the job is bigger, though it ultimately has the same effect of reducing supply.
Were we to, say, stop the cap on H1-Bs in the medical profession, doctors' pay might migrate down towards teachers' and the OECD average (and US healthcare might be affordable).
>Calling it "apples to oranges" is overlooking how some fields are broadly underpaid, which often (though not always) overlaps with gender disparity. For example, primary and secondary school teaching is a 'traditionally female' field that gets massively underpaid compared to tertiary education, despite if anything being much more important to society.
When you take all factors into account the gender wage gap virtually vanishes.
Comparing secondary school teachers to post-secondary professors is hilarious at best. High school teachers should be paid much less than university professors.
Now tell me, how about men vs women at secondary schools. Oh right their unions make sure they are paid identically. How about professors? They are paid the same.
If you think that secondary school teachers should be paid the same as university professors; you're a communist. That's perfectly acceptable to be a communist, but you don't live in a communist society.
I imagine you want to make the point that primary School education is more important than secondary School education (which may be true) and thus should be paid better.
I disagree with this in general, because I don't feel like the skills and knowledge needed to be a successful primary School educator are as difficult or unique as those needed to be a secondary School educator.
My reasoning is that a good percentage of the value that comes from primary School education is based around behavioural education, such as learning how to interact and behave with peers and teams. It also is a place where students learn authority and social heptarchy, and punishment and consequence. In addition to learning the foundations of school subjects.
In secondary education, it's assumed that the student has learned all that, and their attention will be focused on difficult study of each of their subjects. The professor should be an embodiment of that subject, with understanding beyond primary School educators. Likewise it's arguably more difficult to keep the attention of University students than primary students.
On the other hand (as in not in general), if someone was a truly exceptional primary educator / early life coach / babysitter, what have you, then the private sector would be a better place for them I imagine.
It's only "apples to oranges" if you're willing to beg the entire question. Why is elementary teaching less highly paid than university teaching? Why is nurse practitioning less highly paid than anaesthesiologizing?
>It's only "apples to oranges" if you're willing to beg the entire question. Why is elementary teaching less highly paid than university teaching? Why is nurse practitioning less highly paid than anaesthesiologizing?
Because of education level?
A university professor has a PHD. An elementary teacher has a bachelors degree.
If you think a PHD and a bachelors degree should be paid the same. That's perfectly fine, that's called communism. It's perfectly fine to be a communist.
This isn't quite right. People are paid such that the amount is enough to attract needed workers and less than the value those workers provide. Education isn't a critical factor except that it enables people to be more productive and therefore more desirable to employers.
As an example: a middle school dropout who self learned machine learning, became a master, published papers, worked at a successful startup etc, will likely be better paid than your average History PhD.
I'd be fine with a random anesthesiologist teaching my grade schooler, but I'd hesitate to have a random elementary school teacher giving him anesthesia.
Elementary school teaching: a teaching certificate.
University professor: PhD, pre-tenure work & published research (Note that there are less-qualified people teaching in universities that are compensated much less.)
Nurse practitioner: Master's degree (undergraduate plus 2 years)
Anesthesiologist: Undergraduate + medical degree (4 years) + residency (4 years) + possible specialty training.
How do software developers fare under that regime? I make 3x more as a software developer than my teacher friends that have had far more schooling (masters degrees in many cases, plus continuing education requirements). I don't know where you live, but in my state (Michigan) teachers have rigorous certification requirements.
And I definitely would NOT expect someone without training to be an effective teacher. I'm in awe of what my kids' teachers are able to do. Classroom management is a skill that is incredibly difficult to master.
Successful software engineers have a lot of knowledge & skill that is often acquired informally, so it may not be reflected in university history. Because of the demand for developers and the apparent difficulty of acquiring the skills, they are well-compensated.
If a person has a bachelor's degree, they can get a Michigan interim teaching certificate by passing a test. https://www.teachercertificationdegrees.com/certification/mi... Permanent certification then requires 12 hours (1 semester full-time) of courses, or working toward a masters degree would probably give an immediate and permanent bump in pay.
Imagine a random liberal arts graduate: Would it be easier to go into elementary teaching in Michigan or software development?
I see a lot of parallels between this alternative certification route and a bootcamp: yes, the route is shorter, but you're at a huge disadvantage when applying for entry-level positions.
The teachers I know personally obtained traditional four-plus-year bachelors degrees before applying for jobs. In most cases, they had to do a year or more of subbing before finding a permanent position.
(edit to add: education degrees are very hard to get done in four years, especially with the aiding, student teaching, etc.)
Intellectual capacity- programming requires a certain ability towards abstract thinking and logic that a minority of the population is comfortable with.
I actually believe a greater percentage of the population, by far, is CAPABLE of this, but very few choose a path that gives them a self idealization that they believe they can or want to be a computer expert of any sort.
I'd argue that the skill-set to be an effective teacher is also not prevalent in the general population. This includes not only intellectual capacity (effective pedagogy is hardly a cakewalk) but also the emotional intelligence required to manage a classroom.
I think it gets back to self-image. Many many women can 'see' themselves as a teacher. Relatively few imagine themselves in a career in tech.
This is very much a cultural issue- the messages women receive from their media sources rarely contain reinforcement towards technical excellence.
This is a frustration for technically oriented men, I believe, because we aren't directly the source of this disparity- I think the vast majority of STEMish career men would welcome more women into the fold as true peers, but are somewhat aggravated by messages that we are somehow directly responsible for large cultural forces we have little/no power over.
Its been positive to see more girls get into sports as that message has permeated into the culture. Hopeful an equivalent message about women and STEM will percolate into the larger collective id.
I think how far you are removed from the direct financial impact of your job plays a major role in it.
It is harder to measure a cost on society inflicted by poorly educated students than it is to measure the cost of buggy, failing commercial software. Also, students who were academic failures are not necessarily guaranteed to fail in life, since there are ways to succeed in life other than by being good at school subjects, whereas an incorrect software program can never succeed.
The same holds true even inside the same field. It depends whether you are near a cash cow or a cost center. Working on infrastructure, building tooling for other developers is not likely to be rewarded as well as writing code that could cost your company millions if there is a bug.
There are also differences in specialization. An average game dev is probably going to make less than an average mobile dev, who in turn is going to make less than what a random quant makes.
Does any state require a Masters for elementary ed?
Generally only specialized teaching areas require a master's degree.
A Bachelors and a teacher training program w/ possible test is generally sufficient - and you can usually begin teaching with an interim/provisional certificate, and work on the certification as you go.
Amount of training is not the reason. It's supply and demand. Training requirements reduce supply, but that's only part of it.
Not many people can play bagpipes, so supply is low. But not many people will pay to hear bagpipes, so demand is low, too. Bagpiping doesn't pay well.
Nearly everyone needs food cooked, so demand is high. But nearly everyone can cook, so supply is high, too. Cooking doesn't pay well.
Not many people can do surgery, so supply is low. Many people need surgery, so demand is high. Surgery pays well.
Supply and demand explains why surgeons make more than teachers, why basketball stars make more than nurses, and why programmers make more than janitors. It isn't about how hard something is or how noble it is. It's just supply and demand.
I agree that training requirements affect salary primarily by limiting supply. But I think the description of supply and demand above is inaccurate because of the many distortions in these markets, including teachers unions, monopsony providers/employers in public education, insurance company contracts, lack of price information, etc.
These market distortions affect the prices and thus the salaries in various ways. Teacher shortages show that the wage is not sensitive to the supply and demand for teachers. Do people shop around for price on needed surgeries? Do they even know the price before receiving the surgery? Do they even pay the price of the surgery? (usually paying some subsidized part of a contractually limited price).
Basketball stars show another market distortion, particularly in college basketball. The player salary is not governed by supply and demand, but by the cartel of college sports (though colleges do compete on non-salary benefits they provide...)
You could assert that these factors just inflate or reduce the supply or the demand, but it's not simply "lots of people want but few provide therefore it pays well".
Let's not act as though those are in any ways similar.
Elementary school teaching does require less academic rigor than a university professor. Same applies to RNs vs an anesthesiologist.
I do not mean to belittle those career choices (if anything, I myself want to become a k12 school teacher at some point in life). But, there are a certain set of traits that are needed to excel at the 'prestigious' careers. Disposition towards hard work beyond the standard 9-5, an acumen for logical reasoning, ability to retain large quantities of information are all more rare than social skills and empathy, which take precedence in elementary teaching or nursing.
Our culture idolizes the hard working, career oriented person, that sacrifice other things in life to singularly chase this money and fame driven idea of success. This is irrespective of how physically/mentally healthy it is, or if it positively correlates to long term happiness.
IMO, it leads to an obsession to prove that men and women being equal, would have equal outcomes on this narrow benchmark for success.
It both neglects the fact that that social norms haven't changed as much and that equal outcome is meaningless without context.
p.s: nice to see someone use 'beg the question' in the correct context.
> Elementary school teaching does require less academic rigor than a university professor.
But you replace that with a need for a lot more knowledge of teaching and child psychology, so I'd say doing a good job is significantly harder even in the sense of requiring a lot of education.
> a lot more knowledge of teaching and child psychology
Do they really though? In my experience, school teachers don't really have either and both are either learned on the job or academically taught when pursuing the major.
Being a great teacher is tough, but very few teachers are actually great.
Being a university professor is IMO, among the hardest positions to get. In my experience, the smartest people I know are university professors.
If anything, many university professors are grossly underpaid (for what they offer) in exchange for job security and complete freedom to pursue what they love.
Well there's a reason I said 'need' not 'reliably get'.
Also the original quote was university teaching. The whole professorship and tenure thing is a separate giant ball of complication, and you're right that all that non-teaching stuff is extremely difficult.
> so I'd say doing a good job is significantly harder
Maybe, but this highlights another problem in "soft" careers (social, marketing, teaching etc). It's very hard to objectively qualify candidates. In programming, it's easy: you can program, or not. If you can, the question is likely how fast can you learn new things, and how complex programs you can design & write. Good lawyers win cases. Good traders make money. And so on... How do you compare teachers, marketers (except bullshit "increased engagement by 1600%" claims on their CVs), etc?
There is a relative recent (<10 years) government study in Sweden that looked at gender segregation of the teaching profession, and one suggestion they made to make the profession more gender equal and bring more men into the profession was to focus the program to include more academic studies.
>The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Women in Korea are not treated poorly.
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Korea most assuredly is not a country with "the most equality in the workplace". It routinely ranks as having the worst gender inequality of any developed nation, and one of the worst in the world generally. It came in 115th out of 149 countries in the World Economic Forum's 2018 Global Gender Gap Report* and has hovered around that number for years.
Your assertion is that Japan and Korea are highly discriminatory against women? That's certainly interesting and I'm not sure I can defend against that position. Perhaps women in japan and korea are extremely oppressed. This is certainly not what I thought after reading for example or just seeing what's portrayed in the media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_South_Korea
Meanwhile your source has Rwanda as #6 most equal. I'm very confused about what the data is saying. It's certainly feeling more like a checkbox list.
So let's look at Canada. Both my data and your data have them with poor performance. Mind you my data is just looking at wage gap.
Women in Canada for ECONOMIC PARTICIPATION AND OPPORTUNITY is 27th place behind Brunai and Ghana. This seems quite incorrect. Women have completely the same economic opportunity as men in Canada. So this is a debateable number. Women are educated BETTER than men and certainly work. So I'm not sure how this data was determined. The actual number should be showing discrimination against me.
Women in Canada for HEALTH AND SURVIVAL aren't in the list? USA is in 71st place. I happen to know this statistic. Women live longer than men. So they cherry picked and removed this data? https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-624-x/2011001/article... This another number completely false.
Women in Canada for POLITICAL EMPOWERMENT are 21st place behind india and nambia. Except we live in a democratic society with no barriers. Women can run for politics. So this should be a 1.0.
So I guess in conclusion I find your study to be biased, false, and wrong.
Let me explain to you what's happening. Women have the CHOICE. They choose careers that they get paid less in. This is a good thing. They have the freedom. The gap is not a problem.
Japan is very well known for gender inequality in the workplace and Rwanda is also well known as an example of significant legal and social support for gender equality. If your intuition and awareness doesn't include either of these facts then you should not trust yourself on this area at all.
I'm not going to defend Japan. As I said I'm happy to believe they treat women worse than Saudi Arabia; which is what my source provided.
As for Rwanda, this is just plain absurd. This is at best a checkbox study where they are looking to confirm reverse sexism. Yes I did read Rwanda has significant reverse sexism. After the genocide their society was over 70% women and they elected leaders to provide sexist policies.
Reverse sexism is not an ideal to be aiming toward.
You are defining equality of participation as evidence of reverse sexism and you appear happy to believe whatever random things cross your screen that don't disagree with your core beliefs. I hope someone else has the patience to talk to you more.
You just ignored the study's definitions for all the terms and then claimed them false by supplying your own which is pretty classic confirmation bias. Just for "political empowerment" for example, the study did not define political empowerment as "can run for politics."
Lets say Canada passes legislation saying >50% of MPs must be women.
That would be an extreme abuse of democracy. If only 50% of ridings have a woman running. It would mean those riding automatically go to those women. Those ridings don't get to vote.
So yes, political empowerment only goes so in far as women having the right to run. Not confirmation bias; I simply believe in democracy.
I also note you never commented on the other points which were much more egregious and clearly make things appear much worse than it actually is.
I also go back and recalculate Canada's score. We are the MOST equal country surpassing Iceland and Rwanda by gigantic strides it also makes the study look pretty stupid because our equality is perfect and yet we have a large wage gap still.
This is because the gender wage gap isn't discrimination. It's entirely based on decisions made by women.
I'm trying to tell you that for each of your criticisms of the study you ignored their definitions and evidence and applied your own based on your feelings. For another example, 'Health and Survival' was not based on if women lived longer than men but "an estimate of the number of years that women and men can expect to live in good health by taking into account the years lost to violence, disease, malnutrition and other relevant factor." This was defined in the paper but you either chose to ignore it or didn't bother to read how they defined it.
De jure and de facto equality are different things. Do you honestly believe that African Americans faced no discrimination after July, 3 1964? Because at that point they lived in a democratic society with no barriers. They could run for political office. Under your definition, that's a 1.0.
I guess you could say they just didn't choose to run for office. Or to get educated. The cross burning was coincidental.
So lets say I have a new country. The laws are 100% equal and there's absolutely no discrimination against women.
But an election occurs and there's not a perfect representation of the people. Only 25% of the elected MPs are women. But there's no actual discrimination happening.
What's the fix? THERE IS NO FIX. It's exactly how it should be. We absolutely should not say 50% of MPs must be women. That is not how democracy works.
>Because at that point they lived in a democratic society with no barriers. They could run for political office. Under your definition, that's a 1.0.
Yes that is a 1.0. Was there discrimination? I'm sure there is still today. However there is no fix. That is a 1.0. We are equal.
We dont need to have a rule saying 50% of the elected positions must be black people. That would be discrimination and wrong.
>So lets say I have a new country. The laws are 100% equal and there's absolutely no discrimination against women.
But an election occurs and there's not a perfect representation of the people. Only 25% of the elected MPs are women. But there's no actual discrimination happening.
Its very easy to think up improbable, and even impossible, hypothetical situations. This is one such hypothetical and it adds no value to this discussion. We live in a world with discrimination. What you're suggesting is as fantastical as imagining a country where everyone can fly and then asking what we would do for the car companies. It assumes so many unrealistic things that its not a good faith attempt at conversation.
Or another way of putting this is: I claim that your situation will occur with only some miniscule probability such that it is indistinguishable from impossible in practice. You're welcome to prove me wrong. But to be clear, I ask for a proof, and the burden is on you, to show that in a society truly free of discrimination, both de jure and de facto, that things would be as you claim with any regularity. Put plainly, such a feat isn't possible. So your hypothetical isn't worth spending time pondering.
>Was there discrimination? I'm sure there is still today.
Then it's not a 1.0. The WEF report is measuring discrimination, which you just said still exists. By your own admission, this shouldn't be a 1.0.
> The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace.
Yeah, I am not sure what to think of the data. It's not what I would expect.
How is US, Canada, Austria having such a large gender wage gap, followed by Canada.
Then Greece, Bulgaria and Romania are all the way on the left. Having lived in Eastern Europe, I would not consider it overall a bastion of women's equality and rights, not according to the West European standards at least. Granted though, during the Soviet times women and girls were studying math and science just as well as the boys even if not better and it was never specifically promoted or pushed via a "women in STEM" or such similar programs I have seen here, it just happened. Perhaps there is a remnant of that mentality and maybe there is something to be learned from there.
I think it is worth noting that the quality of the data can vary a lot from country to country. On average, governments in countries such as Germany and Norway tend to be more critical and transparent of their own actions while others may try to swipe the issue under the rug of inflate numbers when they deem appropriate. Of course, it doesn't mean there are no truths to the data, it just needs to be taken with a grain of salt even if it is the OECD.
> On average, governments in countries such as Germany and Norway tend to be more critical and transparent of their own actions while others may try to swipe the issue under the rug of inflate numbers when they deem appropriate.
When you provide women the opportunity to become anything they want. They choose the careers that they choose. Which tend to me more social related careers. Teaching or nursing for example does not scale well; therefore salaries are limited.
Whereas men pick more "stuff" categories. It's men who work in STEM creating things. A car or an iphone is going to be generally speaking men who design it. These scale very well and salaries can be larger.
By these modern approaches that allow women to go into whatever they want to do. This is what creates the gender wage gap.
The 'people just choosing different careers' throws a lot of inequality under a rug and calls the problem solved.
1) If we tell women their whole childhood that some jobs are for men and some are for women and vice versa for men then ask them when they turn 18 what job they want we'll get horrendously unequal outcomes even though people are completely free to choose.
2) Valuation of jobs is based partially on the view of the value of the work in addition to the actual value provided. e.g. there's huge amount of societal gain to be reaped by providing better education to our children but various forces keeps the wages to teachers depressed relative to the gains to be had from providing smaller classrooms. In a more solid sense it's much harder to evaluate the value provided by a better elementary school teacher because most of the metrics for success are either years in the future (wages, college graduation rates, etc) or tied up in a huge number of other influences.
These kinds of defuse benefit jobs are a lot of what have been traditionally gendered as women's jobs and in the past were just part of the huge unpaid work that women were expected to do and often are unfairly characterized as easier or less educated/lower skilled jobs. There's a whole gendered history tied up in just how we evaluate these jobs and their benefits.
1) Except that in the western world we do not tell people their whole childhood that they are to do X because of their gender. We actively tell people they can be whatever they want, and as far back I can remember in primary school (early 80s) that's been the case.
2) Valuation doesn't always equate to monetary remuneration. For example (at least in Australia), police, teachers etc get FAR more leave and holidays compared to the rest of the country. That needs to be taken into account as part of the valuation. Stress also factors into why certain professions are "worth" more than others. IT is highly stressful, in comparison to other social professions.
Not explicitly can't but there's a lot of 'boys work' and 'girls work' gendering around work and skills. Progress has been made sure but there'll be a lag of decades before changes at the childhood education level work their way through to employment stats.
1. Could you provide a source showing this discrimination in school? I went to school, men and women were definitely told they could be anything. Also the schools are extremely left-wing SJW(Canadian schools teach children that the right-wing are all racists) so I find this assertion to be immensely unlikely.
2. Teachers in Ontario receive ~$140,000/year for 8 months of work, 5 hours a day. This is publicly available via the sunshine list. If you're using teachers as an example of bias. You're barking up the wrong tree here these inflated teacher wages raise the wages of women on average.
Furthermore, teachers are outside the standard capitalist system. If you want to use them as an example of valuation of you must support the privatization of teachers. I would support that idea. Might not end up well for those $140,000 teachers.
The point is though, women are not 100% teachers and the teacher unions are extremely strong; women and men are being paid the same as teachers.
> 2. Teachers in Ontario receive ~$140,000/year for 8 months of work, 5 hours a day. This is publicly available via the sunshine list. If you're using teachers as an example of bias. You're barking up the wrong tree here these inflated teacher wages raise the wages of women on average.
"5 hours a day" because all the material and lesson plans just appears out of nowhere along with all the graded work and administrative work...
Also I'm very happy that Ontario seems to have a good grasp on the value of teaching but that REALLY isn't true in the US where our average salary in 2016-17 was ~$38k [0].
Also my point wasn't that women are being paid less as teacher but the kind of 'social jobs' typically filled by women that the OP was talking about are valued less. Gender equality within that job isn't particularly relevant there I was talking about the profession as a whole vs other professions.
average STARTING salary -- I think you knew that and "conveniently" left out that one important word. Big difference.
A very brief look at your NEA source (i.e. the lobbying org for teachers, so of course it is biased) reveals that it is obviously flawed. $38+change is the average of each state's average salary -- like the Senate, it gives equal representation to California and to Wyoming. It's pretty easy to see that the most populous states tend to have averages above $38k, in fact many well above $40 (Cali, Texas, NY, PA) while many of the lowest salaries are from much smaller states (W.Va, Montana, Idaho). There is no way, if the state averages are accurate, that the national average is only $38+change. I think you know this too but choose to quote these stats verbatim anyway.
I will also note public school teachers have almost zero chance of getting fired, no worries about their "company" going out of business or bought out or taken over, and become eligible for generous pensions.
> Valuation of jobs is based partially on the view of the value of the work
This is false on multiple levels. Functional water treatment have a much bigger effect on health then functional health care, but water treatment employees are paid far less than doctors. We can likely make a similar argument for sewer treatment, garbage collection and mortuaries. We can see similar disconnect between teachers and veterinarians, where those that work with our children are paid less than those working with our pets.
A large part of Marxism is the disconnection between pay and value. There is no easy answers and bias is a poor explanation in order to understand the issue.
> If we tell women their whole childhood that some jobs are for men and some are for women and vice versa for men then ask them when they turn 18 what job they want we'll get horrendously unequal outcomes even though people are completely free to choose.
This would make some sense if women had been in the workforce for centuries and were well-established in particular fields, but women have only been in the workforce for a relatively short period of time and the cultural influences that might direct them into one job over another are not even remotely strong enough to play the role you think they do. There is almost nothing except the non-stop message of "you can do anything you want to do" given to little girls today and they are electing to do what they want to do. To assume they are trapped by some sort of cultural force that prefers them to do medicine instead of engineering (neither of which existed as a female field prior to the 20th century) is nonsense. Today, most medical school and law school graduates are women. Most engineering graduates are men. Unless men are fiercely protecting engineering for some weird, inexplicable reason, it would seem like women have had their say and chosen what they want to do.
This horse has been beaten to death, beaten again, and is now resembling something less than horse-like, but women that are given equal opportunity to pursue any career path they want will choose paths they enjoy instead of paths that offer raw financial gain. Same is true for men too, actually. It just so happens that more women prefer socially oriented jobs like teaching and nursing than men do. It's not complicated. Freedom doesn't mean everyone is equal in every aspect, it just means that everyone can choose what to be instead of being told what to be and - shockingly - not everyone wants to be the same thing.
Do you know this for sure? Developed East Asian countries are some of the worst in terms of work equality for women, particularly if they want to have children. Not a good example to use.
I admittedly do not know this. I just replied to another person who provided a source which asserts that Korea is the worst country for equality. Which if true would explain why Korea has a large wage gap.
I'm not defending this at all however. I'm perfectly happy to believe that South Korea is worse than Saudi Arabia toward treatment of women.
The mcdonalds cashier should not be compensated the same as someone like a neuroscientist.
If we get replicators invented and everyone can have whatever they please like in star trek. We still don't need communism. Capitalism will still work, stuff will just be free but if you want a PERSON to do something you still would need to pay.
Actually I find that table a bit suspicious. The sequence of countries ordered by pay gap (lowest to highest) is the following:
Romania, Costa Rica, Luxembourg, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Slovenia, Italy, Denmark, Turkey, Norway, New Zealand, Colombia, Malta, Hungary, Poland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Mexico, Spain, Lithuania, Cyprus, Netherlands, Portugal, Australia, Switzerland, Slovak Republic, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Finland, United Kingdom, Canada, United States, Chile, Latvia, Israel, Japan, Estonia, Korea.
See the pattern there? Neither do I. Usually there is some correlation by continent, cultural area, GDP, HDI, etc. In this case there seems to be nothing. Romania and Costa Rica and Luxembourg are the countries with the smallest wage gap; Netherlands, UK and US are way up there, in company of Chile, Canada and Estonia. Turkey is wedged right in between Denmark and Norway. Netherlands' pay gap is 4 times that of neighbouring Belgium. Mexico and Ireland are the same. Lithuania's gap is half that of Estonia and Latvia. Strange.
But I don't think most people go to an interview without having googled "how to ..." about the interview process first. Thus even those not naturally talented at negotiation have a reasonable chance at negotiating decently.
Talent/job competence + a little bit of research and preparation prior to interviewing will ensure superior results IMHO.
Somehow I always get downvoted for saying that, but I worked at a place where all developers (well, everybody) were unionized. Magic did not happen. Bullshit did.
> Google, Ms. Emerson said, seemed to be advancing a “flawed and incomplete sense of equality” by making sure men and women receive the same salary
This quote would appear to sum up the entire debate, using the term generously.
There is a large and vocal minority in society who abuse the word "equality" to mean "more money and power for women". They don't care about equality. They want inequality, but they know they can't say that, so they simply redefine equality to mean inequality in the Orwellian style and carry on as if the language hadn't just been horribly violated.
Ms. Emerson should stop talking until she can say what she means, although given her job is 'diversity consulting' I'm going to guess she will never be able to say what she means.
>That is not the same as addressing “equity,” she said, which would involve examining the structural hurdles that women face as engineers.
Consider the following situation:
Men get promoted faster than women for similar work. They're seen as more assertive or something. Managers, noting the systemic inequality, take individual action to compensate women fairly for their contributions, despite the failure of the larger system.
The structural hurdle: that women find it more difficult to get promoted, is not addressed. And as a result, they end up paid less for similar work, despite attempts by ground level mangers to address the inequity.
The HN guidelines suggest that you
>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I think this should apply to articles posted as well.
But that's not what the word "equity" means either.
Regardless, if she wants to define a word to mean "the structural hurdles that women face as engineers" specifically she should not criticise other people for using the word equality to mean equal treatment. She definitely has no right to claim those who disagree with her have a "flawed and incomplete" understanding of anything - she simply has no intellectual leg to stand on. Put differently, there is simply no plausible interpretation of what she's saying here that isn't a nasty attempt to manipulate the language.
So you're saying that my clearly plausible interpretation of her words is a nasty attempt to manipulate language?
What about "remember that there are structural issues that affect women" isn't fighting for equal treatment? I'd think that an argument to reduce the structural issues that unfairly impact women would be seen as a move towards equality, but apparently you disagree? And further think it's nasty?
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 415 ms ] threadBasically the real world is a lot more complicated than people think and there are many factors that lead to pay discrimination. Claiming that it is due to sexism is an oversimplification.
When women are getting paid more than men, there are no known explanations beyond sexism. Especially at Google who notoriously fired Damore for stating that maybe men and women have different preferences - it's pretty clear from the article, biased though it is, that the issue here is really Google managers systematically awarding pay increases to women rather than men, in order to try and boost their numbers.
Ideally two individuals in the same or similar roles, with similar performance over time in that role, should have the same salary regardless of background or negotiation ability. The major issue with this is that you can't reduce pay of rockstar negotiators (who may or may not be rockstar performers), and a correction that pays everyone as much as the highest earning equivalent employee might be hard for even Google to swallow.
It's not difficult to understand why people believe this might be true, but it is difficult to understand why people accept this as fact when the empirical data of systematic underpayment isn't all that solid.
It would help if you posted the empirical data you refer to.
There are some good studies on this subject that I've read over the years though, for instance one among lawyers in a firm in which women were paid about 2-3% lower than men, on average IIRC. But these often don't or can't take into account personality characteristics. For instance, women on average are more agreeable and so often don't negotiate as hard as men on their salary.
When controlling for all factors, wage differences largely disappear.
https://www.epi.org/publication/womens-work-and-the-gender-p...
The authors also conjecture that this is due to cultural biases, but obviously cannot prove this.
For instance, their overview that women arrive in college less interested in STEM, and they hint suggestively that this is due to discrimination. Except this hypothesis doesn't at all explain the gender equality paradox; in fact, it predicts the exact opposite of what we see.
Normally in science, a falsification this strong would immediately dismiss a hypothesis as a viable candidate theory. It's suggestive that it hasn't.
But that's not how a lot of jobs, software development included, work. It's entirely possible for someone fresh out of school to be a far more valuable team member than someone with ten years experience... yet we would point to a disparity in pay between those two people as [sexist, ageist, whatever-ist]. Now let an experienced employee find out they're getting paid less than someone with far less experience? Hooo boy, talk about creating a toxic environment.
I don't think that's the conclusion being reached here. What I'm getting at is performance is a VERY hard thing to quantify to everyone's satisfaction (after all, I doubt anyone thinks that they aren't a valuable employee, and everyone has numerous examples of "well this other guy sucks, I'm much better than him"), but it has a major impact on pay.
But for this specific case, there's one of two things happening:
1. As another poster said, "men" is code for "men working under H1-B visas." 2. In an effort to not look sexist, Google let the pendulum swing the other way and pay women more out of general principle.
Why? That's far too simplistic. Are you comparing e.g. a senior engineer to a part time janitor? Why should their pay be closer?
Look at the position and demand for it. Comparing salary without context is a waste of time (unless you truly believe market forces shouldn't be relevant, but I think you'll have a hard time convincing people in the US to join your side.)
You're completely throwing context out of the window, though, and that's a dangerous precedent. Is the person making 300k in sales? Is the person making 32k merely the frontline helpdesk?
To try to "even it out, to decrease the dispairity, and - thus - the inequality" would mean the sales person and the helpdesk person making around 150k but only one of them is performing highly skilled, desired, sought-after work and the other is a generalist whom can easily be replaced. You intentionally devalue the sales person to add unwarranted value to the frontline helpdesk person.
So, your sales person leaves and your helpdesk person stays with your company until they either die or company runs under or what-have-you. They could improve themselves to move up the ranks but where's the onus for that, if they're already making gold bars, without having had to have done anything to actually earn that value?
The entire premise is wrought with problems because it doesn't address the principal fact that the desparities probably exist for a reason...
there are plenty of environments where salaries are known and there is not more conflict than anywhere else. For example Congress staffers' salaries are public, there are huge pay differences for the same position but it sill works.
I think most arguments against transparency are spread by employers to keep the information asymmmwetry.In most markets the party that has more information will have the advantage.
Counter-example: pay on commission. Salespeople are "directly compared", but are not doing exactly the same work. Still, the work they are doing is fungible—you can compute the value in dollars both of closing one big account, or ten small accounts, and compare those.
This is essentially how a very small subset of IT people get paid, as well: vulnerability researchers, who make a living off of bug bounty programs.
Attempts have been made to expand this approach. Some FOSS projects have bounties on each issue, where whoever submits a PR for that issue (that gets merged) gets paid the bounty.
The question is how to scale this approach to work that requires more than a single person to complete. (I.e. how to distribute the "spoils" of a bounty among a team.) There are historical examples one could look at of bounty programs where the entrants were teams (e.g. the Netflix Prize), but IIRC in none of them were any of the teams really motivated by the bounty above all; rather, they were just in competition with the other teams to be the first ones to solve an eminently-achievable-but-challenging problem, and it was competition for competition's sake—essentially, a sport.
Stable incomes are essential for most people's sanity. Always being at risk of having projects shift away from work you do, and to work other people do directly conflicts with that stability most people are looking for. You could be spending an incredible amount of time trying to catch up with another project, while still maintaining your own, all the while having the looming threat of not being able to pay your bills over you head.
Freelancer type pay isn't for everyone.
Which goes back to that issue of not having an objective measurement to pay by.
When I was in industry, our company was a 20-person R&D house that paid everyone equally, from new hires like me to founders of the company. And it worked great!
We would all occasionally compare over the years and it would always come up that there would be a small difference (<$1k) where someone happened to hit a lucky streak of getting promoted in a better % year, and people's feelings would be hurt.
Granted, that probabbly wouldn't stop recruiter spam and of course there is MUCH MORE to a good job than pay.
If a woman is promoted over a man in the name of gender equality, are his three daughters better off because of the new equality? Are "women" better off?
Salary transparency without job descriptions would be akin to showing house prices without describing house details - location, square footage, number of bedrooms, etc.
This whole notion that the only way for someone who thinks they aren't paid enough to get a raise is to know everyone else's salary and then use that as leverage is absurd. If you feel like you aren't paid enough ask for a raise and explain why you feel that way. If you're turned down look for a different job that values you at a level you're comfortable with. If you still can't make the amount you desire maybe then it is time to check your own assumptions and see what you can do to provide more value so that you can get it in return.
People are trading their time based on certain assumptions, including the viability of the company; seeing the company's books is a vital way to do that.
"Trust me" is a shitty position for companies to put workers in, and yet we see again and again how they go under and leave people (individuals, families, etc) in the lurch.
Secrecy never benefits the person in the weaker position.
Now, developer 1 has a rage-boner because developer 2 is being paid more but there's the reason of his/her desirable skills being utilised in the role. Yet, developer 1 doesn't see this qualifiable reason and just sees this as being unfair/unequal.
Pay transparency would only exacerbate the current problems around pay, not help alleviate them.
Citations?
So the markets have been improperly functioning, this entire time, because they didn't have the relevant information...?
That's the reason why it's criminal for employers to punish employees for discussing compensation with each other and why employers try their hardest to prevent that from happening.
I posit that in a lot of (most) companies profit is born wholly by the underpaid employees.
All public servants or just those paid by your statea and/or federal governments? Could you find out how much someone made at the NSA, for example?
>Sweden.
Tax returns are not the same as pay transparency. In premise, yes, in practice, no, because a tax return is based on taxable income only. So, let's say I have tax credits for having three kids. My taxable income would be vastly different from yours, if you have no kids.
>Buffer
Overflow...?
>Sweden.
You are conflating tax returns and taxable income. A tax return shows the salary AND the tax credits. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-panama-tax-nordics-idUSKC...
>Buffer
https://www.google.com/search?q=buffer+pay+transparency
Plenty of situations? Where? Documented somewhere, I should hope, yeah?
Is that better dev from a subjective or an objective perspective?
The reason that I ask is because one dev can think that they're better than another and believe that they should be paid more but that could very well be the fault of fevered ego and not, necessarily, a reflection of reality, yeah?
Also, salary transparency wouldn't actually address anything. It would be a tool to address the salary issue with management and management (plus, HR) would address it, yeah?
The first step to address issues is to gather relevant data so an informed decision can be made. right now we have only very incomplete data.
Okay. Let's make a thought experiment.
Question: is the Java developer in Company A underpaid?I still don’t understand the thought experiment. How about: Car A costs $30000, Car B costs $50000. Which is the better value? Makes as little sense.
Market transparency that you mentioned earlier makes sense only for standardized goods/services. Software jobs are not standardized and many people don't want their colleagues to know how much their earn.
As a fun thought exercise, imagine that you were the head of a multi-national conglomerate (or working in the interests of a multinational conglomerate) who stood to gain from paying people as little as possible. Would it be in your best interest to: a) standardize pay fairly or b) convince some people that they were being mistreated to the benefit of some other people and watch them fight each other while you laughed from your corner office, puffing cigars lit off of $100 bills?
Similarly, I think imagine Google will find similar flaws with how these numbers were generated.
I would say this makes it more likely for people to be underpaid, especially when factoring in hours worked. See SpaceX for another example.
A company like Google, paying substantially over minimum wage, is probably not underpaying most employees systematically, almost by definition IMO.
If a company underpays all its employees equally, it's still underpaying. Companies that do this are taking advantage of how people are not rational actors.
Supply and demand of willing free-will workers? Profitability of the company? Something else?
Or what a Wall Street hedge fund can pay?
Political campaigns have the same property in a lot of cases.
So long as people want to express their preferences in where they work based on the content of the work, the mission of the organization, the laptops they issue, or any other set of criteria, I think it's fair game that those choices tip the supply/demand relationship in or away from their favor.
Now I'm hearing that "it doesn't matter that there are significant numbers of both underpaid women and underpaid men" from you.
I guess it's not very clear to me what you think the issue is here.
^ That's like saying that two people can each be shorter than each other. It's not possible according to the way the "less than" function is defined.
I still agree that 'underpaid' is a difficult term here. Maybe the 80% are overpaid? The only hard fact in this example would be that the salary is more skewed than it should be for a 'fair' compensation.
Should the salary distribution mirror the talent distribution, or no?
In large companies with many career levels, the role level indicates the perceived value for the company. Then, the distribution within the level doesn't matter that much, as long as the difference between minimum and maximum pay is relatively small, and there is not much overlap to the neighborhood levels. Of course, there is no objective criterion what "relatively small" means in this context.
And, as the article already points out, this only covers fairness within the same level. Maybe even more important is if everybody is evaluated in the same way when it comes to career progress.
I believe the productivity figures are at least a factor of 2, and probably a tail out to a factor of 10 or more versus the median developer (and then a left-going distribution under the median where a substaintial number of developers do not create any value at all). Under that set of beliefs, 20% making ~$150K and 80% making ~$200K is actually insufficient skew vs a “fair” system.
What is happening though is a flaw within our logical frameworks. Our cultural biases are making something evident.
If more women are underpaid than men, then that it is obviously and overtly a form of sexism... logically this implicates that If more men are underpaid than women then it is also sexism.
Instead of calling out the logical implication why do people jump to an illogical conclusion?
The question is now, do women experience sexism in terms of compensation at google or do men? Or do neither?
If the answer is neither than what does it mean when I see videos like this popping up all over my facebook feed? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pQ-fUXAeCI
> Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money.
So they were compensated out of proportion with their demographic makeup of the company--they made up a larger share but needed more money to "catch up."
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19278839
This is an "inside" indicator, referencing that ol' ungenerous-but-pithy paraphrase of a since-disavowed Bill Gates quote regarding 640 kB of personal computer memory. It's like the phrase "modest proposal", in that you only know it's marking something as insincere with some out-of-band knowledge.
>Women and racial minorities often do not get the same opportunities and they must overcome certain biases when they are hired or compete for promotions.
My problem with these kinds of "intrinsic biases" that white men are accused of is that they can only be shown to exist by accepting the fundamentally unproven assumption that we all enter the workforce equally capable in all industries, a position which is clearly untenable at a minimum because of cultural differences.
This is practically the definition of ideological, institutional bias, and the results will either be reduced efficiency across the workforce, or a violent swing of the ideological pendulum.
But the study did not tell the whole story of women at Google or in the technology industry more broadly, something that company officials acknowledged.
Most significantly, it did not address ingrained issues that, according to workplace experts, cannot be overcome simply by considering how much different people are paid for doing the same job: Women and racial minorities often do not get the same opportunities and they must overcome certain biases when they are hired or compete for promotions.
Etc.
The media really needs to stop this practice of just saying "experts say" without any attribution.
I suggest when reading any article, when you read, "experts agree" or "sources say" or "critics have said" or "others are saying" -- just replace it with, "I, the author of this article, think ..."
Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, a consulting company that advises companies on strategies for increasing diversity, said the pay gap correction only served “to benefit a group that is dramatically overrepresented in engineering, and that faces fewer barriers to access and opportunity in the field.”
Also, from the article:
“We know that’s only part of the story,” Lauren Barbato, Google’s lead analyst for pay equity, people analytics, wrote in a blog post set to be made public on Monday. “Because leveling, performance ratings, and promotion impact pay, this year, we are undertaking a comprehensive review of these processes to make sure the outcomes are fair and equitable for all employees.”
So...workplace experts said.
I don't think the context is completely unjustified. It just happens to be more complicated than this. The reason that women generally drifted into higher compensation compared to men was that their direct management chain was adjusting their compensation disproportionately (when measured in aggregate, across the company).
You could come up with a lot of explanations for this effect. Women could have been hired at lower levels than appropriate and were therefore outperforming men of the same level, for instance. Or, perhaps, there's a lot of emphasis in the company towards retaining and compensating women fairly, and the effect was that managers were primed to reflect that in their pay raises -- in other words, people were personally overcompensating for the intrinsic biases they were told that they had. Still another reason might be that women just make better engineers, in aggregate.
Google decided that the goal was "equity" here and decided to correct it, for better or worse, and yet it's false to say that we already understand the cause behind the disparity.
Or more broadly, supply/demand. There is a heavy demand for female tech workers, which tends to increase their salaries (both when hired and when countering outside offers).
Gender or any other identity factor is then irrelevant if pay is based entirely upon candidate experience, right?
Edit: I have no knowledge of how Google handles salary. If anyone knows, feel free to share.
[edit: minor wording change; why am I being downvoted? I'm seriously asking]
It turned out there WAS bias - in favor of the women!
"The lawsuit triggered a study. The study results showed that not only were women not discriminated against, but that women had a statistically significant advantage!
Here’s what happened. Some departments had high acceptance rates and some had low acceptance rates. Women applied to more competitive departments. Men applied to more accessible departments. Taken on the whole men had an advantage. When broken down per department it was women who were more favored."
https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/my_favorite_paradox/
Human beings just have very strange presuppositions regarding probability and statistics that are almost always wrong.
Univariate analyses can hide lots of interesting things!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox
There is simply not enough information presented in this article to know whether there is truly a gender bias (in either direction) regarding how Google pays their employees.
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19303989
Hmm...
"Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a disproportionately higher percentage of the money. "
So, yes, we do have that information.
My understanding is that we're talking about the latter.
E.g.: Google is 70% men. At 100,000 employees: 70,000 Male 30,000 Female
If 5% of men are underpaid that's 3,500 men. If 10% of women are underpaid that's 3,000 women.
More men are underpaid (3,500 > 3,000). But women are twice as likely to be underpaid (10% > 5%).
The article says the opposite with regard to where the salary adjustments went:
> One effect of the adjustments was to create a pronounced imbalance in compensation among lower-level software engineers, one of Google’s largest job groups, with a large number of men identified as being underpaid compared with their female peers. To offset that, further adjustments were made. Google said it saw no pattern in the reasons women were receiving more discretionary pay.
Btw, note that this passage (that I also quoted yesterday for a comment of my own) is now nowhere to be found in the article, that has been heaviy edited since it was posted on HN.
It says no such thing. The "large number" of underpaid men is not being compared against the number of underpaid women.
The article still contains these quotes, which clearly establish that the equity pay raises went disproportionately to men:
> The study, which disproportionately led to pay raises for thousands of men [...]
> In response to the study, Google gave $9.7 million in additional compensation to 10,677 employees for this year. Men account for about 69 percent of the company’s work force, but they received a higher percentage of the money.
This sentence compares the number of men identified as underpaid to the number of women identified as underpaid.
>> The study, which disproportionately led to pay raises for thousands of men
"Disproportionate" is used to signify something that is "out of proportion", in a lay sense, not in the mathematical sense of the ratio between two numbers. It is not a mathematical term that signifies a comparison between percentages, as your comment seems to suggest.
>> they received a higher percentage of the money.
This says nothing about the proportion of men or women who were found to be underpaid. It refers to the percentage of men who received more money. The justification for that is that there are more men in the company.
No, it is saying that the definition of "underpaid" is "making less money than women at the same level."
> This says nothing about the proportion of men or women who were found to be underpaid. It refers to the percentage of men who received more money. The justification for that is that there are more men in the company.
It says that men accounted for 69% of the work force, but received more than 69% of the money that went to equity raises.
1. The average under-compensated man had worked there longer or had been under-compensated longer
AND/OR
2. The average under-compensated man was in a higher paid role.
https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-...
In a bid to eliminate sexism, thousands of public servants have been told to pick recruits who have had all mention of their gender and ethnic background stripped from their CVs
The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview.
Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door.
...
Leaders of the Australian public service will today be told to "hit pause" on blind recruitment trials.
For two, it doesn't make people angry, it just confuses the issue.
The real reason for the Berkeley study is that the seeming acceptance disparity worried administrators, who proactively asked Bickel to look into it. https://outline.com/2HMrKV
To support this claim the study pointed out that the percentage of male applicants _out of all male_ applicants that were granted admission was lower than the percentage for female applicants, for all (examined) departments.
However, according to the study, there were 8442 male applicants and 4321 female applicants. So while a larger proportion of female applicants were granted admission, it still meant that many fewer women were addmitted.
To clarify, a higher proportion of a smaller number can still be a smaller number. 5% of 1000 is 50, 10% of 100 is 10.
Imagine we split a pie in 10 pieces, you keep 8 and I keep 2. I eat my 2, you eat 4 of your 8 and then you accuse me of hogging the pie because I ate 100% of my share while you ate only half of yours.
That is what the study actually showed happenned with admissions in Berkeley.
_________________________
[1] Sex Bias in Graduate Admissions: Data from Berkeley
https://homepage.stat.uiowa.edu/~mbognar/1030/Bickel-Berkele...
Where does the study say that? I find it saying that 44 percent of male applicants and 35 percent of female applicants were admitted, when totaled over all 101 departments.
In that paragraph, the authors state that they estimate the probability of admission of a female applicant "by multiplying the estimated probability of admission of any applicant (regardless of sex) to that department by the number of women applying to it", which I find reasonable.
However, immediately afterwards they compare that probability with the probability of an applicant being admitted given that the applicant is female. I quote from the end of the second column and the start of the third one:
"Thus, if the chances of getting into a department were one-half for all applicants to it, and 100 women applied, we would expect 50 women to be admitted if they were being treated just like the men".
In other words, bias depends on whether the proportion of applicants of one sex, out of all applicants of _that_ sex, was higher than the expectation formed for applicants of any sex. It's a little confusing and the language in the article is not very precise. But that's what's up.
Ah, I see; I was misunderstanding which part of the study you were referring to.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
This site looks like it has the rules more formalized, if you’re interested. I think it’s something most native English writers do without thinking by adulthood.
https://capitalizemytitle.com/
> Within a few weeks of Ms. Ellis being hiring, Google hired a male engineer for her team who had also graduated from college four years earlier. But he was hired as a Level 4 employee, meaning he received a higher salary and had more opportunities for bonuses, raises and stock compensation, according to the suit. Other men on Ms. Ellis’s team whose qualifications were equal to or less than hers were also brought in at Level 4, the suit says.
This feels like a part of the issue, but could be really hard to analyze easily.
You've spent four years of your career doing some crappy data entry job? Undershot. Rejected.
You've been running your own company after the college? Overshot. Rejected.
So the L4 person probably had some better story/negotiation which allowed them to start at L4. It of course could be bias.
It was really frustrating for me to be at the same level as new grads, though on reflection, I was not at a the same level as other L4 employees around. Some transparency around these processes I think could help candidates a lot.
I think the bigger issue is that new-grad phds are almost always hired at L4. They are often less experienced at software engineering than someone with a bachelors and a few years of experience. So unless the person is being hired into an area that actually makes use of their phd, it seems that Google is just willing to pay for the title.
Say what you will about Google, but I don't think it's a very controversial opinion to say they do hire a lot of the best software engineers, and they are very good at it.
I'm sorry but that is completely the opposite.
In MLB and a lot of other sports now, every single play is tracked. Every player has rate and counting stats to measure efficiency and overall production in every category. Anyone in the world can subscribe to the tape library and watch your entire career on loop and analyze every single moment of your professional career.
No one can do anything like that in closed-source software. Infact, that is the big unsolved problem in tech hiring. No one can tell who the good devs are because your "track record", your resume is just not a reliable indicator of your ability.
Much of what you've done at other companies, other on the Microsoft stack or open-source stack, doesn't transfer. Little of your tooling experience matters.
While you can jump from one Linux-and-Python-and-git-and-JIRA-based startup to another and hit the ground running, you'll be spending months ramping up at Google unless you've worked there before.
I'm not saying this is justified, especially when it comes to other ladders like graphic designers (where you see the same thing happening), but there does seem to be a certain logic to it.
One of the reasons I chose to join Google over another security-related company (that would have done little coding) was that I wanted to learn how to write software better. I've learned a lot about testing, understanding the reliability of distributed systems, writing code for maintainability, etc.
I tend to think of it this way: Google has tens of thousands of engineers. That's an ecosystem the size of a few thousand startups, except stuffed into one company. It has its way of doing things, and to move up in this ecosystem you don't just master your own startup, you master the ecosystem around you.
That and a noticeable amount of elitism.
I worked for around 4 years before joining Google and was also hired as an L3. I'm male.
Two of my new grad friends were hired as L3's at Google too but make like 100k more than I do in total compensation. One is male and one is female.
I'm not saying there isn't sexism but I'm not really convinced by this example. It's pretty common that people get "demoted" when coming in from other companies.
I made the mistake of not getting competing offers (I wasn't actually looking to change jobs at the time).
So people just take whatever is offered. Because, there are tens of thousands of people applying for these jobs. Most of them are likely to better than you and they didn't crack all competitive coding style interview to land a job like you did. So people just find it hard to turn down the offer and take it.
It's only later do they realized they are not building the next search engine. Nor building the next gen e-commerce platform, but building Jsons and posting to dataservices. By then you are conditioned to free food and you are not comparing your salary with people outside but inside.
Its always hard to admit you didn't negotiate well or fell for the marketing appeal of the company. Its easy to find conspiracies and accuse others of malice. The later story is more appealing, makes you a victim and makes the other side look bad.
I don't speak for everyone obviously but the reason I took the offer is that it will still >50% what I was making previously. I didn't bother looking into how much other people make.
> It's only later do they realized they are not building the next search engine. Nor building the next gen e-commerce platform, but building Jsons and posting to dataservices. By then you are conditioned to free food and you are not comparing your salary with people outside but inside.
Somehow I feel you have a bone to pick? I've been on 3 different teams and this has not been my experience at all.
People at Google seem to be just like people at other companies. They're happy they have a good job but look forward to retirement.
>>People at Google seem to be just like people at other companies. They're happy they have a good job but look forward to retirement.
Not sure what's your point here. The whole reason this discussion seems to be happening is because a segment of people think that is not true.
If that is true in your case, why would you even argue? It does not even apply to you.
I asked my boss about this and he said it was because this was her first real job. When I reminded him that this was also my first real job he just said "that's different" without further explanation.
Also, a L3 at Google makes ~$200k a year. Someone getting paid that 4 years out of college is not being discriminated against.
Source: https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Google/Facebook/Microsoft
If women were underpaid, things are less equal on average. If men were underpaid, as the study suggests, things are more equal on average. That said, would it be fair to keep underpaying some people in order to keep it more equal on average? I think not.
They needed to compare the number of men who were underpaid as a proportion of all men to the number of women who were underpaid as a proportion of all women.
Using bum-pulled numbers, your company has 1000 employees, 667 are men, and 333 women, and they all do pretty much the same job. Your payroll is $100M, and 70% of it goes to the male employees. The mean pay for men is $105k, and the mean pay for women is $90k. Mean pay is $100k--let's say this is fair pay for the work. Overall, the men are overpaid, and the women underpaid.
But the mean is a fool's game; the median is more telling. Now say 445 men get $90k, and 222 get $135k. 2/3 of men are underpaid. Now let's say 222 women get $101k, and 111 get $68k. 1/3 of women are underpaid.
On a per-person basis, a man working for the company is twice as likely to be underpaid as a woman, but the amount by which they would be underpaid is much less. Going by the aggregate numbers, one could say "men at Company X are overpaid, compared to the women" and then any given underpaid man might not even realize they are being underpaid, thanks to the misleading statistic. When one of the $68k-paid women complains (naturally, as the worst-off of the bunch), and the company analyzes its own payroll at a more detailed level, it realizes that men are more likely to be underpaid than women (and also that increasing its payroll by 8% would make no-one underpaid).
So at the end of the day, they weren't severely underpaying employees.
Good to see a company take this step. I had this happen to me at one company I worked for... it actually resulted in a pay increase of over 4 bucks an hour, now THAT was nice!
If you set initial salaries fairly with respect to gender but promote men more quickly, then you end up with a company where it looks like women are paid more when you control for job title.
Step 1: Let's agree that this is a complicated problem, and that quick feel good knee jerk reactions may end up having negative impacts.
Step 2: Work on solutions to complicated problems.
Easier said than done, but few things worth doing are simple, and there's already a lot of people doing great work on sustainable, informed solutions (but too many people just going "lets pay everyone the same, its the only way to be fair!!!" hurting everyone else)
Usually it's the opposite but for the same reason: women seem underpaid but when you correct for experience on the job, they make something like 98 cents on the dollar compared to men.
And I think someplace like Hacker news is exactly the right place for the community to discuss the many ways a company can get to a result like this - via Simpson's paradox, via differences in promotion velocity, or via simple economics, based on the fact diverse teams are desirable and women are more scarce.
Attacking someone for suggesting one not-yet-discussed possibility is not helpful to the discussion, imo.
My observation is that news about men being disadvantaged comes out and people don't want to believe it.
I've seen people insinuate that the study was done by men and therefore the outcome would naturally happen. Another mocking that is was "scientific" and "numbers-based" Another claiming the women deserve more money. I bet if I challenged any of them they would claim to be attacked too.
It is not just about pay equity in a particular level. It is also about the ingress and egress rate of a level.
As the article mentions, some woman was hired as L3 while all of her co-workers were hired as L4. Was she overpaid as a L3? Maybe. But she was underpaid overall because she could've gotten L4.
Similarly, women and under represented minorities also face similar issues in promotions.
Levels (on hiring) can be affected by negotiation. You can, quite literally, negotiate a better level before signing the employment contract.
Why Miss Ellis' level was only Level 3 and everyone around her seemed to be hired at a Level 4, I won't even presume to know but I think it is a disservice to argue over facets surrounding something not publicly known specifically because those facts aren't known.
For example, the man that was hired - after Ms. Ellis was hired - was also hired four years after he graduated university and came on at Level 4.
Did he graduate with a master's? Did he have the same (or more) experience dev'ing? Is there any other plausible reason than the nefarious one we assume?
If not, then, sure let's deride away.
If so, then are we saying that prior experience and education level[s] (or quality) should not matter? That there should be a "maximum minimum level" for all workers entering the force?
Doesn't sound like they were underpaying by very much...
This is true of most models (in practice - any model which models salary in the real world) yet not every company is being accused of these payment discrimination lawsuits.
maybe because attacking them is not worth it?
> In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple's Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google's Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other's employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators.
https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valle...
BTW, in the same vein the article could be titled "Google finds it is overpaying many men (or women)" - since unless everybody has the same salary, half of the workforce would be paid less than median - thus being underpaid - and half would be paid more - thus being overpaid. Well, there could be lucky ones being paid exactly the median, but they are too boring to write an article about them.
https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/gender-wage-gap.htm
The countries with the highest wage gaps are the countries with the most equality in the workplace. Women in Korea are not treated poorly.
The important thing though is the people proposing that the wage gap is a problem has a solution. They are pushing equality of outcome. They want everyone to be paid exactly the same. That's the problem that they have. They don't care that they are comparing apples to oranges. They want pay to be exactly the same.
When you take all factors into account the gender wage gap virtually vanishes.
Comparing secondary school teachers to post-secondary professors is hilarious at best. High school teachers should be paid much less than university professors.
Now tell me, how about men vs women at secondary schools. Oh right their unions make sure they are paid identically. How about professors? They are paid the same.
If you think that secondary school teachers should be paid the same as university professors; you're a communist. That's perfectly acceptable to be a communist, but you don't live in a communist society.
Why?
I disagree with this in general, because I don't feel like the skills and knowledge needed to be a successful primary School educator are as difficult or unique as those needed to be a secondary School educator.
My reasoning is that a good percentage of the value that comes from primary School education is based around behavioural education, such as learning how to interact and behave with peers and teams. It also is a place where students learn authority and social heptarchy, and punishment and consequence. In addition to learning the foundations of school subjects.
In secondary education, it's assumed that the student has learned all that, and their attention will be focused on difficult study of each of their subjects. The professor should be an embodiment of that subject, with understanding beyond primary School educators. Likewise it's arguably more difficult to keep the attention of University students than primary students.
On the other hand (as in not in general), if someone was a truly exceptional primary educator / early life coach / babysitter, what have you, then the private sector would be a better place for them I imagine.
Because of education level?
A university professor has a PHD. An elementary teacher has a bachelors degree.
If you think a PHD and a bachelors degree should be paid the same. That's perfectly fine, that's called communism. It's perfectly fine to be a communist.
As an example: a middle school dropout who self learned machine learning, became a master, published papers, worked at a successful startup etc, will likely be better paid than your average History PhD.
More people are considered qualified as elementary school teachers than those qualified for university teaching. Same with nurses and doctors.
I'd be fine with a random anesthesiologist teaching my grade schooler, but I'd hesitate to have a random elementary school teacher giving him anesthesia.
Elementary school teaching: a teaching certificate.
University professor: PhD, pre-tenure work & published research (Note that there are less-qualified people teaching in universities that are compensated much less.)
Nurse practitioner: Master's degree (undergraduate plus 2 years)
Anesthesiologist: Undergraduate + medical degree (4 years) + residency (4 years) + possible specialty training.
And I definitely would NOT expect someone without training to be an effective teacher. I'm in awe of what my kids' teachers are able to do. Classroom management is a skill that is incredibly difficult to master.
If a person has a bachelor's degree, they can get a Michigan interim teaching certificate by passing a test. https://www.teachercertificationdegrees.com/certification/mi... Permanent certification then requires 12 hours (1 semester full-time) of courses, or working toward a masters degree would probably give an immediate and permanent bump in pay.
Imagine a random liberal arts graduate: Would it be easier to go into elementary teaching in Michigan or software development?
The teachers I know personally obtained traditional four-plus-year bachelors degrees before applying for jobs. In most cases, they had to do a year or more of subbing before finding a permanent position.
(edit to add: education degrees are very hard to get done in four years, especially with the aiding, student teaching, etc.)
I actually believe a greater percentage of the population, by far, is CAPABLE of this, but very few choose a path that gives them a self idealization that they believe they can or want to be a computer expert of any sort.
This is very much a cultural issue- the messages women receive from their media sources rarely contain reinforcement towards technical excellence.
This is a frustration for technically oriented men, I believe, because we aren't directly the source of this disparity- I think the vast majority of STEMish career men would welcome more women into the fold as true peers, but are somewhat aggravated by messages that we are somehow directly responsible for large cultural forces we have little/no power over.
Its been positive to see more girls get into sports as that message has permeated into the culture. Hopeful an equivalent message about women and STEM will percolate into the larger collective id.
It is harder to measure a cost on society inflicted by poorly educated students than it is to measure the cost of buggy, failing commercial software. Also, students who were academic failures are not necessarily guaranteed to fail in life, since there are ways to succeed in life other than by being good at school subjects, whereas an incorrect software program can never succeed.
The same holds true even inside the same field. It depends whether you are near a cash cow or a cost center. Working on infrastructure, building tooling for other developers is not likely to be rewarded as well as writing code that could cost your company millions if there is a bug.
There are also differences in specialization. An average game dev is probably going to make less than an average mobile dev, who in turn is going to make less than what a random quant makes.
FTFY
Generally only specialized teaching areas require a master's degree.
A Bachelors and a teacher training program w/ possible test is generally sufficient - and you can usually begin teaching with an interim/provisional certificate, and work on the certification as you go.
https://www.teacher.org/how-to-become/ https://www.alleducationschools.com/teacher-certification/
Not many people can play bagpipes, so supply is low. But not many people will pay to hear bagpipes, so demand is low, too. Bagpiping doesn't pay well.
Nearly everyone needs food cooked, so demand is high. But nearly everyone can cook, so supply is high, too. Cooking doesn't pay well.
Not many people can do surgery, so supply is low. Many people need surgery, so demand is high. Surgery pays well.
Supply and demand explains why surgeons make more than teachers, why basketball stars make more than nurses, and why programmers make more than janitors. It isn't about how hard something is or how noble it is. It's just supply and demand.
These market distortions affect the prices and thus the salaries in various ways. Teacher shortages show that the wage is not sensitive to the supply and demand for teachers. Do people shop around for price on needed surgeries? Do they even know the price before receiving the surgery? Do they even pay the price of the surgery? (usually paying some subsidized part of a contractually limited price).
Basketball stars show another market distortion, particularly in college basketball. The player salary is not governed by supply and demand, but by the cartel of college sports (though colleges do compete on non-salary benefits they provide...)
You could assert that these factors just inflate or reduce the supply or the demand, but it's not simply "lots of people want but few provide therefore it pays well".
I do not mean to belittle those career choices (if anything, I myself want to become a k12 school teacher at some point in life). But, there are a certain set of traits that are needed to excel at the 'prestigious' careers. Disposition towards hard work beyond the standard 9-5, an acumen for logical reasoning, ability to retain large quantities of information are all more rare than social skills and empathy, which take precedence in elementary teaching or nursing.
Our culture idolizes the hard working, career oriented person, that sacrifice other things in life to singularly chase this money and fame driven idea of success. This is irrespective of how physically/mentally healthy it is, or if it positively correlates to long term happiness.
IMO, it leads to an obsession to prove that men and women being equal, would have equal outcomes on this narrow benchmark for success. It both neglects the fact that that social norms haven't changed as much and that equal outcome is meaningless without context.
p.s: nice to see someone use 'beg the question' in the correct context.
But you replace that with a need for a lot more knowledge of teaching and child psychology, so I'd say doing a good job is significantly harder even in the sense of requiring a lot of education.
Do they really though? In my experience, school teachers don't really have either and both are either learned on the job or academically taught when pursuing the major. Being a great teacher is tough, but very few teachers are actually great.
Being a university professor is IMO, among the hardest positions to get. In my experience, the smartest people I know are university professors.
If anything, many university professors are grossly underpaid (for what they offer) in exchange for job security and complete freedom to pursue what they love.
Also the original quote was university teaching. The whole professorship and tenure thing is a separate giant ball of complication, and you're right that all that non-teaching stuff is extremely difficult.
Maybe, but this highlights another problem in "soft" careers (social, marketing, teaching etc). It's very hard to objectively qualify candidates. In programming, it's easy: you can program, or not. If you can, the question is likely how fast can you learn new things, and how complex programs you can design & write. Good lawyers win cases. Good traders make money. And so on... How do you compare teachers, marketers (except bullshit "increased engagement by 1600%" claims on their CVs), etc?
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Korea most assuredly is not a country with "the most equality in the workplace". It routinely ranks as having the worst gender inequality of any developed nation, and one of the worst in the world generally. It came in 115th out of 149 countries in the World Economic Forum's 2018 Global Gender Gap Report* and has hovered around that number for years.
*http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2018.pdf
Your assertion is that Japan and Korea are highly discriminatory against women? That's certainly interesting and I'm not sure I can defend against that position. Perhaps women in japan and korea are extremely oppressed. This is certainly not what I thought after reading for example or just seeing what's portrayed in the media. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_South_Korea
Meanwhile your source has Rwanda as #6 most equal. I'm very confused about what the data is saying. It's certainly feeling more like a checkbox list.
So let's look at Canada. Both my data and your data have them with poor performance. Mind you my data is just looking at wage gap.
Women in Canada for ECONOMIC PARTICIPATION AND OPPORTUNITY is 27th place behind Brunai and Ghana. This seems quite incorrect. Women have completely the same economic opportunity as men in Canada. So this is a debateable number. Women are educated BETTER than men and certainly work. So I'm not sure how this data was determined. The actual number should be showing discrimination against me.
Women in Canada are 1.0 for education. That's good. Like I just said https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-004-x/2008001/article... Women outnumber men. So this is actually false information. They capped the number wrongly at 1.0.
Women in Canada for HEALTH AND SURVIVAL aren't in the list? USA is in 71st place. I happen to know this statistic. Women live longer than men. So they cherry picked and removed this data? https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-624-x/2011001/article... This another number completely false.
Women in Canada for POLITICAL EMPOWERMENT are 21st place behind india and nambia. Except we live in a democratic society with no barriers. Women can run for politics. So this should be a 1.0.
So I guess in conclusion I find your study to be biased, false, and wrong.
Let me explain to you what's happening. Women have the CHOICE. They choose careers that they get paid less in. This is a good thing. They have the freedom. The gap is not a problem.
As for Rwanda, this is just plain absurd. This is at best a checkbox study where they are looking to confirm reverse sexism. Yes I did read Rwanda has significant reverse sexism. After the genocide their society was over 70% women and they elected leaders to provide sexist policies.
Reverse sexism is not an ideal to be aiming toward.
That would be an extreme abuse of democracy. If only 50% of ridings have a woman running. It would mean those riding automatically go to those women. Those ridings don't get to vote.
So yes, political empowerment only goes so in far as women having the right to run. Not confirmation bias; I simply believe in democracy.
I also note you never commented on the other points which were much more egregious and clearly make things appear much worse than it actually is.
I also go back and recalculate Canada's score. We are the MOST equal country surpassing Iceland and Rwanda by gigantic strides it also makes the study look pretty stupid because our equality is perfect and yet we have a large wage gap still.
This is because the gender wage gap isn't discrimination. It's entirely based on decisions made by women.
I guess you could say they just didn't choose to run for office. Or to get educated. The cross burning was coincidental.
But an election occurs and there's not a perfect representation of the people. Only 25% of the elected MPs are women. But there's no actual discrimination happening.
What's the fix? THERE IS NO FIX. It's exactly how it should be. We absolutely should not say 50% of MPs must be women. That is not how democracy works.
>Because at that point they lived in a democratic society with no barriers. They could run for political office. Under your definition, that's a 1.0.
Yes that is a 1.0. Was there discrimination? I'm sure there is still today. However there is no fix. That is a 1.0. We are equal.
We dont need to have a rule saying 50% of the elected positions must be black people. That would be discrimination and wrong.
Its very easy to think up improbable, and even impossible, hypothetical situations. This is one such hypothetical and it adds no value to this discussion. We live in a world with discrimination. What you're suggesting is as fantastical as imagining a country where everyone can fly and then asking what we would do for the car companies. It assumes so many unrealistic things that its not a good faith attempt at conversation.
Or another way of putting this is: I claim that your situation will occur with only some miniscule probability such that it is indistinguishable from impossible in practice. You're welcome to prove me wrong. But to be clear, I ask for a proof, and the burden is on you, to show that in a society truly free of discrimination, both de jure and de facto, that things would be as you claim with any regularity. Put plainly, such a feat isn't possible. So your hypothetical isn't worth spending time pondering.
>Was there discrimination? I'm sure there is still today.
Then it's not a 1.0. The WEF report is measuring discrimination, which you just said still exists. By your own admission, this shouldn't be a 1.0.
Yeah, I am not sure what to think of the data. It's not what I would expect.
How is US, Canada, Austria having such a large gender wage gap, followed by Canada.
Then Greece, Bulgaria and Romania are all the way on the left. Having lived in Eastern Europe, I would not consider it overall a bastion of women's equality and rights, not according to the West European standards at least. Granted though, during the Soviet times women and girls were studying math and science just as well as the boys even if not better and it was never specifically promoted or pushed via a "women in STEM" or such similar programs I have seen here, it just happened. Perhaps there is a remnant of that mentality and maybe there is something to be learned from there.
Great point. Yeah I can see that happening.
When you provide women the opportunity to become anything they want. They choose the careers that they choose. Which tend to me more social related careers. Teaching or nursing for example does not scale well; therefore salaries are limited.
Whereas men pick more "stuff" categories. It's men who work in STEM creating things. A car or an iphone is going to be generally speaking men who design it. These scale very well and salaries can be larger.
By these modern approaches that allow women to go into whatever they want to do. This is what creates the gender wage gap.
1) If we tell women their whole childhood that some jobs are for men and some are for women and vice versa for men then ask them when they turn 18 what job they want we'll get horrendously unequal outcomes even though people are completely free to choose.
2) Valuation of jobs is based partially on the view of the value of the work in addition to the actual value provided. e.g. there's huge amount of societal gain to be reaped by providing better education to our children but various forces keeps the wages to teachers depressed relative to the gains to be had from providing smaller classrooms. In a more solid sense it's much harder to evaluate the value provided by a better elementary school teacher because most of the metrics for success are either years in the future (wages, college graduation rates, etc) or tied up in a huge number of other influences.
These kinds of defuse benefit jobs are a lot of what have been traditionally gendered as women's jobs and in the past were just part of the huge unpaid work that women were expected to do and often are unfairly characterized as easier or less educated/lower skilled jobs. There's a whole gendered history tied up in just how we evaluate these jobs and their benefits.
2) Valuation doesn't always equate to monetary remuneration. For example (at least in Australia), police, teachers etc get FAR more leave and holidays compared to the rest of the country. That needs to be taken into account as part of the valuation. Stress also factors into why certain professions are "worth" more than others. IT is highly stressful, in comparison to other social professions.
2. Teachers in Ontario receive ~$140,000/year for 8 months of work, 5 hours a day. This is publicly available via the sunshine list. If you're using teachers as an example of bias. You're barking up the wrong tree here these inflated teacher wages raise the wages of women on average.
Furthermore, teachers are outside the standard capitalist system. If you want to use them as an example of valuation of you must support the privatization of teachers. I would support that idea. Might not end up well for those $140,000 teachers.
The point is though, women are not 100% teachers and the teacher unions are extremely strong; women and men are being paid the same as teachers.
"5 hours a day" because all the material and lesson plans just appears out of nowhere along with all the graded work and administrative work...
Also I'm very happy that Ontario seems to have a good grasp on the value of teaching but that REALLY isn't true in the US where our average salary in 2016-17 was ~$38k [0].
Also my point wasn't that women are being paid less as teacher but the kind of 'social jobs' typically filled by women that the OP was talking about are valued less. Gender equality within that job isn't particularly relevant there I was talking about the profession as a whole vs other professions.
[0] http://www.nea.org/home/2016-2017-average-starting-teacher-s...
average STARTING salary -- I think you knew that and "conveniently" left out that one important word. Big difference.
A very brief look at your NEA source (i.e. the lobbying org for teachers, so of course it is biased) reveals that it is obviously flawed. $38+change is the average of each state's average salary -- like the Senate, it gives equal representation to California and to Wyoming. It's pretty easy to see that the most populous states tend to have averages above $38k, in fact many well above $40 (Cali, Texas, NY, PA) while many of the lowest salaries are from much smaller states (W.Va, Montana, Idaho). There is no way, if the state averages are accurate, that the national average is only $38+change. I think you know this too but choose to quote these stats verbatim anyway.
I will also note public school teachers have almost zero chance of getting fired, no worries about their "company" going out of business or bought out or taken over, and become eligible for generous pensions.
This is false on multiple levels. Functional water treatment have a much bigger effect on health then functional health care, but water treatment employees are paid far less than doctors. We can likely make a similar argument for sewer treatment, garbage collection and mortuaries. We can see similar disconnect between teachers and veterinarians, where those that work with our children are paid less than those working with our pets.
A large part of Marxism is the disconnection between pay and value. There is no easy answers and bias is a poor explanation in order to understand the issue.
This would make some sense if women had been in the workforce for centuries and were well-established in particular fields, but women have only been in the workforce for a relatively short period of time and the cultural influences that might direct them into one job over another are not even remotely strong enough to play the role you think they do. There is almost nothing except the non-stop message of "you can do anything you want to do" given to little girls today and they are electing to do what they want to do. To assume they are trapped by some sort of cultural force that prefers them to do medicine instead of engineering (neither of which existed as a female field prior to the 20th century) is nonsense. Today, most medical school and law school graduates are women. Most engineering graduates are men. Unless men are fiercely protecting engineering for some weird, inexplicable reason, it would seem like women have had their say and chosen what they want to do.
Do you know this for sure? Developed East Asian countries are some of the worst in terms of work equality for women, particularly if they want to have children. Not a good example to use.
I'm not defending this at all however. I'm perfectly happy to believe that South Korea is worse than Saudi Arabia toward treatment of women.
Technically, everything could be equal, but men and women have much stronger gender roles there, it's very deeply ingrained into culture.
That's not a solution, that's another problem.
The mcdonalds cashier should not be compensated the same as someone like a neuroscientist.
If we get replicators invented and everyone can have whatever they please like in star trek. We still don't need communism. Capitalism will still work, stuff will just be free but if you want a PERSON to do something you still would need to pay.
Romania, Costa Rica, Luxembourg, Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Slovenia, Italy, Denmark, Turkey, Norway, New Zealand, Colombia, Malta, Hungary, Poland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Mexico, Spain, Lithuania, Cyprus, Netherlands, Portugal, Australia, Switzerland, Slovak Republic, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Finland, United Kingdom, Canada, United States, Chile, Latvia, Israel, Japan, Estonia, Korea.
See the pattern there? Neither do I. Usually there is some correlation by continent, cultural area, GDP, HDI, etc. In this case there seems to be nothing. Romania and Costa Rica and Luxembourg are the countries with the smallest wage gap; Netherlands, UK and US are way up there, in company of Chile, Canada and Estonia. Turkey is wedged right in between Denmark and Norway. Netherlands' pay gap is 4 times that of neighbouring Belgium. Mexico and Ireland are the same. Lithuania's gap is half that of Estonia and Latvia. Strange.
Unionize and wage equity magically disappears.
not necesarily talented at doing the job
But I don't think most people go to an interview without having googled "how to ..." about the interview process first. Thus even those not naturally talented at negotiation have a reasonable chance at negotiating decently.
Talent/job competence + a little bit of research and preparation prior to interviewing will ensure superior results IMHO.
This quote would appear to sum up the entire debate, using the term generously.
There is a large and vocal minority in society who abuse the word "equality" to mean "more money and power for women". They don't care about equality. They want inequality, but they know they can't say that, so they simply redefine equality to mean inequality in the Orwellian style and carry on as if the language hadn't just been horribly violated.
Ms. Emerson should stop talking until she can say what she means, although given her job is 'diversity consulting' I'm going to guess she will never be able to say what she means.
>That is not the same as addressing “equity,” she said, which would involve examining the structural hurdles that women face as engineers.
Consider the following situation:
Men get promoted faster than women for similar work. They're seen as more assertive or something. Managers, noting the systemic inequality, take individual action to compensate women fairly for their contributions, despite the failure of the larger system.
The structural hurdle: that women find it more difficult to get promoted, is not addressed. And as a result, they end up paid less for similar work, despite attempts by ground level mangers to address the inequity.
The HN guidelines suggest that you
>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I think this should apply to articles posted as well.
Regardless, if she wants to define a word to mean "the structural hurdles that women face as engineers" specifically she should not criticise other people for using the word equality to mean equal treatment. She definitely has no right to claim those who disagree with her have a "flawed and incomplete" understanding of anything - she simply has no intellectual leg to stand on. Put differently, there is simply no plausible interpretation of what she's saying here that isn't a nasty attempt to manipulate the language.
What about "remember that there are structural issues that affect women" isn't fighting for equal treatment? I'd think that an argument to reduce the structural issues that unfairly impact women would be seen as a move towards equality, but apparently you disagree? And further think it's nasty?