This article seems to have fallen into a common misinterpretation of the results of the study. They assume that failing to reject the null hypothesis automatically accepts the null hypothesis.
The article says "The study authors did find that, on average, women in fields like programming earn 6.6 percent less than men (a Bureau of Labor Statistics study showed that women actually earn 11 percent more, however). But that difference is not statistically significant."
But that the difference is not statistically significant does not mean there is no difference. To show there is no difference, you'd need to show that the power used to run the study was sufficiently high to be confident.
The correct interpretation would be "the study failed to find a significant difference in salaries between men and women, but that does not mean there isn't one." Not as exciting of a headline I guess.
Update: I skimmed the study pdf and the study does not make the mistake as the article. In fact, I applaud the study for using two-tailed tests that gave them less power but more neutrality (so they were checking for gender differences in pay rather than if men were paid more than women). The study shows significant differences in pay in several professions but not engineering or math/CS.
This is a really, really bad article, the author clearly didn't bother to read the study.
I just skimmed it, 64 pages is a bit much right now, but from first look:
First of all, the study [1] just checked graduates one year after graduation - i.e., absolute entry-level. This may say some things but doesn't say anything about female computer scientists in general.
Second of all, the study checked many, many differences in pay - some of which are statistically significant, some are not. The author of OP's article just listed one of these comparisons. To quote from the text:
>All gender differences reported in the text and shown in the figures are statistically significant (p < 0.05, two-tailed t-test) unless otherwise indicated
Moneyquote:
>Women working full time
earned $35,296 on average, while men working
full time earned $42,918
and
>In fact, the
pay gap exists within nearly every category of
institution and level of selectivity. Among public
and private college graduates, women earned
81 percent and 86 percent, respectively, of what
men earned one year after graduation. Women
who graduated from public universities earned
86 percent of what their male peers earned. The
pay gap was largest among graduates of private
universities, where women earned just 75 percent
of what men earned
And yes, that's a statistically significant difference. It's the very first two figures. (Edit: And depending at which paygroup you look, OP's 6.6% is really low - it goes up to 25% difference!)
tl;dr: There is a pay gap and it's statistically significant.
Edit: The only thing I can find that is not statistically significant is the pooled pay for women in "Biological, physicial sciences, science technology, mathematics and agricultural sciences" and "Business" - i.e., something different than what OP claims, especially since the average of these jobs is likely to be different from the average of each job itself.
Edit2: I finally found OP's 6.6% pay difference, which is a complete misunderstanding of the article they copied from here [2].
>According to the study, there are seven professions with pay equity. When controlled for all factors other than gender, the earnings difference between men and women is about 6.6%, something most people don’t know.
So the 6.6% are not the pay gap in computer science, but the pay gap for _all_ jobs clustered together! Then it's no wonder that the 6.6% are not statistically significant, several different populations with different means are merged, and since t-tests compare the means, you get no significance.
Thanks for linking the study. I find these articles interesting, but I always end up skipping them, instead of looking for the core data. For some reason my brain is too lazy to skim the two page article to find the source, but is interested enough to skim and potentially read the 40 page source when found directly.
They don't take height into account, for example, which has been shown to have an influence on wages [1]. They also cluster region in broad regions (page 37), even though there is a large variation in wages within the same region. Also, note the funding source for this study.
The thing is, salary is so arbitrary. People make up the number. How many tech companies out there actually says "all junior level developers make $80K, level 2 makes $85K"? Some people are paid more. If you are a frontend developer, you are likely getting less than a backend developer or a full stack. Sometimes fullstack engineers get the same salary as a frontend/backend but does two people's job. And I was told by people that asking other people's salary in American culture is rude. How can I find out what my co-workers are making. And even if I knew, how would I know my salary, as a male engineer, is too high? How do we judge? When we do an average on salary, we need several categories: companies (you can't compare Google to a local small business IT firm), location (NYC vs Portland), education, job performance (this is also quite arbitrary).
Assuming you're not american, by the way you reference it. Thought I'd throw in a few things I've experienced in America, that I think are pretty common.
Almost every job I've had with a company that's of any decent size (e.g. ten years ago when I worked for a five man moving company) has made it pretty clear that sharing compensation numbers with a coworker was an immediately fireable offense. I never really considered whether or not that would be typical outside of the US. Anyone care to comment? I'd be interested to know.
You're still right though, that in my experience there's a social pressure not to share as well.
I also definitely agree that saying "a junior programmer makes x dollars a year" or "a senior programmer makes y dollars a year" has been pretty meaningless at the major corps I've worked with. They're typically had some kind of pay band where "junior" meant x to y, and the closer you got to y, or if you crossed y, meant getting approval from higher levels of management. I'd be interested to know if this has been other peoples experience as well.
As an example, I know a guy (not in programming) who went from being in a realtime data monitor to a supervisor in a call center, and jumped his salary probably 15%, then went back to being the data monitor a year later, and retained the salary increase, which was way larger an increase than the company at the time would have allowed, had he stayed the data monitor.
> Almost every job I've had with a company that's of any decent size (e.g. ten years ago when I worked for a five man moving company) has made it pretty clear that sharing compensation numbers with a coworker was an immediately fireable offense. I never really considered whether or not that would be typical outside of the US. Anyone care to comment? I'd be interested to know.
Almost every job may say that, but in almost every case that provision is illegal[1] and grounds for a lawsuit if they actually carried it out.
Interesting; thanks for the link. I'm going to read it over in a little bit (making food).
I'm not beyond believing that it's mostly just common lore, and I'm definitely going to look into it.
An unrelated instance of something like this would be how most hourly workers think they're legally obligated to get a lunch break and a paid break if they work x hours, when in the states I've lived in there's no legal requirement, except under specific circumstances (I think missouri was for employees under 16 working in certain kinds of service industries).
Where I worked in Europe I don't think it's considered a "fireable offense", but it's definitely something you tend not to share with coworkers, and it would be frowned upon by your boss/HR.
On the other hand, it's not uncommon to share it between friends or ex-coworkers.
Salaries also tend to vary wildly, and are not necessarily linked to seniority. The best way for a junior to rapidly increase his salary is to change jobs, or threatening to change jobs and receiving a counter-offer.
I hadn't seen this article... and it's actually quite surprising seeing as every other mention of this issue seems to say women aren't treated fairly in this industry and are belittled by their peers and paid half as much.
That is rarely said because those of us working know it's not true. We're just concerned for the low gender ratio. I haven't felt belittled for years (mostly due to older men retiring).
Never has someone my age or younger thought it was in any way appropriate to call me 'dear' or 'precious' or 'love' or 'oh my, you are clever!'. Happens all the time with older men (60's and up if I were to guess) and if you aren't one of them then I really appreciate it.
Having said that it is fairly common for the British to call me, as a complete stranger, 'love'. While it might be cultural I don't know if there is an equivalent for women to men?
This is the kind of "science journalism" that I strongly dislike (and is promulgated by both sides in politically tinged debates like this one). Basically the author has a point of view, and sees in the study some numbers that support said point of view.
That aside, I think the biggest problem is not understanding where (the obvious) disparity in tech comes from. It's not discrimination, and least conscious discrimination. And I don't even think it's unconscious discrimination or side effects of so called "privilege".
It's simply that when tech startups are small, for various reasons (I'll get to this), they have a lot more males than females.* If the startup does well, early hires rise in rank by virtue of being there longer. If/when the reach the size where they are recognized by name, it's too late, most of the top roles (both engineering and management) are filled by males. Even if there was zero discrimination (or feelings of isolation), you would get the topsy turvy industry we see now.
Most studies focus on income but the far bigger disparity is wealth (both in this case and generally). The earlier employees in successful startups are phenomenally more wealthy than latecomers. These people are the ones who go on to start and fund more startups, and the cycle continues.
This is why PG's now infamous remarks about there being few female hackers (as opposed to CS students/engineers) are really insightful. Having Sheryl Sandberg or Marissa Mayer as visible leaders in large companies won't really change much (or anything when it comes to tiny startups). When these large companies hire, it's quite likely they do so scrupulously fairly. But even though the disparity is much better when it comes to new hires, the females amongst them (just as the males) start at the bottom.
Having more female founders is a start, perhaps, but it doesn't really solve the problem of too few female hackers. What you need are more female technical founders. I'm not saying that the non-technical founder role is less important (in fact it can often be a lot more important). But the technical founders are responsible for building the technical team from the ground up. Males tend to have more male friends, just as women tend to have more female friends. And the first people you try to hire are friends.
But even more than just technical founders, if you want to reduce the disparity at the source, there need to be more female "Mark Zuckerbergs" who come up with the idea and hack version 0 when everyone else is out partying (and, importantly, before fundraising is even a thought). This is when a founder has most leverage: when he/she has built the kernel of something that people want and everybody else wants in. Think of the scene from The Social Network (admittedly a hollywood movie) where Zuckerberg assigns roles and equity to his co-founders and basically brushes of the girls' offers to help.
This is a very difficult problem to have, if you want to increase the presence of women in this industry. It's difficult because there's nothing you can do to future "Mark Zuckerbergs" to force him to pick a more diverse set of co-founders. There can be no law, because this is almost like choosing your friends or significant others. A not insignificant percentage of startups with female founders in fact have their significant others as co-founders. This could be great for the startup (I know many great teams like this, obviously pg/jessica being one), but it again points to how difficult it is for females to find co-founders the way males do.
The only thing that would really work is for "these girls" to have been hacking since they were children and think that this is the coolest thing they could be doing. And there needs to be a critical mass of them so they can make friends with each other, because if you think that telling adult male developers to "play nice" is hard, try forcing 10 year old boys to invite 10 year old girls into their crew, (cooties and all).
* It would be cool if there was data to track the ratio of male engineers to female engineers as a successful startup grows. My hunch is the ratio improves steadily along with company size.
is it so hard to believe that women don't enjoy stem fields as much as men?
that men and women are actually different and that it implies different behaviour?
that actually you know what... the more freedom women get the /less likely/ they are to work in a stem field?
maybe we should pay them more in our naive quest to make the unequal equal - because it is 'politcally correct' - which ever kind of correct that is because it certainly isn't 'true'
As a female developer, yes, those things are hard to believe.
This is a great example of why I was hesitant of entering the field. You feel totally comfortable saying this when your profile links to your blog with your real name and place of employment. If you're that comfortable in this belief you can't expect me to believe that you don't treat women in your work place differently and with less respect.
i'm not ashamed to speak my opinion, nor associate it with my name. i don't think i'm making especially ridiculous or unbackable claims...
it shouldn't be offensive to women imo. i am not offended by the many opportunities that women have and i don't - that they are /generally/ more socially adept, need to make significantly less investment to find a mate /in general/, and are constantly treated with special care an attention in particular areas (e.g. violence against women is constantly considered especially distasteful even though 90%+ of violent crimes are between men exclusively, there are more illnesses and disabilities specific to men - but most research focuses on those specific to women etc...)
i don't think my opinion that women and men are measurably different should imply that i will treat women with less respect... why should it? i'm not saying women are somehow distatsteful or undesirable in some moral or value sense - just that they are different, measurably so and that claiming we are all equal in the sense of political correctness, and shoehorning every possible behaviour into that ideal is ignorant - it does disservice to humanity - not just men or women as a sex.
i've had a look at that article, but it is authored with a tremendous bias imo... the fact that its hosted on an openly feminist website does of course skew me but the wording itself is highly presumptuous (perhaps iam too?). i will not deny that their data does show a large variation... but i will gladly deny your conclusion because reorganising that graph shows a reasonable correlation between those countries we consider 'most free' and those we do not... with outliers and natural variation as you would expect.
I can believe that there are biological differences that make women, on average, less likely to enter STEM fields, and also treat those that do enter as equals.
A question is where these differences come from. One explanation is that the gender differences occur due to different upbringing as a child. Under this hypothesis, by the time they enter the workforce, men and women are significantly different. A different explanation is that entering the workforce, men and women are the same, but then they are treated differently within the workforce. Under this hypothesis, I would expect free market economics to have already resolved issues such as the wage gap.
On a different note, given the large population, it is likely that there is a non-zero, biologically driven, difference that is statistically significant, even if it is of such a small magnitude as to be irrelevent. In this case, any such difference is being overshadows by the non-negligible cultural influence, but it is always worth keeping in mind what statistics actually say.
> Same with Female HR workers. Women make up a massive percentage of HR departments from 72% to 90% and have an interesting habit of discriminating against "unattractive men" and "attractive women" in their hiring practices.(I'm not saying men are perfect just showing that everyone's human)
I think people tend to overrate how much influence HR departments have in the hiring process, at least for tech jobs.
After the screening process, where "attractiveness" does not really come into play, technical interviewers usually have much more weight in the final decision (in my limited experience, at least).
ok. so get ready to hate me but i think that none of these things are real 'problems' and that there are reasons:
> African Americans are 12% of the population but today make up over 65% of the NFL.
During slavery African Amercians were bred to be better stronger slaves. Before that the African environment of their ancestors better favoured physical strength - it is no coincidence imo that the best long distance runners are from Africa and the best sprinters are African Americans. In general black people dominate physical sports - track, field, team sports.
In short what keeps caucasians out is that they aren't as good at sports on average - they just aren't as strong or physically fit.
> Same with Female HR workers. Women make up a massive percentage of HR departments from 72% to 90% and have an interesting habit of discriminating against "unattractive men" and "attractive women" in their hiring practices.(I'm not saying men are perfect just showing that everyone's human)
I'm not sure if this such a strong trend. I can believe it though... women in general do seem to discriminate against unattractive men and attractive women - at least in my experience. A rationale here is obvious - they want to out compete the women and they do not desire unattractive men.
In their defense men do the same in reverse... esp treating attractive women with disproportionate respect and care to the point where with men and women in the same role - the more attractive women may end up doing significantly less work for the same pay, if they are doing anything truly productive - much to the annoyance of others. Its not their fault... I've seen this in every factory and warehouse type environment i've worked in. Nobody gets more annoyed about it than the 'average' looking girls who already work there and actually carry their weight and have to watch that guy they fancy covering for some dumb and unappreciative pretty girl with his efforts to sleep with her.
> Lastly, every major Hollywood studio was founded by Jewish people. Jews are massively over represented in films as directors, producers, writers, and actors.
Yes Jews are disproportionately successful, not just in Hollywood, and I believe their history has much to do with it as a much persecuted people and the long connection with banking as a religious loophole until relatively recently. IIRC Jews of european descent average higher IQ scores than any other ethnic group. Jews are smart.
I am an arab... so... eep! I shouldn't really say anything nice about Jews (j/k - i hope) :P
> The one thing that I dislike is when we use blame as a motivator to increase a gender's presence in an industry.
Thank you. :)
> A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes
As an aside I somehow imagine the number of men thinking 'pfft women would screw that up' is massively outweighed by the number of women thinking 'pfft men would screw that up'. for women to have a stab at men in a sexist way is just the norm manflu! men are pigs! men are stupid! - and its part of the male ethos to take it and not complain. The other way round is considered a social faux pas...
During slavery African Amercians were bred to be better stronger slaves.
Do you have a citation for this? I've been on the internet for 20 years and this is the first time I've seen anyone claim that slaves in the US were bred for characteristics like work dogs.
actually my source is very flimsy - its a chris rock sketch i saw a few years ago.
this is perfectly believable though considering the often inhuman treatment of slaves.
googling this matter reveals that its popular enough to appear in the auto complete, gets mention on the wiki page about african american slavery and even some counter arguments:
so its not clear cut i guess... although its interesting that there is a furore or knee jerk reaction against things like this. i don't really get it...
i especially enjoyed this bit from his article though: And while some slave masters did engage in eugenics their efforts were ineffectively crude, being incredibly limited in scale and inexactly uncontrolled. Further, even with a more controlled and widespread eugenics program, 250 years would not have been enough time for major genetic differences to emerge.
he seems to have some basis for this assertion so it is probably fiction - but its judging from the internet presence its a relatively common myth.
Women as a whole aren't born being more inclined to go into non-CS fields. This preference is acquired at some point in childhood. I am comfortable making this claim because we know that in the mid 80s 37% of CS graduates were women vs. 12% today. Something happened in the meantime.
I don't think it is a result of supposed wage gaps (which supposedly exist in all fields) or supposed widespread sexism (as if other fields are any better). But I do think it is a problem. We have a shortage of good developers in this country and not being able to draw talent very well from roughly half the population is not helping.
> Women as a whole aren't born being more inclined to go into non-CS fields. This preference is acquired at some point in childhood. I am comfortable making this claim because we know that in the mid 80s 37% of CS graduates were women vs. 12% today. Something happened in the meantime.
The impressive and oft-reported increase of female representation in the biological sciences, to the point where they've reached a majority at all levels, degree programs happened in the meantime.
see the stuff i linked and research the subject. there is plenty of research showing that tech/social biases are measurable from the earliest possible ages.
there are certainly lots of opinions that this is not true from sociologists and other 'almost doctor' types. and treating this matter seriously will make you unpopular with women and men alike...
i won't deny wage gaps or sexism. i just think its sexist in a sort of nasty and ignorant way, to try and incentive women to do things they may not want...
Yes, what happened was that people are now more free to choose their occupation, which is shown to increase the stereotypical occupation choices of both men and women in practically every country in the world:
Unless you can identify the biological mechanism that supposedly makes women less likely to work in STEM fields (nevermind that in some countries and fields this doesn't hold), yes, it is hard to believe.
i don't really care to speculate on the cause - that can be debated. there are plenty of differences in brain physiology and development between sexes though. its a much weaker hypothesis to assume that there is no difference imo. we have every reason (including the objective data) to believe that there should be a difference - even if small.
The way science works is that you start with a hypothesis of how the world works, based on cause and effect, then you test that hypothesis. Data by itself can have any number of explanations. In particular, you cannot construct a hypothesis from statistical data and expect that to hold water.
its a much weaker hypothesis to assume that there is no difference imo.
Nobody says that there isn't any difference. But you have to exclude the possibility that the difference is caused (primarily) by cultural factors. You also offer no explanation why, if there is a biological difference, it does not favor women instead; if the entire basis of your hypothesis is that men and women are different in some way (which is as of yet unknown), then any difference can go either way.
> But you have to exclude the possibility that the difference is caused (primarily) by cultural factors.
fine, if we are going to have a very serious discussion on this... (i'm always mildly flabbergasted this isn't common sense --- we have all met men and women right?)
this has been very well covered over the last half a century or so. we have the many 'sex reassignment' disasters on hermaphrodite babies showing us that women and men are intrinsically so - we can also point at the related psychological issues of transgender people... ( i don't want a negative connotation - but if you are confused about your sex - that is an issue for you i would assume )
sure this might not apply to precisely this, but afaik medical professionals believe that there are gender differences beyond naive physiology and treat their patients accordingly - when they assumed the differences were merely cultural they caused well documented suffering.
looking around the area the nurture/culture side of the debate is very weak imo. but there are certainly ample studies and papers on both sides of the debate...
i'm always mildly flabbergasted this isn't common sense --- we have all met men and women right?
If science were just "common sense", we'd still believe in the impetus theory [1]. Plus, personal experience tends to suffer from all kinds of confirmation bias.
we can also point at the related psychological issues of transgender people...
Looking at transgender people is indeed interesting, if not the way you think it is. In particular, how the same person gets treated completely differently based on which gender he or she is perceived as [2]. E.g.:
"After he underwent a sex change nine years ago at the age of 42, Barres recalled, another scientist who was unaware of it was heard to say, 'Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister's.'" (Ben and his "sister" are one and the same person, of course.)
sure this might not apply to precisely this, but afaik medical professionals believe that there are gender differences beyond naive physiology and treat their patients accordingly - when they assumed the differences were merely cultural they caused well documented suffering.
And how do you conclude that any such difference reflects a higher aptitude of men for STEM subjects instead of a higher aptitude of women for STEM subjects?
i'm not talking about aptitude and i hope i didn't give this impression. desire to do something does not make you inherently better at it...
maybe i miss your point, but 'impetus' as classically defined is nearly equivalent to the newtonian concept of momentum and yes - the common sense there does make sense. the usual real problem here is that vaccuum is not something we experience - so the idea that the natural state is to be 'at rest' is common sense but misleading - one can of course argue that the presense of air and the resistance it gives is also common sense. its a wooly term.
when i use it here what i mean to say is that imo its blatantly obvious.
There is plenty of research showing women and men do actually behave differently on average. One of the more interesting is when it comes to there jobs women are more rational as in they chose jobs that better fit their goals. Another is you find more men at the extremes both high and low height, weight, IQ etc. As in there standard deviation is generally higher which is just as often a good thing as a bad thing.
Note: Averages and standard deviations say nothing about individuals but they do explain trends.
This is true, but why do these differences change so dramatically when you cross national borders? Specifically, Men have a higher variability in IQ in countries that have higher gender inequality. To me this seems to indicate that it's an issue of culture and the way men and women are socialized, not something biologically inherent to each sex.
I don't think that the way you're phrasing this is as tactful as it could be, given that it's going to be a really divisive thing to say no matter the efficacy, but I don't necessarily think you're trying to be an ass.
I think it's better to assume that two groups of people are less different than one would initially think, because of the natural tendency to create in and out groups. When there has been a history of systemic oppression between those groups, I'd lean toward requiring more rigorous proof of the differences before accepting it, and I'd be very careful as to what I accepted as rigorous proof.
This is my quick thought on the subject. Please don't consider it my philosophical magnum opus on discrimination.
it may be surprising but the lack of tact is intentional (and more muted than i feel i should feel free to use without lashback).
> I think it's better to assume that two groups of people are less different than one would initially think, because of the natural tendency to create in and out groups.
this is a very valid point and one i've never really considered before. i've never really fallen into that kind of behaviour but have observed it plenty (with some mystification tbh). thanks. you are probably right that the problems caused by discrimination against women in e.g. strongly patriarchal society in recent times (Saudi Arabia or something) massively outweighs the trouble caused by the reverse situation - botched gender reassignments and dubious equality policies, but nothing on a large scale directed against the whole of a portion of society. :)
I'm ambivalent about having to consider blowback from conversations like this. For me it's less about the content or the topic, though and more about the emotional content. I don't think you should get flayed for expressing an unpopular viewpoint, but I don't want someone's emotional content, or outrage. I want information, conversation, and counterpoints. I don't think being purposefully evocative leads towards changing minds. I think it tends toward polarization. I'm in it to figure things out and learn, if I can, and to help other people figure things out, if I can do that. Mostly I just want productive dialogue where I get to pat myself on the back for trying to be a better person ;).
And yeah, I definitely think it would be disingenuous for someone to say or imply that we haven't made a lot of progress in the last hundred years.
That being said, I'm on the side of the gender and ethnic fence that has largely benefited from discrimination in the past, so I try to be relatively sensitive to it, especially since it can be so subtle and hard to spot.
that men and women are actually different and that it implies different behaviour?
Individual variation within gender is almost always far, far greater than demographic variation between genders.
Here's an easy example: most men are not in STEM and aren't all that interested in STEM. In these debates people throw around 'man' as a term, assuming the archetype of the engineer, when actually the 'average' man (if there is such a thing) is not particularly interested in STEM. So painting STEM as 'what men do' is inaccurate, because most men do not do it.
i think of the construction, driving/motor and manufacturing industries as being part of STEM and that covers a significant portion of men - several of the most common modes of employment for men if not all of them.
i could be wrong, but i am skeptcial - is this not a common interpretation?
oh sure - in desperation people will take the jobs they can get, but what it does is wash out the natural tendency for men to prefer stem - which is very clear if you look at western nations and those considered to have good sex equality in general (Scandanavia, western europe)
its a shame i cant find any of the studies on this to link. they are buried beneath rubbish populist/magazine articles on google...
i am ashamed to belong to a society that necessitates such an article saying in its opening paragraph 'Leaving aside politcal correctness, there is compelling evidence...'
The article says "The study authors did find that, on average, women in fields like programming earn 6.6 percent less than men (a Bureau of Labor Statistics study showed that women actually earn 11 percent more, however). But that difference is not statistically significant."
But that the difference is not statistically significant does not mean there is no difference. To show there is no difference, you'd need to show that the power used to run the study was sufficiently high to be confident.
The correct interpretation would be "the study failed to find a significant difference in salaries between men and women, but that does not mean there isn't one." Not as exciting of a headline I guess.
Update: I skimmed the study pdf and the study does not make the mistake as the article. In fact, I applaud the study for using two-tailed tests that gave them less power but more neutrality (so they were checking for gender differences in pay rather than if men were paid more than women). The study shows significant differences in pay in several professions but not engineering or math/CS.