> Despite continued assaults on the credibility of her contributions to modern computer science as the world’s first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace coded.
Yet in reality she was very much respected in her day, and despite her challenges received widespread support. The first "assaults" on her scope of her contributions came over 100 after her death, and not some sexism she had to fight and overcome.
The "assaults" on her credibility did not happen to her during her lifetime. Even if they are proven to be true, her proven contributions are still impressive.
Please, take a moment and reflect on what is most important. Is it gender equality, or is it nitpicking the temporal sequencing of Ada Lovelace's contributions?
The facts are that women are poorly represented in the tech community[1], and do make less than men[2]. Any attempt to let women feel more accepted and bring about much needed change should be championed, not picked apart and belittled because you feel like you are personally being attacked when people are just asking for help.
1. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/05/28/google-release...
2. https://www.cnet.com/news/biggest-pay-gap-in-america-compute...
From the glassdoor wage gap study you mentioned in [2]:
> After taking into account differences in education and experience, men working at tech companies overall make 5.9 percent more than women do
From a brief scan of the study they didn't control for hours worked and they are already down to 5.9%
Since full-time men work 5% longer than full-time women[3] just adjusting for hours worked almost entirely eliminates the gap.
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/karinagness/2016/06/30/new-repo...
Edit: Sorry I put the overall adjusted US pay gap of 5.4% when I meant to put the adjusted tech pay gap of 5.9% from the glassdoor study.
Yeah, I've gone through and scanned that BLS report you linked to (actually you didn't, you linked to Forbes, but this is what they were talking about): https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf
It doesn't say what you think it does at all. This isn't a study of men vs. women working identical jobs and doing less work, this is a finding that across the entire workforce, a men's "work day" is somewhat longer than a woman's. Which is to say: Women are more likely to work part time jobs.
Also, starving people of hours is just as effective at reducing costs as lowering the hourly. I don't think it's in your favor to argue that's something that should be controlled.
Are the programmers in question being paid by the hour? Does programmer pay within each gender correlate closely to hours worked?
Why is it a foregone conclusion that the majority of women in this population worked fewer hours? A forbes study which averages across a large canvas of american workers is not a very good thing to compare to glassdoor's targetted subsection.
In my opinion, the problem is twofold. First of all, this gap - whatever you think it is, 6% or 9% or 21% - it is a problem. Most Americans live pretty close to financial ruin, like it or not. 76% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck [1] and 63% of Americans are one missed paycheck away from the streets [2]. A 6% pay gap is about two paychecks. Even though it may not seem like much to a HN reader with significant savings or a safety net, this small gap spread across the whole population actually causes problems.
The second part of the problem is societal: women are discouraged from pursuing higher-paying jobs by society. This isn't the fault of the women themselves, or the people doing the hiring, but sexism and biases hidden everywhere. In my opinion, this is the best support for affirmative action: more women doing a certain job translates to more women interested in that career.
These two things combined are a double whammy that currently mean that less women work and women who do work are not always financially secure - and that's the big problem here. If you're a woman from an upper class background and have been encouraged by those around you, you may never experience any of these problems, and that's great. But if you're an average American woman, these things have a very real impact on your life.
This also explains the giant gulfs of opinion I see here on HN. Most people here are relatively wealthy - remember, if you earn more than 36k a year, you earn more than most working Americans. $70k/yr means you earn more than 75% of American workers. I'd bet the vast majority of US programmers on here earn above 70k/yr. It's easy to get caught in a bubble and say 'well the women around me seem to have no problems!' and forget about the majority of the country. At the same time, if you live in a low-income area, those two "missed" paychecks might be absolutely killer.
[0] I have a personal, unfounded feeling that it's closer to 10% - maybe 8-9% if I had to guess.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/24/pf/emergency-savings/
[2] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-are-one-payc...
It is good to encourage women and other underrepresented groups to enter tech-just imagine how many awesome programmers we are missing out on- but I feel we can do this by being objectively accurate.
I'm with you on the underrepresented story, this is very common. But the glassdoor study has many major flaws and I don't think is really that useful. The biggest flaw is that it's only using self-reported data for location, gender, salary and job title; and it has a very broad comparison by job title that doesn't really fit when you are comparing "programmer" with "qa engineer"
That said, I find it much easier to believe that women are paid less than men, on average, than to believe otherwise. This has been the case historically since pretty much the founding of the nation. While I would certainly hope and do believe that women now make more than they have in the past, and that their pay is now approaching that of men, I think it's unreasonable to believe that we have reached "pay equity" between the sexes.
In my opinion, I would not consider pay between men and women equitable until I have seen reasonable looking studies that have proven the case. I think it would be wise to be skeptical of such studies but look forward to their being published.
https://research-content.glassdoor.com/app/uploads/sites/2/2...
And it, like most of the statistical papers surrounding the pay gap suffer from what I personally affectionately refer to as the "peanut butter spread" problem.
The implicit assumption of pay gap studies is that if you group all jobs into a category and then segment them by gender both groups should have equal distribution of some set of attributes X, Y, and Z. I can't help but feel as if looking at genders (or really any segment of society) and assuming they have "independent and identically distributed"[1] random variables is flawed.
For example, UC enrollment of undergraduate students for Engineering/CS has hovered around 14.5% for the last several years[2]. My fraternity, however, was more than half Engineering/CS majors at one point in time during my time as an undergrad at UC Davis.
One way to look at this is:
* My fraternity favored Engineering/CS majors
another way would be:
* My fraternity discriminated against non-Engineering/CS majors
But neither is actually true. The fact my fraternity had a higher percentage of Engineering/CS majors than the overall student body distribution does not imply any sort of causal influence insidious or otherwise; correlation is not causation.
Moreover, all things being equal, should my fraternity have the same distribution of majors as the overall student body?
I would argue no. Membership of a fraternity, or any other student organization for that matter, should be a personal choice. Whether it is a collection of like-minded individuals, similar majors, or similar interests that motivates you to join the choice should be yours to freely make. If that means that individual fraternities all have non-identical distributions of majors, then so be it!
Make no mistake, I am all about freedom of choice. I also am steadfastly libertarian and individual freedoms (and this applies equally when it comes to gender considerations). But I don't necessarily believe that in a Utopia-esque society where there is perfect freedom of choice that there would also be perfectly equal distributions of any sort.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_di...
[2] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/fall-enrol...
I don't follow the logic. Someone who enters tech through such an intervention is someone taken away from another field; why do we need another awesome programmer more than we need another awesome salesperson?
Seeing sexism everywhere is not helping the fight against remaining actual sexism.
If recent raises / salaries in the tech industry outside of Silicon Valley are any guide, companies love to save money on salaries. So I honestly have no idea why all the men I work with haven't been replaced by women being paid 95% or whatever the claimed pay gap is. And remember, this is in the US, where you can legally be let go because your boss doesn't like the color of your shoes.
Would you be more likely to hire a man than a women for an engineering role? Take the harvard implicit gender bias test for one answer: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html
This discussion is complex and it's not entirely obvious how much of the pay gap is caused by discrimination, but this is one stupid argument.
I know of women who are paid more than me in tech, and I know why. I know of women who are paid less than me, and I can think of n reasons why.
As for sheer numbers, ask yourself: are there any industries where there are considerably fewer men than women? The answer is, of course, yes. Look at nursing. In the most gender-equitable societies on the planet, I'm talking the Norways and Swedens of the world, you'll see 80-90% female involvement in nursing. Look at construction. In those same societies, you will see almost the exact opposite, probably even greater disparities. Look at sales departments, I don't know a single woman who likes sales work, and I know at least a few who have given it a serious try. I'm sure there are some, but you won't convince me that it's the norm without hard data. On the flip side of that, I grew up with guys who love working with their hands in construction, and who like that it's honest work.
My intuition is that men and women(real, living individual men and women) are different in some way which drives them to prefer different work based on schedules, the way their job has them interact with people, the amount of solitary vs. collaborative work, work-life balance, and hosts of other complex differences.
As for harassment, I find it hard to believe that tech is a particularly bad place for it. I would believe you if you said that startups are prone to harassment (HR vacuum). Until I see a non-partisan study with an appreciable number of respondents, a consistent rubric for assessing individual situations, I will continue to believe what I see in person.
No CNET or USA Today article is going to convince me that it's a problem in itself that there is a statistical difference between the average yearly earnings of different cohorts. I'm sure married and unmarried people make different amounts of money on average. I'm sure people with and without kids make different amounts of money on average. Nothing about those statistics says that there is a discriminatory or unfair advantage. If you could prove that a major company is systematically underpaying women for work of equivalent holistic value, then it would be the case of the decade; this case has clearly never happened, because if it ever did, it would be an outrage, and at very least the people making this argument would be pointing at it every time they got a chance.
And I know you'll downvote this before reading it through, but maybe the first few open-minded people will get a chance to reflect. I can spare a few HN hivemind cohesion points.
Do the men employed as nurses make less money on average than their women colleagues?
You're looking at the finish line and making an answer while ignoring the fact that they are placed on different courses from birth.
I don't work in sales so perhaps someone better qualified can comment, but isn't the stereotype that the culture in sales is like that of fraternities? I can imagine how that's probably not welcoming to women, especially when the sales revolves around social relationships.
(In case you are unaware, I appear to be the highest ranked openly female member here. I strongly suspect I really am because I have been saying that for a couple of years or so and no one has shot me down yet with "Nope!!! THIS member is openly female AND on the leaderboard, you dumbass!!!!!")
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-cant-silicon-...
http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/20/9179853/tech-diversity-sco...
https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/thought-on-diversity...
In the meantime, I note that you could have chosen, in response to a post on International Women's Day, to show appreciation to black _women_ and latina _women_ in tech, and recognize the issues that they face on all of these fronts. You chose not to do so. Hence it seems to me like your purpose here might be to draw attention away from those women, because you don't think they need your support or solidarity. Was that your intent?
http://www.blackgirlscode.com/ https://www.devcolor.org/
I remember reading this particular blog entry via HN: https://blog.devcolor.org/on-being-a-black-man-42ecb7946fe0
The disparity you're talking about could be because there are more women in tech (just underrepresented in C-level roles or whatever it might be) likely to speak up, whereas black people are underrepresented in tech full stop?
Weasel words. The discussion happens, it is out there, you can find it. Who is to blame if you ignore it?
Also, the origin of the quote 'Nevertheless, she persisted' is from a completely non-gendered context, where a woman persisted in breaking the non-gendered rules of the US Congress.
What a shame that most of the top comments here are boring, stand-up-for-the-vulnerable types agreed with by the majority— "women face difficulties in tech, and we should help them whenever we can"—while the downvoted posts are the ones trying (not necessarily successfully) to arrive at politically incorrect truths.
I sometimes write about such topics, but can't get much traction. A few of my pieces have gotten a few thousand page views, mostly on HN, but most of what I write is largely ignored. If you want something meatier, you might enjoy my personal blog.
Best.
Do soldiers reason when given orders?
Do sheep flock alone?
This forum, like most places is no different. Regardless of what you are trying to say, best to just stfu because there will be another person awaiting to single their virtues.
Also, 99% of stats on the internet are bullshit, including this one.
Take everything with a grain of salt and just be a nice person. That's my motto. In addition to don't raise pitch forks when I hear a stat
Happy woman's day.
Additionally, why don't we speak about rights of minorities on this forum. I don't think xor meant anything negative by this. A good question to ask but I guess not today?
Treatment of women as full-fledged peers is definitely something that needs better attention in our industry.
I recently saw this surface on HN in the basement of this thread, discussing the appointment of Jennifer Widom as the dean of Stanford Engineering. Many posters speculated, without knowledge of her credentials, that she was unqualified compared to her male peers and only selected because she's a woman.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13779165
I don't know how it escapes them that this attitude is the literal definition of sexism, and that women in tech have to fight this constantly.
I saw it happen all the time in engineering school. I even occasionally see it in workplace. So many of my female classmates and coworkers are talked down to, discouraged and have their skills written off by their male counterparts (nevertheless, they persist). No wonder the share of women in STEM fields dwindles, the culture can be absolutely toxic.
I don't doubt that many people are honestly being unintentionally sexist. But it's on everyone to constructively call out this behavior and support a healthier culture in the school and workplace. At the very least, why would one want to write off the ideas and talent of half the population?
> It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.
It's really very true.
https://dev.to/thepracticaldev/nevertheless-she-coded/commen...
> The first thing I coded was an Everquest 7-page website in plain-old HTML. I was 15 and I had figured out HTML from right-clicking and wondering if 'View Source' was how it was made.
I went into computer engineering because I loved video games and wanted to write games. I believe my one of my first webpages was a Final Fantasy fanpage with Microsoft FrontPage, uploaded to my dad's Prodigy web space. I don't know what the actual stats are in terms of girls playing video games, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a correlation between that childhood activity and a later interest in programming.
"women face continued pay disparity"
Seeing this statement tells me immediately that the author is grinding an ax.
In some fields of engineering (EE, for example), women actually get paid more (104% last I checked). And, when you control for experience, time off for family, etc., pay disparities in most tech fields almost disappear.
Complaining about discrimination or harassment? Sure, go for it. Lack of child care and having undue burden with family health issues? The stats back you up.
However, attempting to promulgate something which is not true hurts the overall movement when there is so much that is true and needs to be fixed.
Based on my casual research, the correct answer to "what's the gender pay gap" is to sidetrack into a half-hour discussion on what you're controlling for and whether it's appropriate to control for that.
For example, professions where flexible schedules are rare see the wage gap grow for women between their 20s and 30s (compared to professions where flexible schedules are more common). This is likely because that's around the age where people have children and women are expected to handle a disproportionate measure of childrearing duties.
Is that something you try to control for? If you're looking for direct, hiring-manager-discriminating-against-you sexism, then yes, you control for it. If you're looking for the wide variety of subtle ways women are discriminated against, you don't.
From what I've found, if you're looking for the sort of direct sexism of hiring managers paying less to _exactly_ the same person for _exactly_ the same work, you come out with a 3-10% wage gap.
If, on the other hand, you're looking for the wide variety of systematic ways women are prevented from getting equal pay, you get 10-30%. Some of those ways can be addressed at the individual level, some at the company level, and some at the societal level.
[0] http://www.payscale.com/data-packages/gender-pay-gap/women-i... [1] http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-0323-pay...
Okay, so spoiler alert, I'm grinding an axe right now.
It's completely ridiculous to imply that analysts are not normalizing for hours worked. That's one of the most basic things they do, and you really should provide proof in the form of a study that both published its methodology and has been done in the last 5 years that didn't account for this, setting aside that one clickbait publicity stunt from Glassdoor. People keep citing other studies that "don't do this" and it's not true, or point to the national average and say that extends to knowledge work and that's absurd.
"The pay gap" is not simply lockstep salary progression. It was just the most obviously unfair and lowest-hanging fruit. That's only the start of it. The fact that women are often passed over for promotion because industries frown on maternity leave, the fact that harassment leaves women with fewer mentorship opportunities, the fact that many environments treat interviews like hazing, all these things add up to create aforementioned gap.
Your quote up at the top is the root of the pay gap. It's your belief that someone who works a reasonable sum of hours but then goes to have a child should be paid less. You believe that someone who takes time off for a reasonable work-life balance or a family emergency should be paid less. That attitude is bad for everyone, but it's especially bad for women in much of western society's current form.
And yes, there are still places where women DO get paid less for the same work. That is not done yet. And until it's so rare that it's unheard of, we're going to keep pointing it out.
It's your belief that someone who works a reasonable sum of hours but then goes to have a child should be paid less.
The question isn't whether someone who takes time off to raise a child should be paid less, it is whether someone with more overall work experience should be paid more. My wife took 10 years off to raise kids. Is she entitled to the exact same salary as a co-worker who continuously worked for that time, increasing their skills? What about a 5 year gap? 1 year?
In fact, according to a different video also by Christina Hoff Sommers the 77 cents on the dollar pay gap oft cited is no more than a blanket calculation using Census data.[1] This is seemingly confirmed by the Washington Post.[2] In fact, the Washington Post seems to indicate that the 77 cent figure doesn't correct even for weekly/hourly wage metrics much less hours worked.
As a whole I think you might find the Christina Hoff Sommers videos interesting to watch. Although they are "classical liberal"/libertarian leaning right (considering the American Enterprise Institute is a conservative think-tank I am not too surprised by this).
But I also wanted to ask some things about your points:
> the fact that many environments treat interviews like hazing
> someone who works a reasonable sum of hours but then goes to have a child should be paid less
> someone who takes time off for a reasonable work-life balance or a family emergency should be paid less
These aren't really gender specific so I am struggling to see how they would contribute to a gender pay gap. Perhaps you could elaborate?
> The fact that women are often passed over for promotion because industries frown on maternity leave
> the fact that harassment leaves women with fewer mentorship opportunities
I would be interested to read any sources you have that could give me some insight into these dynamics. These are points I haven't read about before and I wasn't even aware they have been examined to any degree.
Personally I tend to be more Libertarian and am very pro-"choice".
I don't think being skeptical of the dubious statistics surrounding the gender pay gap makes someone misogynistic or anti-feminist...so I would encourage you to try and keep an open mind before labeling someone so just because they express reservations about the wage gap and the statistics behind it.
[1] https://youtu.be/1oqyrflOQFc
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/04/...
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/goldin_aeapres...
I think she's said that once all factors are accounted for there is still a 6-7% pay gap that they can't yet account for.
EDIT: Use similar term for both genders.
That's a big "etc" to throw around - do you mind elaborating?
What else beyond time off for family could possibly be in this list to the degree that pay disparities disappear?
So what you're saying is there are pay disparities in most tech fields.
Aka, women face continued pay disparity.
Whether her points are validate or not, the rules were followed as they would have been with any man.
If she wants to get her opinion out, she can hold a press conference outside the Senate or simply call Maddow, like she did- a friendly audience that would allow her to speak as long as they had time for.
The Senate has rules, and those rules are fairly enforced regardless of gender. Tying a movement to the perceived unfairness of a fair enforcement seems to me to be unwise.
Later that same night, a male senator from Oregon read the complete letter that Warren was trying to read from the floor of the senate.
I also don't like how the article equates programming and its value system of efficiency and beauty as factors of value and correctness with the political aspect of Senator's Warren actions that uses a different value system. If you agree with Warren, then this article makes more sense because you think Warren was right, but was stopped. If you disagree with Warren, then you may think that she broke whatever rules of the Senate and was properly stopped.
Finally, I don't like how it equates all of these awesome female and non-binary programmer examples of success with Senator Warren's failure. She was stopped and Sessions was confirmed as attorney general. It would be cool if there was a better example that resulted in success, like Senator Warren's own story of how she became a senator.
For example, the inclusion of Elizabeth Warren and McConnell's line. What McConnell did (attempt to shut down resistance of the opposite party) was wrong-headed and undemocratic, but the only thing it had to do with gender was the use of a pronoun (edit: yodon is right).
Nobody would have paid much attention to it if he'd said "nevertheless he persisted", but a partisan attack was made into something about gender when there's no reason to believe it was so.
What does it really have to do with coding, anyway? It's inclusion says more about the author's goals than it does about the topic.
During this time, I've seen Web design positions attract females applicants by about a two-thirds majority, whereas Web development positions attract only one in twenty (if that). And yet, those who have applied seem to fit into two distinct categories of undesirables:
First, the designer, with a design degree, who learned to code from some two-week academy that now feels the need to apply for a position well beyond their skill level. Or second, the mathematics major (or similar) who feels their knowledge of topics only related to programming in general is satisfactory enough to hit the ground running as a Web developer of all things...
So I'll be happy to discuss the potential of a wage gap if I ever seem to hire a true female Web developer.
You clearly have not decided this is important to you, which is your choice. However, because you choose not to pursue it, you are now concluding that you are entirely blameless for your objectively abysmal performance in hiring women. That is not a valid conclusion.
My experience is that once I chose to prioritize hiring women, a bunch of my own hidden biases, assumptions and yes, values, became clear. I realized that I had missed opportunities to hire women in the past. I realized that I had connected values I shared with people I hired as objectively "good" when in fact they just matched mine. I have a high opinion of my skills, so it's perhaps natural that I would do so, but in the end it actively hurt my abilities to recruit a diverse workforce. It was actually quite painful to realize I was the reason for not hiring women in many cases.
The other thing to realize is women, like all humans, have their own biases, and instinctively suss out those organizations that are seriously hiring women, and avoid those that don't. So until you decide that you want to recruit women, and succeed in doing so, you will continue to have a terrible record for hiring women.
> You decide that it is a top priority to have a diverse workforce ...
> You will find ways to attract, grow, and retain diverse talent ...
> You clearly have not decided this is important to you ...
> You choose not to pursue it ...
> You are now concluding that you are entirely blameless ...
> I chose to prioritize hiring women ...
> I realized that I had missed opportunities ...
> I realized that I had connected values I shared with people I hired as objectively "good" ...
> I have a high opinion of my skills ...
> I was the reason for not hiring women ...
In truth, your real issue is that you project your own failures in an amazingly presumptuous manner.
Whereas I merely left a comment detailing my factual observations regarding hiring for a specific type of position advertised equally to both men and women on services like LinkedIn and Craigslist.
All companies I worked for routinely hired guys like that assuming they will learn on the job. Most did, some did not. In any case, many professional programmers I see studied mathematics, physics or something similar and then changed career.
Edited to add: it is possible that your company can not afford a bit longer learning curve in the beginning. Did not wanted to make it sound like I am accusing you.
I actually thought that big difference between men and women is that men assume they can do tech by default, apply for jobs even as they have minimum qualification or experience and it oftentimes works out.
That is exactly my point and what I would have replied, otherwise. I just cannot spend that level of non-billable time teaching.
Humans just don't care enough about intelligence unfortunately. Everyone knows about Neil Armstrong though.
The lack of cited sources in articles like these leads people to bolster or criticize particular studies that they have read or heard about, usually without referencing those. Many of these studies are either flawed or contain assumptions that some people don't agree with, so this ends up going nowhere also.
Are there any really good studies on this topic that we may discuss as a common point of reference? Once that take into account all the facts, and don't start with assumptions like the following:
1. There should be equal numbers of men and women in tech (or there is some other ratio that is preferred or correct). 2. Women and men in tech should - on average - be paid the same.
Some people have these assumptions as part of their personal belief systems, but they entail a whole bunch of other assumptions that are not prima facie true.
One other huge weakness in these kinds of studies is that they measure the things that are easy to measure; things like education and experience. If companies are hiring compensating employees rationally, they would use these only as heuristics, and have some measure of how much an individual employee would contribute to the company as the determining factor.
Measuring job skill, as well as all the other skills that go into being a good employee is really hard, but until a study tries to actually do this, they are coming up with conclusions that aren't at all useful in the real world.
It's true. The earliest "computers" were overwhelmingly women.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer#Wartime_computi...
here we go...
We found that adjusting for a number of factors (profession, experience, education, etc.) the pay gap actually closes significantly.
That isn't to say some companies don't have pay gap, but it is largely overblown and often dissimilar pay is a result of other factors.
tl;dr 70 cents on the dollar is not a real thing when you use your data correctly (at least in USA).
"Adjusting for profession" ignores the cultural context of terms like "pay gap" -- we come from a world where women couldn't work certain jobs at all.
Why do these "other factors" push down the pay rate of women by almost 30%? If these other factors were random noise you'd expect them to affect both genders approximately equally.
The fact that men work more hours or that women take on more childcare duties does not mean that the pay gap doesn't exist. All it means that it's caused by cultural factors.
It's better than it's made out to be, but that there still is a gap is not right.
I would imagine it's really hard to measure the pay gap between programmers because there are literally coders that are 2x or 5x more productive than other coders. So I don't think it's as simple as checking all the people with "programmer" in their title by gender.
Do you know whether your equally skilled female colleagues are making less money than you? Have you asked?
There is systemic pay discrimination in development jobs here in Australia so I can only assume it is similar in the US.
there are a million parameters you can compare people on and determine who makes more money in life.
good looking people make more on average too.
If you're bad at negotiation it has nothing to do with being a man or woman. Are we supposed to nationalize or socialize individual negotiations?
> Do you know whether your equally skilled female colleagues are making less money than you?
BS argument.
Feb 8, 2017 was a Wednesday, not a Tuesday.
I had heard wage gap wasn't an accurate disparity in software engineering jobs. Like there isnt a cabal of people at every company conspiring against equally qualified candidates based on gender.
In HIRED's report it seemed more common that people underbid themselves, and more often than not the company still gave people higher offers if they had underbid but these were still lower offers than for people that bid higher or overbid.
Lets work on it but we have to get the discussion right first. I think villifying a sexist boogeyman isn't going to get us anywhere if a persistent reality is more nuanced.
> I think villifying a sexist boogeyman isn't going to get us anywhere
I don't think anyone is denying that sexist rhetoric exists, or that a pay gap exists. It could be "vilifying a sexist boogeyman" to say that one is primarily caused by the other, and it's fair to criticize articles that say that. But I don't think this article says anything like that. I think it addresses them separately.
I like the cause: awareness of gender discrimination, harassment and awareness of contributions in the workforce.
I think the wage gap is tangential to these circumstances, when there is evidence to the contrary for equally qualified individuals in software engineering roles. This isn't saying that gender based averages won't reveal the existence of a gap, it is saying that the current discussion misses the mark, as if this is a form of harassment that is either deliberate or unconscious bias that people simply aren't aware of, when there are other circumstances that are more nuanced and likely more prevalent, in the field of "coding".
It's not PC to suggest that the source of the problem may be with women themselves and their interests.
If we tell them they're victims enough then they'll believe it. There is evidence of this in other things for instance refugees who are told that they're victims are less likely to integrate.
I'm more focused on pointing out that we're all equal. If you're a woman on my team, I'm incredibly sorry but I'm not going to celebrate your feminity any more than I'd celebrate my other colleagues manliness. You do your job and I'll reward everyone with good pay, a bonus and a cake or two.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13821991 and marked it off-topic.
I haven't seen people using the same arguments as me before.
Unless you're referring to my refugee sentence which has, at least some, connections to reality[0]
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13826005 and marked it off-topic.
"Pay gap is fake" "Prove it" Cites stuff "Unrelated/invalid" *Conversation derails
Scrollinf half way, i saw this easily 5 times.
It's as if people stick to their beliefs despite any arguments that are made.
