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Study Finds No Gender Gap in Tech Salaries
- s_dev 11y agoLink broken - 404
- loco5niner 11y agoCorrect Link: http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/study-finds-no-gender-gap-in-tech-salaries http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-c...
- dang 11y agoThanks. Changed to that from http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/.Vth23MxmIEA.twitter http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-c....
- magicalist 11y agoThe blog post directly from Dice has slightly more information: http://insights.dice.com/2016/03/02/dice-report-gender-plays-no-role-in-tech-pay/ http://insights.dice.com/2016/03/02/dice-report-gender-plays... It also links to a more in depth look at what they call the "position gap", which addresses some people's comments about the original article hinging on controlling for education, experience, and job title: http://media.dice.com/report/february-2015-the-position-gap/ http://media.dice.com/report/february-2015-the-position-gap/ (I'd call the IEEE post blog spam, personally. It's barely more than a collection of quotes from elsewhere, and "IEEE" with "Study" in the title gives this more of an air of credibility than a survey by a job search company probably deserves)
- dang 11y agoThanks; good catch! We changed the URL from http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/study-finds-no-gender-gap-in-tech-salaries http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-c.... (I agree.)
- jonesb6 11y ago"No salary gap exists between women and men in tech, says job search firm Dice, looking at its annual survey of 16,000 tech professionals, as long as you are comparing people with equal experience, education, and job titles. That, of course, is a big if. And previous data from Dice found about a $10,000 pay gap between men and women if not controlled for those factors. Dice’s president, Bob Melk, in a letter to the media, indicated that, while generally the men (54 percent) and women (51 percent) surveyed reported being satisfied with their compensation, cash just doesn’t mean as much to women as it does to men. Melk indicated that employeers are offering women alternatives to higher salaries, including flexible work hours and the ability to telecommute. (I have to say, wouldn’t it be nice if these options were in addition to, instead of a replacement for, higher salaries?) Dice’s complete analysis of motivators is in the figure at right."
- dang 11y agoPlease don't just paste quotes from the article into the thread.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago>That, of course, is a big if. And previous data from Dice found about a $10,000 pay gap between men and women if not controlled for those factors. So what you are saying is that more experienced and more educated people get paid more? The horror! Seriously though, what is the problem with more experienced and educated people getting paid more?
- bobby_9x 11y agoDon't let the facts get in the way of a good discussion. These facts have been out for at least 5 years now and nobody cares.
- rubicon33 11y agoI'm confused by your comment. Facts should either support a discussion and foster it's continuation, or, it should shut down a discussion until new facts are presented. We COULD all still be talking about how square the earth is, but I think we've moved on to more fruitful discussions after the facts shut that one down. Speaking in an entirely abstract sense, discussions should halt if facts don't support it. I'm open to hearing something new though....
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago>I'm confused by your comment. I took their comment to be commentary on how there is still an insistence by many in society that there exists a gender gap even when many studies have given evidence that the gap is explained by a variety of factors such as work life balance. It would be nice if the discussion could move onto issues such as why there is a gender difference in work life balance desires, in hours of overtime worked, in work place death rates, etc. But we still seem to be stuck having to explain that the earth doesn't have four corners.
- actionwords 11y agothe patriarchy, duh. check your privilege, hurrrr..
- ktRolster 11y agoThis is my favorite recent example of thoughtless discrimination against women: http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2014/05/09/sexist-by-design/ http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2014/05/09/sexist-by-des... And you can see it's not a particularly new problem: http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/09/glass-staircase-not-dress-friendly/comment-page-2/ http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/09/glass-staircase-not-dre...
- itsdrewmiller 11y agoControlling for "job title" basically makes this invalid; if men are being promoted more often at the same experience/education level and consequently making more that is obviously a gender gap. Edit: "invalid" is maybe a strong word for the study itself - the headline "no wage gap exists" is definitely invalid, but the actual results are interesting.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago>if men are being promoted more often at the same experience/education level Instead of shifting the goal post, form a hypothesis that men are promoted more even when you control for factors such as education, experience, and work life balance, and then see if that is the case.
- zaphar 11y agoIt doesn't make it invalid. It just points to where the real issues lie. Something you need to know if you intend to actually fix anything.
- TTPrograms 11y agoOr it means that another study has to be written demonstrating that promotion is sexist? It's critical to understand these issues in depth if you want to fix them. Writing it off as invalid because it doesn't align with your worldview is the worst way to ensure that we never properly fix things.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoIf. That may be happening, if those doing the promoting are biased. (Which means, in some places, it probably is happening that way.) Systematically, though? Industry-wide? Is this really happening?
- untog 11y ago> Systematically, though? Industry-wide? Is this really happening? Probably? The issue as best I see it is that there isn't any one cause here. So when you look at the roster of Silicon Valley CEOs and see row after row of white, male faces you could say that it's because tech is racist/sexist and prevents women/people of color from ascending to management positions in companies. Then someone might counter and say, no, it's because there are far fewer women/people of colour entering the industry at the entry level, so it's understandable that there would be a lack of representation at that level. In reality, both of those things can be true without contradicting the other. There is both a pipeline problem going all the way back to elementary schools that presumes which career a person is going to pursue, and there are incidents of sexism and racism within the tech industry, but it's next to impossible to attribute exactly what cause and what effect go together.
- ahoy 11y agoThis is fairly consistent with other studies. The "77%" number is arrived at by comparing the median wage of full-time male & female employees. It doesn't account for differences in industry, job title, experience, etc. It's super broad. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, but it means we need more granularity. Coming out of uni/grad school, male and female salaries are equal in comparable fields. They depart a few years after that. Women tend to find themselves funneled into specific career paths that prioritize flexible hours and often pay less. Men face an opposite pressure - toward inflexible hours but higher pay. This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men. That doesn't mean the "gender gap" doesn't exist, or that it isn't an issue to address. It means that the way we tackle it isn't as simple as "pass a law mandating equal pay for equal work". We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules. We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women (normalizing parental leave for fathers with newborns is a good start). *edited for typos
- ultramancool 11y agoHere's a really interesting freakonomics radio episode that goes into some good detail here if anyone's curious where these differences really originate: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender-pay-gap-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...
- shostack 11y agoBeat me to it. The episode is basically an interview with Claudia Goldin who is about as qualified a person as you could hope for to speak on this matter. [1] tl;dr women start out with equal pay, but trade pure monetary compensation for flexibility and/or fewer hours when they have kids because society still sucks at gender equality when it comes to enabling parents to equally contribute to certain aspects of parenting due. [1] http://scholar.harvard.edu/goldin/biocv http://scholar.harvard.edu/goldin/biocv
- tomp 11y ago
- samd 11y agoThat's good news if true, the women who make it and get promoted earn the same as their counterparts. Still lots of work to be done removing the barriers that keep them from getting these jobs and promotions in the first place.
- api_or_ipa 11y agoWhat is interesting is the breakdown of motivations between men and women. It seems readily apparent that women on the whole prefer flexible work arrangements because of child raising obligations. This is exactly the same argument lobbed across the wage gap discussion for years now. Proponents of the wage-gap point that women have an unfair obligation to child-raising duties, which puts them at a disadvantage when compared to their male peers. I'm not a social scientist and nor am I particularly well versed in the quagmire of social & gender obligations, so I'll keep out of making a normative judgement on this topic. Suffice to say, in Tech, the longer you spend at the office, the more you appear to be motivated and hardworking. I fear that might just be too ingrained in management psyches for a solution to be readily available.
- WalterSear 11y agoI'd be amazed if there wasn't a correlation between time in the office and productivity. There may be very good reasons for the disparity in pay.
- tehwalrus 11y agoThere is; a negative correlation. Humans are much, much less efficient when tired/overworked.
- WalterSear 11y agoDon't be facetious: that's not at all what we are talking about here.
- SamBam 11y agoIt's not remotely facetious. Regularly doubling your hours in the office generally does not even remotely double a person's productivity. However, appearing to be a "team player" and always being in the office makes a person appear to be a hard worker. So people who put in long hours are generally rewarded with more bonuses, promotions, and retention, even if there isn't a strong correlation with their actual work output.
- kough 11y agoDoes anyone have a link to reliable breakdowns of different professions by race and gender? Tech gets slammed particularly hard for being "white male cishet scum" and I'd love to see how it compares to other fields. I can't imagine fields like law or nursing or mining or teaching or policing are much more equal.
- actionwords 11y agoif anything white males are underrepresented and asian males are overrepresented.
- rqebmm 11y agoI was able to do a quick analysis of US government data about a year ago when the 77% thing was at it's height, and the industries with the largest raw discrepancy were Business and legal services. Tech was ~94% if I recall. I'll see if I can dig it up again. edit: Here's an updated version for 2015: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm edit2: And here's a curated google doc where I calculated the gender gap for each occupation with sufficient data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15vJGu8IMbvrVz6FqCg3rKMec0xJ2CiWgvXMRq08OXPo/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15vJGu8IMbvrVz6FqCg3r...
- eli 11y agoYou're talking about whether men and women in the same field get roughly paid the same. That's a separate issue from the ratio of men to women in the field.
- rqebmm 11y agoThat's true. Re-reading OP I'm honestly not clear which they were looking for, so I've added that to the sheet as well.
- eli 11y agoHere are BLS numbers on profession by gender and age: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat09.htm http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat09.htm The legal profession has actually made significant progress in closing the gender gap. Tech has a problem with gender. I'm not sure it's helpful to point out that other fields also have similar or even worse problems.
- tofupup 11y agoin other new the social implications of nan's
- tofupup 11y agoin other news ... the social implications of nan's
- thekevan 11y agoI wish I could find it but I saw a study that said when you take out hazzard pay for dangerous jobs and the jobs which experience the largest number of work related deaths, there was no pay gap by gender. If anyone knows the study I am taking about, I'd love to take a closer look at it.
- abraca 11y agoI'm surprised. In a technical PM role a few years ago I found out that I earned 20-40% less than other PM's at the company. There were more than a dozen PM's and I was the only woman who was mid-level seniority. My male direct report made almost the same as me, while my female direct reports made a lot less. In my case it was not due to lack of initial negotiation, but that at each promotion I didn't get a sufficient bump (and since I was getting a raise, I felt grateful instead of negotiating in middle of promotion/raise!) Second reason, was that a lot of the male PM's had threatened to leave in the past and negotiated their raises that way, whereas I had never done that. Since then, I have negotiated HARD for every position I've taken and have not hesitated to turn down jobs if I'm not confident that they are offering me 50th percentile relative to men in the role. I've also encouraged women to find out salary data for their peers in order to get raises. Often when someone leaves the company they will openly tell you their salary or if you are friends they will just tell you. In so many cases, where a woman is one of only 1-2 women out of 15-20+ men, it turns out that she is making far less than men who have previously held her role or been in same role. It's strange to me that HR never seems to pick up on things like this!! Seems like the first thing you'd check given all the publicity on issue. Anyway I've only seen negotiation work well (even where a woman is making way less than peers) where the woman has also gotten a competing offer, so that's number 1 thing I encourage.
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoThe best way to fix this is to create a social pressure to be open about salaries. Some want to fix this by teaching better negotiation skills to those who are poor at it, but as long as the social pressure is to hide this data, it is going to keep being a problem regardless if the cause is racism, sexism, classism, or just difference in negotiation skills.
- the_af 11y agoFully agreed. In some countries there is a taboo about openly discussing salaries, but keeping them secret only helps employers and hurts the negotiating power of employees.
- coldtea 11y agoGender Gap obligatory video link (Maddox): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDj_bN0L8XM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDj_bN0L8XM
- coldtea 11y agoDownvotes? I can understand not liking the humor, but it's a well researched video full of arguments for the subject matter. Better arguments in fact that several comments.
- deadcast 11y agohaha I was just thinking about that video :~) (up vote)
- abiox 11y agohe made an interesting observation - the supposed wage gap would mean businesses could save massively on payrolls by hiring all women.
- multinglets 11y agoPostmodern critical theory teaches me that this article is simply incorrect.
- brongondwana 11y ago"I have to say, wouldn’t it be nice if these options were in addition to, instead of a replacement for, higher salaries?" That was a kind of pointless observation. I too would like a pony. Obviously the jobs with both flexible work options _and_ high salaries are going to be very fiercely competed for, since they're the best jobs to have.
- rqebmm 11y agoIf anyone is curious, I created a google doc with the pay gap for each occupation based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data for 2015: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15vJGu8IMbvrVz6FqCg3rKMec0xJ2CiWgvXMRq08OXPo/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15vJGu8IMbvrVz6FqCg3r... source:http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm
- fapjacks 11y agoWell, that throws a wrench in some of the complaint machinery.
- _jmar777 11y ago> they’re getting equal pay for equal equal positions, education, and experience While those are certainly relevant control factors, I would presume that any conclusions are premature without demonstrating a lack of bias in the actual positions men vs. women are promoted to, relative to their experience and education. I.e., large disparities in salary by gender for "Software Engineer III" within the same organization are a bit hard to overlook, whereas there are often much fuzzier criteria involved in who has that title in the first place. Not looking to necessarily refute the article, but the control factors themselves are still rather variable.
- 13thLetter 11y ago> While those are certainly relevant control factors, I would presume that any conclusions are premature without demonstrating a lack of bias in the actual positions men vs. women are promoted to, relative to their experience and education. I'm wondering why the default assumption is that there is bias, and we're being expected to prove a negative here.
- _jmar777 11y agoI don't know if I would consider that a "default assumption", so much as being willing, in the absence of hard empirical data, to put some credibility into the glut of anecdotal evidence.
- whiddershins 11y agoI don't know ... have you wandered around the world and actually talked to real people about how they view gender? Almost no one will assert they think men and women are exactly the same. So if everyone starts from the presumption that there is some, poorly defined, somewhat-conscious, never agreed upon, but certainly real, difference between men and women ... a bias in treatment would be the default condition, and would probably require conscious effort and/or policy to overcome.
- tomp 11y ago> a bias in treatment would be the default condition, and would probably require conscious effort and/or policy to overcome. Ironically, people usually assume that the unequal treatment benefits men over women, and completely dismiss the reverse possibility, even though there's no rational reason for this :)
- PhasmaFelis 11y ago> No salary gap exists between women and men in tech, says job search firm Dice, looking at its annual survey of 16,000 tech professionals, as long as you are comparing people with equal experience, education, and job titles. > That, of course, is a big if. And previous data from Dice found about a $10,000 pay gap between men and women if not controlled for those factors. Annoying that the article itself seems to contradict its title. We don't have a breakdown of how much effect those different factors have, but from the summary it's possible that women get equal salaries for the same job titles, but are less likely to be hired for/promoted into better-paying titles--which would be the same thing as a gender-based salary gap.
- floor__ 11y agoThis should be spread around.
- leeleelee 11y agoNursing is a field dominated by women. And there are very large salary gaps between nurses with 0-10 years of experience and nurses with 10-20 years of experience. I'd also bet that there are much more women with 10-20 years of experience than men. So if you broke it down in the same way as the tech industry and did not control for job title or years of experience, you'd find a reverse gender gap in the same way you see in the tech industry. Controlled for job title and experience, you'd probably find it equal just like this study shows. I don't think there is any more discrimination in the tech industry when it comes to salaries than there is in nursing. I think both do not suffer from gender discrimination.
- chiaro 11y agohttp://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/24/stubborn-pay-gap-is-found-in-nursing/ http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/24/stubborn-pay-gap-is... Nope. Male nurses still make more, which, with respect to your post, is a strong data point in favor of the discrimination hypothesis.
- LunaSea 11y agoA discrimination by women against women then since nursing is overwhelmingly women.
- baddox 11y agoI don't know if that's true, but even if it is, how does that make the discrimination any less of a problem?
- 203993203993 11y agoIf we can't even agree on what kind of discrimination happens then we certainly can't do more than social media inactivism. At best we can make the problem worse by trying to solve the wrong problem.
- 11y ago
- 4bpp 11y agoEveryone seems to be quick to reduce the gender disparity in seniority/paygrade of jobs occupied to a childcare/parental leave/homemaking question, but is there any data for the single, infertile or asexual segment of the population to back this up? My impression always has been that long before parenting even starts being relevant, there is a difference between the genders in terms of readiness to engage in self-sacrificial or -destructive behaviour for the sake of self-realisation and status climbing (which is often correlated to pay in one way or another). Regardless of whether this difference is predominantly biological or cultural and which gender deserves the "blame" for it if it is the latter, I think that any attempt to reduce the disparity by policymaking should at least try to address this.
- robbyking 11y agoThat's not the issue; the issue is the hiring gap in tech jobs and reasons behind it. The film "Code: Debugging the Gender Gap" does an excellent job of documenting the phenomenon. Nationally, young women taking high school placement tests score as well or better than their male classmates, but are placed in advanced math and science classes at a much, much lower rate. Because of this, the number of female high school graduates who meet academic requirements for university STEM programs is much lower, and so on though graduate school until the number of qualified female candidates for jobs in STEM fields has dwindled to nearly nothing.
- Chefkoochooloo 11y agoIt is a very interesting article, but I wonder if companies would show the average Gender hiring when it comes to applicants. Sure, a man with the same skills could've gotten the job, but what if there were 5 women who also applied with the same skill set? It just depends on the way that you view the situation. Different perspective, in my opinion.
- epx 11y agoEven if the 80% thing is true, this is not a difference to lose the sleep about. It should be fixed, but the statistical noise is too significant to aim at 100%. The marginal value of money is log(x), and log(0.8) is almost 0. When women were limited to a couple professions (nun, teacher, nurse) it was a buyer's market, and even brilliant women would have to give in to minimal salaries, or opt out of professional work. At that time, the difference was like 10x, so women made 10% of a man, and log(0.1) is a significant number. This was successfully resolved (with the help of two world wars and the invention of washing machine).
- whiddershins 11y agoObviously it is important to be skeptical when controlling for job title. If there were an institutional bias against women tech workers, one way it could manifest is by women receiving less recognition and promotions, or being hired in to lower positions with the same skills and experience. Which would mean they might typically have a lower job title than the equivalent male worker, so controlling for job title could hide the bias. I'm not saying this is or isn't the case, but it is a rather blatant possibility that isn't addressed by what is seeming like a naive study.
- reversecs 11y agocriticizing a study is fine but in light of how absolutist the mainstream is about the gender pay gap this increased granularity is very much welcome
- apta 11y ago> What if it's a natural preference given It is known that women tend to be more emotional than men for instance. As such, they do well in nurturing roles like you described. I'm not saying that men can't do them, it's just that more women feel "at home" doing that kind of work.
- st3v3r 11y agoIs that a natural thing? Or is it because emotions are considered "unmanly"?
- logfromblammo 11y agoYou are in the woods. Before you are two black bear cubs. Due to the circumstances of the hypothetical, you have only two choices for where to stand. Choice A is between the cubs and their mother, who is feasting on armyworms. Choice B is between the cubs and their father, who is raiding a beehive. Which do you pick? Choice B, right? It is illogical to walk away from easy food and then choose to attack the strong food rather than the weak food. It is somewhat less illogical to run away from easy food and attack an imminent mortal threat to the most important things on the entire planet. What makes an adult bear decide that bear cubs are not food, and also the most important things ever? Emotions, probably. Most mammals employ liberal doses of hormones to ensure that a mother forms a powerful emotional bond with her child. Humans are not an exception. Remember that the placenta allows chemicals to pass directly from mother to child and vice versa. The emotional bond between father and child has to form in the same way as it would form with anyone else. I'm not saying that a male can't be as emotional as a female, but males never experience a 280 day interval where something is constantly giving them intravenous injections of chemicals evolved specifically to create an emotional response.
- Kluny 11y agoI don't think your analogy holds any water, and I also find it disrespectful of the typical father's love for his children.
- ninjakeyboard 11y agoContrast with http://media.dice.com/report/february-2015-the-position-gap/ http://media.dice.com/report/february-2015-the-position-gap/
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago> What does still exist is a position gap as researched in earlier years. This is key and should probably be mentioned in the title. People of different genders in the same position have similar salaries. It's the disparity in positions they attain that creates a wage gap.
- kaonashi 11y agoNote, a gender gap in salaries does not imply an absence of a large differential in proportional representation. In fact, given the tech sectors large salaries compared to the population at large, the presence of proportionate salaries and disproportionate representation would add to the overall wage gap.
- RA_Fisher 11y agoNo data, no code, no way to verify they didn't fat finger the stats. :(
- kdkooo 11y agoCompletely agree! Where's the data? How many people were surveyed? These statements are too strong to evaluate without the proper context.
- readymade 11y agoWherein a bunch of privileged white men all agree that they were never privileged all along.
- clevernickname 11y agoWhen those gender roles are all but constant across countless independently developed cultures existent over tens of thousands of years, with distribution of visible physical traits to match them, it's pretty safe to assume that they're baked into our DNA and not some random whim of western culture. Imagine how long a tribe with male caretakers and female warriors (who it cannot be argued are not on average significantly smaller and weaker than men) would survive against a tribe of male warriors and female caretakers. There are species with much less divergence in biology between males and females. We would not have evolved to have such divergence if it were not useful for our fitness to have distinct fighter/protector and caretaker roles. Indeed as K-strategists that take a very long time to mature, having dedicated caretakers was an extremely useful evolution.
- shkkmo 11y agoThat is a bad assumption that will mislead you. The gender roles are not baked into our DNA. There are 'baked-in' DNA traits, that have emergently caused cultures to adopt those gender roles in their historical contexts. 'Baked-id' DNA traits are now emergently leading to the abandonment of gender roles in the context of western cultures & economies. Please re-evaluate your assumptions because they are wrong.
- defen 11y agoWhat do you make of studies that show monkeys and humans have a similar gender-biased breakdown of toy preferences and juvenile activities?
- msoad 11y agoIn our community we share our salaries we make. I am male recently hired by Google. My package is exactly equal to my friend which has the same amount of experience and is a female.
- LargeCompanies 11y agoGet as much money as you can especially while our skill/experience is in high demand; man or woman! Use recruiters to your advantage; utilize them to get a higher salary or hourly rate. I.E. When they message you tell them your making more then you really are to see how high they can go.
- elchief 11y agoThere is also a smaller earnings gap for lesbian women vs straight women (vs men) https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/25/the-surprising-reason-why-lesbians-get-paid-more-than-straight-women/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/25/the-s... And for Asian women vs non-Asian women (vs men): https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/06/why-indian-american-women-make-more-money-than-white-guys/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/06/why-i...
- timwaagh 11y agothis is good news of course, although largely irrelevant since almost no women bother with programming.
- freyafff 11y agoI think that its all about stereotypes and shatering the glass ceiling! This is an amazing article for this! http://thefrejeleriexperiment.tumblr.com/ http://thefrejeleriexperiment.tumblr.com/
- freyafff 11y agoI think that its all about stereotypes and shatering the glass ceiling! This is an amazing article for this! http://thefrejeleriexperiment.tumblr.com/ http://thefrejeleriexperiment.tumblr.com/
- ianamartin 11y agoFrom my anecdotal data, what I noticed the last few years I worked in Texas was that I was seeing a pretty remarkable influx of middle eastern women filling technology roles. These women were some of the most competent people I've had the opportunity to work with. If you go out and have a drink and a conversation with some of them, you'll find out that they: feel like they have two strikes against them in the U.S. and in technology. Their response is to work really effing hard to get insanely good at what they do. And it works for them. Most of the people I'm thinking of right now had higher titles and salaries than the males they work with. I'm not arguing that there's no discrimination or anything stupid like that. But I do think there is some nuance to the situation. For example, the leadership and culture isn't driven by them, even if they are at the top end of the individual contributor spectrum. It's a tough nut to crack. Knowing that you have certain knocks against you can have different effects for different people. One person can look at a situation and say, "What's the point? I'm not going to be successful because of gender/education(or lack of it, in my case)/ethnicity/company culture/whatever. Other people look at that as part of the fun in life. Bucking the odds, overthrowing stereotypes. I don't know that there's a strong gender correlation with these attitudes. But in my very non-representative experience, where you get hired and how much you make in the technology field are not consistently tied to whether you have boobs or if you have a college degree, or if you're a privileged white male, or if you're a recent immigrant. I would not argue that the situation is all roses for women and minorities in this country. But I don't think it's as bad as is sometimes portrayed. I think that the real race and gender discrimination start in early life education. Women are not-so-subtly guided in different directions than men are. And many minorities just don't have much of a chance because our education and social mechanisms are mostly just crap. The imbalances that we do see in the job market are a direct result of our inadequate and unequal social and educational systems. The market is reflecting the values that we've decided on.
- littletimmy 11y agoEven if there is a gender gap, should the state really be intervening to "make it more fair"? Personally I am against anti-discrimination laws. If I start a company, and I want to employ only men (or only women or only bald eagles), that's my business. Why shouldn't I be free to choose to be productive with whoever I wish?
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoNo gap in pay for the same position. But the position gap is still alive and well. Also called the glass ceiling. So, the average women in tech are paid less than men. The title is quite misleading.
- mycroft-holmes 11y ago> No gap in pay for the same position. That's the point here and it's worth reiterating when feminists consistently say they're paid 7X cents on the dollar.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoAnd the glass ceiling means, the average woman is pad 7X cents on the dollar because they're denied promotion and advancement. So that's the point too - they're right.