> Women, who make up 41% of the Tech Guild, earn 12% less on average than men
Such statistics are meaningless without more context. For example, are women over-represented in entry level positions? Do they work the same hours? the same overtime? And so forth.
Articles that present such statistics are pushing propaganda.
I've always wondered why companies don't overhire women to save on labor costs.
The only explanations I can rationalize is that management isnt aware of the pay difference, or they are aware but they're more sexist than they are greedy.
> In the United States, for example, the non-adjusted average woman's annual salary is 79–83% of the average man's salary, compared to 95–99% for the adjusted average salary
It's the same in essentially every western developed country. Discrimination on the basis of gender is no longer accepted, the disparities that persist are due to different choices.
If women were paid less for the same work companies would benefit from staffing mostly women.
One explanation I've heard is that companies don't extract the same value from women as they do from men because society's sexism causes managers and peers to assign "low value tasks" disproportionately to women even when they have the same job description as their male counterparts.
I think that today is very interesting in that a lot of the R neocons of yesteryear have shifted to D neolibs today. It's really weird in a lot of ways.
Note: I've been pretty heavily libertarian minded for a long time, so this observation has mostly been an outside perspective even though I'm currently more inclined to move R as a secondary/pragmatic position. There are some aspects of R and D I'm inclined to support.
It’s not meaningless if you want to see women making at least as much as men regardless of the job and their skills. That’s the obvious implication of such statistics.
But is that really a valuable goal? The market determines wages, and usually it's willing to favor sacrifices like a 24 hour oncall rotation. Don't those people deserve for the value of those sacrifices to be reflected in compensation?
"Equal pay for equal work" is a much more compelling goal in my view than "equal pay for unequal work".
Not to mention it's incentivize companies to cut the roles with artificially inflated wages. Imagine a government mandated that some component or material cost 15% more than market rate. You'd refactor your design with that new cost in mind, and reduce usage of that component. Similar deal with labor.
I'd counter it's more likely that you'd see even more corruption and revolving doors between civilian and govt roles. It's very easy to spend other people's money (govt spending from taxes).
It's not a straw man. In the UK, the government has stepped in and mandate that two different jobs be paid the same, in the pursuit of pay equity.
Specifically, they forced Next to pay their warehouse workers and retail workers the same. When the retail workers were asked why they wouldn't just take jobs in the warehouse, they responded to the effect of "it's a less pleasant job, you'd have to pay me a lot more money to do it." Yet the UK mandated equal wages on account of the fact that more retail workers were women, and market rate wages created a net pay disparity (though women and men in the same roles were paid the same).
The intended implication of the presented statistic is obvious, but the actual disparity is impossible to realize without context on the types of positions being included in the statistic.
The above commenter is asking for relevant facts. If Job A pays more than Job B and there's a larger proportion of men in Job A then men's average pay will be higher, but both genders are receiving equal pay for equal work.
If anything, your allegations of sealioning are violating HN's guideline "Assume good faith."
did they commit thought crime or something? any even semi-competent statistician would have these questions, and any semi-competent journalist would question numbers being produced by an organization that are being used to promulgate that organization's agenda. and, moreover, we both know that the likelihood that these numbers actually properly control for these things is essentially 0. the sad thing is that if they did actually do the right thing, the numbers would be not as fair, but much more heinous and actionable. as it is there is absolutely no conclusion to draw for anyone involved-- how is the NYT supposed to fix the policy when they cannot even divine whether it's an underpromotion problem vs a recruiting problem vs an outright racism problem? isn't the goal to get them to fix things? the fixes for those three things are DRAMATICALLY different from one another.
If we look at past times these things are brought up; almost certainly not. Often things like part-time vs. full time aren't considered or amount of overtime hours worked (for hourly jobs).
This kind of thing is impossible to control for, though. How can you tell whether someone's success or lackthereof (including via degree of responsibility) comes from earnest evaluation of merit or social bias? I have a difficulty imagining trusting any kind of confident assessment of the bias at hand.
Sure, but people are always going to make their own judgements, so why bother complaining about it? It comes off like you're trying to defend the industry as being equitable when it clearly caters to people with certain skills.
Yeah it's really difficult, but that doesn't mean you should just give up and take the average.
There was a case recently in the UK where Next (high street clothing chain) were paying their warehouse staff more than their shop staff for (apparently) similar work. The shop workers had a higher proportion of female workers than the warehouse workers (something like 70% vs 50%).
Next claimed this was because the market rate was higher for warehouse workers. They got sued by the female shop workers for discrimination.
They lost and have to pay back pay. Now... you might think 70% vs 50% is barely a difference - did the Next bosses really discriminate? Surely not. Well, that's what the court thought too. Apparently even though they accepted that there was no conscious or unconscious discrimination, the effect of the pay difference was in itself discriminatory.
I dunno how that makes any sense. The shop workers should have sued the IT department and then they'd be in for a serious pay day!
I think the problem is that often the solutions are worse than the problem... price controls, wage ceilings, protectionism, etc. As opposed to offering negotiation training to women to push for the highest wages you can achieve.
I've worked pretty hard to teach my daughter than it doesn't hurt to ask for more than offered, or even to price yourself out of a job if there are multiple opportunities on the table. Women tend to naturally optimize for stability over maximum income and other factors and to accept a given deal vs negotiate. Much like men are far more likely to move to another location for career advancement and higher pay. There are natural tendencies that training can overcome which is likely better than trying to price control.
> Yeah it's really difficult, but that doesn't mean you should just give up and take the average.
Presumably the rational approach would be mild skepticism about confidence, not specifically accepting or rejecting any claim. Which leaves this well within the grounds of "plausible".
The reasoning I heard is that it's explained by differences in personality across the two populations. One group is, on average, more assertive, and as a result more likely to negotiate higher salary.
Which is reasoning that's difficult to prove. To the contrary women and underprivileged minorities also feel like they can't be assertive without being labeled as shrill.
The wage gap, at firms without a history of discrimination, is almost entirely determined by women having their first child and the support structures around it (subsidized childcare, paternity leave, flexible hours).[1][2] This suggests the assertiveness is probably not the issue.
It's funny, every hedge fund and tech startup I've ever worked at since roughly 2001 very proudly boasts about how they pay women more than the men.
But as my career goes on into the years I find that I'm working with less women and less minorities and not more. Despite the best of efforts...
If I were to look for evidence though, I would point things squarely at the interview process... In the past if you could operate a computer you were hired and assumed you would figure it out. Nowadays it's much more about fitting a certain narrative that's largely down to socioeconomic factors... I don't think I've ever worked with someone in tech who went to an HBCU, but lots of people who were token at NYU, Yale, etc...
I conducted around 500 interviews at my last company at all stages: initial screen, technical, architectural, etc. There were simply far more white men applying. (And this is in Atlanta where we have a highly bimodal racial distribution.)
It wasn't like we weren't bending over backwards to attract diverse candidates. I personally went to HBCUs on outreach programs, and there were dozens of annual Girls / Women Who Code programs and partnerships that other folks on my team participated in.
I was once even told I couldn't recommend someone for a role because they weren't diverse.
You're looking at it too narrowly. In fairness, I should have said "it's the recruiting process".
It's not the "interviewing" itself but it's the recruiting stage. If you're looking at fresh graduates you're already significantly skewing things. It's hard to blame companies for this, but a few of the bootcamps are cranking out nontraditional candidates and many companies still overlook them in hiring.
Remember that story from the other day about founding Valve and Gabe recruiting game modders to his team? Two of them were pizza delivery guys and thought they were being called on a prank.
To be honest though, I think we're all lying to ourselves. The job isn't about ability to code. We're not looking for people with those skills. Most companies hiring are looking for stable clock-punchers who will do things that make their manager look good.
In today's market, most companies will automatically filter out bootcamper applications regardless of candidate background. It shouldn't be considered unusual that a subset of those are not being hired.
About 3/4 of the bootcamp learners I've interviewed only did the minimum to get through the course(s). I've found the biggest differentiator for bootcamp learners are those who did more than they were assigned and those who only did what they were assigned. There seems to be a very significant basic knowledge and skill gap between those two groups. It's even more significant in my experience than those with a more traditional education or self-taught.
This line of questioning is often brought up in response to pay gap conversations. Universal trends do not explain individual data points, but in general, studies do seem to indicate that pay gaps are real.
It's difficult to parse, because it says that experience and occupational choice does pay a significant role in the gap. But then editorializes and claims that less experience and occupational choice are due to discriminatory issues in the broader culture.
Culture war issues like this are unfalsifiable in either direction and largely reflect the political persuasion of the person making the argument than anything quantifiable.
Here's another example from the American Progress article:
> Women of color disproportionately work in jobs within the service, care, and domestic work sectors—jobs with historically low pay.
This is an empirically verifiable claim.
> This is due to occupational segregation, which is the funneling of women and men into different jobs based on gender and racial norms and expectations
This is an unfalsifiable political claim. Some unknown force, by some unknown mechanism, forces people to make certain choices.
If not, then that's also an equity problem. If the "dog jobs" are mostly offered to women and minorities, that should also be called out as a problem for employers to solve.
This presupposes a lot of pretty nasty things. It reads like you apply to the NYT and then you get offered a job based on your gender or race which is obviously not the case. That lack of equity (which is equality of outcome, not opportunity) is itself a problem and not simply a byproduct of different people being different. That when your entire sample size is 622, you can make broad generalizations based on the pay of ~37 of them. Even if you can, it also assumes that your salary in your job is based on objective set criteria and not a) whether you negotiate, b) how hard you negotiate, c) whether you have a BATNA that makes you need the job less, d) whether you had breakfast that morning or were more tired than normal or were coming down with a cold or any number of a myriad of other things that could affect a high-stakes negotiation.
The pay gap as a systemic issue (for equal work for equal hours with equal qualifications) has been debunked a thousand times over. But while it's certainly possible (likely?) that some individual companies have a racially or gender-driven pay gap, it's a far stretch to assume that the NYT is one of them.
Equality of opportunity is good, giving people a leg up early in their lives when they've been disadvantaged, regardless of their race or gender, is good. "Equity" for the sake of it is racist.
> It reads like you apply to the NYT and then you get offered a job based on your gender or race which is obviously not the case.
Obviously? A newspaper is exactly the kind of business to hire based on your personal narrative (including 100% of protected class intersections). That's the entire point of the opinion column. Granted, I don't think that the folks being discussed here are publishing any personal opinions, and I doubt the times is doing anything legally actionable or we would have heard about it, but the idea that they don't consider these factors just because it's illegal is laughable.
Yeah I didn't phrase it very well, what I meant was that you're not applying for any old job on the tech team. You apply for a specific job, presumably one you're qualified for that would be a step up in your career.
If you look at a very small sample of people and one racial minority or gender has all the "lower" jobs, that doesn't tell you what jobs they were "offered" it just tells you what jobs they applied for.
I'm pretty conflicted answering this. On one hand reporting is miserable; on the other hand it's virtually impossible to exclude bias in hiring, especially if the hiring requires skills that people pay to learn.
man the downvotes on this thread are all over the place-- people need to take a long, hard look in the mirror about what discourse they actually tolerate, vs what they tell themselves... it's absurd. at best this comment is mildly combative, but it doesn't seem like OP took it personally, as they shouldn't have, but yet... downvote city. it's especially bizarre because i couldn't even tell you what ideological trigger shibboleth is being triggered here, even...
I try not to talk about voting on here per the guidelines, but it is pretty interesting to me the cross-section of completely legitimate, valid viewpoints that will get obliterated if they're mentioned on the wrong thread. Like everyone else I'm predisposed to think my particular ideology is slightly more persecuted than the other one but it doesn't even seem to be liberal v. conservative, authoritarian v. libertarian, or Democrat vs. Republican. I'm sure the initial thread topic has something to do with it and I do recall dang saying they keep an eye a little more closely on threads that are particularly political.
I'd be curious to see an analysis of downvoted comments in political threads and what their general ideological bent was.
- african americans are statistically more likely to originate from lower on socio economic ladder than, say, asian americans
Thus when you get a bunch of job applicants, you might get an asian american with a Yale degree (James) and an african american with a community college degree (John). Affirmative action or other DEI pressures might force you to hire both James and John, but James will probably be able to outperform John due to higher initial degree of education. Furthermore, James may have had parents who networked and ensured he got good internships and experience growing up while John didn't have that opportunity.
So it's not that the company is offering John a "dog job", it's just, James's capacity to perform in current role and take on new responsibilities is at a higher initial state than John's, so it's not unthinkable he would climb corporate ladder faster than John given those initial advantages. Pay gap is a natural consequence that follows.
I don't really think a Yale degree makes you better than someone with a community college degree. There's no magic at Yale. The education you get everywhere is pretty good now because of all the resources universally available to all students.
But Yale basically applies a filter function and attracts the top 0.01% of high school graduates every year (plus some less elite legacy students and DEI admits). When you hire a Yale graduate, that's what you are paying for. Not the Yale education. If you could find a similar filter function some other way, you'd hire that 0.01% of high school graduates via that filter function.
And in fact companies are always trying to get ahead of their competitors and find other, less well-known, filter functions to get high performers who others don't know about. In the 1980s and 1990s Microsoft was among the first to discover that Indian IIT graduates were products of an extreme filter function applied to Indian high school students (IIT grads are like top 0.0001% of Indian high school grads). For a long time Microsoft hired those engineers for cents on the dollar. By the 2000s though, the word was out ... hiring IIT grads is as difficult as getting any other high performing grads.
There was also a brief period of time when Google had an edge in recruiting by identifying high school kids who were good at programming competitions online and via contributors to projects in Google's open source projects. But now, that signal is well-known too.
So John's community college degree doesn't matter if John is an elite performer.
As someone who has studied at both kinds of schools I can tell you there is a WORLD of difference.
In a middling school the professor was constantly providing remedial education to the students and had to cut down the curriculum breadth and depth.
When we are talking about the elite 0.01% of students the professor is irrelevant for regular coursework. They are almost uniformly autodidacts. A mentor is of course useful at the very boundaries of knowledge that textbooks and papers don't cover. But by the time you are in that range of work, you will be recognized through your performance, and you can find mentors by reaching out to them with links to your work.
Generally, people are completely unaware of what top 0.01% of performance looks like because we are so rarely around these people unless we are in some very elite institution or working on some project which attracts such people.
Employers are not responsible for forcing people to do the work required to be qualified for a position the employers are trying to fill.
Among the people who are qualified for the position, they are prohibited by law from considering race or gender or other protected characteristics when making a hiring decision.
Not really. Imagine if it takes 20 years to acquire some senior status, and the world was 100% sexist/racist/whatever 20 years ago(so only white men were allowed) but 0% now, you would have a bunch of white men as senior rank even though the world isn't sexist/racist/whatever any more.
Affirmative action at the companies I’ve worked at was hard to hire less qualified individuals into roles. Those folks were often under performing but marked as “meets” at request of hr. Now with economy and other factors, they are being performance managed out given a worse output/impact than peers at same level.
this seems like it could easily be a symptom of aff action policies. Making it so firings have to be perfectly representative will discourage companies like these from taking a chance on an underrepresented candidate who might have a slightly weaker resumé if they are stuck with the decision
The bit you’re quoting is one of the complaints people have raised. It is not the only complaint, and given the near unanimous support for the strike it is not even likely the biggest complaint. They also mention the company handing out PIPs like candy and fears from automation, problems I think many people on this site can sympathize with.
A lot of comments on this thread seem to feel like the “why” of this matter is settled with an answer of “The men have more experience and are working higher-level jobs. Therefore, they receive higher pay.”
This is not the equilibrium we are aiming for as a society, and the matter is not settled here.
The point of these measurements is not to demand that women are paid more for less work. The point is for us to keep asking “why”, and not just stop after the first one.
“Why are women earning less at the New York Times?”. Maybe the company is just top-heavy with men in leadership roles. This has been floated in this thread as a common cause.
“Why are there more men in leadership roles?”. A few commenters have shared anecdotes of having far more men in their recruiting process. More men applying would help explain more experienced men higher up in the company.
“Why are there more men than women applying?”. We’re getting closer to root causes now. In software engineering, for example, there are just more men in the workforce.
“Why are there more men in the workforce?”. It gets more difficult, but also more important, to investigate the answer at these lower levels. Girls Who Code and similar initiatives are tackling this behemoth cultural problem. It will take years to see the effect of their work, but their success breeds hope that someday, the gap in this New York Times statistic will close a little.
At any of these levels, a company can step in and try and correct the natural bias in their hiring or development pipeline. That is, of course, the most sensitive topic for a lot of us here. Such initiatives should have buy-in from the workforce, and there’s an implication here that the (unionized) workers of NYT do support some kind of intervention.
Their choice, and above all the very measurement of a wage gap, doesn’t need to be threatening to anybody here. It will forever be important to track this number even if we “feel” like the explanations are simple. It doesn’t represent some kind of action the company should be forced to take. It measures where we are on every level of asking “why?”.
There is no need for a society that forces, top down, every possible occupation to be perfectly split 50/50 by sex. Just let individuals make their own decisions.
In this case, why do we "need" more women coding? Maybe they are doing other work that is just as important and fulfilling and useful to society?
The issue is that we can’t make reliable judgements about the hiring or promotion process based on the outputs without more information about the inputs. But I agree, the answer is more information, not less.
> * Black women and Hispanic or Latina women, who make up just over 6 percent of the Tech Guild, make 33% less than white men in the unit
> * Black workers, who make up 7 percent of the union, earn 26% less than white workers
Do they work equivalent jobs with equivalent experience?