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Still not sure what to believe on this issue. Some points of discussion are (unrelated to article): 1. If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as compe

Still not sure what to believe on this issue. Some points of discussion are (unrelated to article): 1. If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits? 2. Women are less likely to negotiate salary and assert themselves, as women in general are more agreeable than men. Is this behavior based in biology or is it social construct? 3. Women tend to choose lower paying jobs, such as teacher, caregiver etc. In general women tend to care about people, while men care about things (STEM). Again: biology or social construct? For example in Sweden, which is doing it's best to increase gender equality, sex differences between men and women maximized http://jamda.ub.gu.se/bitstream/1/833/1/scb_eng_2014.pdf http://jamda.ub.gu.se/bitstream/1/833/1/scb_eng_2014.pdf So perhaps occupation differences are healthy and natural. Of course, in Sweden engineers don't earn 300% more than teachers, so it's not a huge problem like in the USA. The logical solution would be to increase pay in women dominated professions. But this kind of thing spits in the face of capitalism. It's a tough problem to solve, and I still have no idea how to go about solving it. EDIT: Additional explanations

vkou 9y ago
Because outside of tech, there's a glut of trained, capable workers.
projectileboy 9y ago
Point (1) makes perfect sense, except that historically the answer has very clearly been "no", as it has applied to capable women, people of color, LGBTQ, etc. etc.
- cisanti 9y ago
  Source?
- dixie_land 9y ago
  the answer is yes if you simply look at how many Chinese and Indians there are for entry-level software engineering jobs. if the answer is "no" for women or any other particular group then it just proves the point of the article, i.e. there's barely a pay gap when factoring in exact job responsibilities.
  - ebola1717 9y ago
    > job responsibilities Job title* Which means that there is still a well-paying-job-title gap between the sexes
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
HIRED has a report out which reveals demographics on what the employees themselves ask for, and what employers offered them. It reveals, as in a piece of data that wasn't typically part of the conversation, that some groups ask for less to begin with while the employer offers them more. But this 'more' amount is still less than employees that asked for more than that to begin with. The average of black candidates, and women candidates, simply asked for less than the average of white male candidates. Got offered more, took the 'generous' offer and retroactively find out they are on the lower side of the pay gap, again on average. Much of the discussion seems to place a blame squarely on employers, describing a cabal of shadowy prejudiced men in the board room ensuring someone gets 30% less or 30% more just because. And I think that is not an entirely productive discussion, if all the reactionary HR training fails to find this while other aspects aren't even discussed at all.
- Quanttek 9y ago
  > Much of the discussion seems to place a blame squarely on employers, describing a cabal of shadowy prejudiced men in the board room ensuring someone gets 30% less or 30% more just because Nobody says that. It's the larger society, which also teaches black people and women to ask for less
  - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
    I think we agree that we should address it, but I have heard .... things. The understanding of this topic is a wide gradient, with lots of incomplete and incorrect information repeated by authoritative political figures including Presidents.
  - emsy 9y ago
    Genuine question: Where does that happen?
  - beaconstudios 9y ago
    it seems to me that if you spend all your time telling people they are oppressed, they'll believe you. There are certainly aspects of society that are unfair on women and racial minorities but hammering the idea of privilege and that as a person of group X you'll never be as successful as a white male you're just teaching people to accept and expect less.
Jare 9y ago
You don't see how all these surprising facts where people are doing things that go against their best interest, can be explained by irrational but strong forces such as sexism?
- oldboyFX 9y ago
  I understand, but blaming it on irrational sexism in the ether doesn't help us fix the problem. It's not an actionable piece of information.
  - swift 9y ago
    It's more actionable than you might think. Attitudes can be changed - by social pressure, through the media, and through education. And while legislation may not directly change attitudes, it can also help create pressures that reshape them indirectly.
    - the_gastropod 9y ago
      I think the parent's point is "sexism" (and most "isms") themselves aren't specific enough to be actionable. There are many beliefs and actions that can be classified as "sexist". These specific ideas may be corrected. But "sexism" is too vague to be addressed itself.
  - Jare 9y ago
    The first step is to understand that the problem does exist, even if it may not be apparent, or even if we can find other, simpler or more comfortable explanations. That's all my reply could hope for at best. There are many smarter and better people than me offering plenty of detailed analysis and paths to action.
bitexploder 9y ago
As mentioned elsewhere, doesn't this article sort of refute the idea that women don't negotiate salary well if their pay for the same rank/role is just 1% different than that of their male counterparts?
- disiplus 9y ago
  my wife does not know how to negotiate, multiple times have i said to her that she should fight for more, but she will not or does not know how to do it. but there is also another side. women that i have worked with have used social norms to ask for more. like in some conversation make a joke about how they deserve promotion and pay incrase, like hehe im such a great team member/worker i deserve a pay incrase, wink wink, and such comments multiple times. I never heard a man use this method. If its from a man then he asks to speak to you and directly says what he wants.
- ar-nelson 9y ago
  True, but it could support the idea that women don't negotiate for promotions as well or as often. Or that they are less likely to be promoted in general, for whatever reason. Whether the underlying reason is innate personality, socially-conditioned personality, or sexism, this seems like the simplest explanation for why the pay gap looks the way it does.
  - bitexploder 9y ago
    That definitely seems possible. I have also read some interesting stuff around how women tend to end up a few years behind their male counterparts due to child care, maternity leave, and them choosing not to take less demanding positions to spend more time with kids. There is a lot in there to unpack and you could still argue it is a societal discrimination thing (women are expected to do more child care duties), but that is not an argument supporting pay discrimination at a corporate level, but more of a societal shift that has to happen between child rearing partners. I don't know if this matches up with data and studies, but just logically, it is inevitable for a woman to have to take at least a little more time out than a man due to the biology of child birth and child rearing. I think all of this points to women not attaining the same rank/position as the key factor in gender differences, not a discriminatory pay gap.
Antrikshy 9y ago
Well, point (1) doesn't work because sexist capitalists who would be willing to pay women less would also probably think women do less work.
em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
1. "If women were 25% cheaper than men" That is not what the article said. 2. "women in general are more agreeable than men" ??? 3. "women tend to care about people while men care about things" ???
- oldboyFX 9y ago
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/ "For example, women are often found to be more agreeable than men (Feingold, 1994; Costa et al., 2001). This means that women, on average, are more nurturing, tender-minded, and altruistic more often and to a greater extent than men."
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    I won't speak to the veracity of that...I have no scientific knowledge on that. I wonder if part of the solution involves women understanding that if you want to look out for your self interest, then you don't need to be agreeable all the time.
- marksc 9y ago
  For #3 see 'Gender Differences in Personality and Interests: When, Where, and Why?'[1] The difference between being thing-oriented and people-oriented is larger than the things we think of as obvious gender differences like physical aggressiveness or attitudes toward casual sex. "For the people–things dimension of interests, the results in Table 1 are clear, strong, and unambiguous. Men tend to be much more thing-oriented and much less people-oriented than women (mean d = 1.18, a ‘very large’ difference, according to Hyde (2005) verbal designations" [1] http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x
swift 9y ago
When you say that women are "more agreeable" than men and "tend to care about people" more than men, you should consider that there is a social expectation that women have these qualities. You should also consider why the link between "lower paying jobs" and "jobs that women tend to choose" exists in the first place, and that "jobs that people of a certain gender tend to choose" is a self-reinforcing notion that limits your options no matter what your gender is. As for why capitalists don't trip over themselves to hire only women to increase their profits, well, what makes you think they don't, at least in industries where margins are low and there isn't a strong counteracting social force? Take a look at the gender ratio in the notoriously low-margin garment industry, for example. There has been a lot written on these topics, if you look around. You can learn a lot very quickly if you move beyond the realm of HN comments. =) That might make it easier to decide what to believe.
Quanttek 9y ago
> If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits? THis is not how it works. at all. There's not some cabal taht decided they should pay women less. Instead, the larger culture prootes behaviors and attitudes and devalues others that, as a consequence, lead to women getting paid less. Those are unconscious biases that influence hiring or promoting decisions. One example: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09585192.2015.1072100 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09585192.2015.107...
- deno 9y ago
  > I find it useful to adapt to other people, and I believe my cultural background is not as important in my work > I find it useful to be different than other people, I believe I can make use of my unique cultural background in my work So the recruiters in that study decided candidates that make an explicit issue of their ethnicity in their CL would not be the perfect fit for a team (they were asked to select for coherence). What a bunch of racists!
  - Quanttek 9y ago
    If you read the study they show that not only is their social/cultural fit assessed more negatively but also their pure performance assessment.
    - deno 9y ago
      The question is how would they fare against a control group of applicants with similarly suboptimal first impression to boot.
whiddershins 9y ago
It's interesting to consider that many of these lower paying jobs - such as teachers/caregivers are very hard to tie performance to profits. Therefore the market forces are different or nonexistent, who hires a $500,000/year rock star grade school teacher? Even if such a thing exists and has real impact.
- OJFord 9y ago
  I'd have thought that would be easier to do for teachers than for (the implicit comparison) software engineers.
  - sheepmullet 9y ago
    Not at all. As a parent I have limited choice in who my kids teachers are. Where I lived I didn't even get a choice of schools. But the market is clearly there - plenty of people here pay $25-$30k/year for private school. With a small class size of 10-15 students that's $250k-$450k/year. On top of that most people here pay maybe $10-$15k to schools via property tax. So that's another $100k-$150k.
    - OJFord 9y ago
      But that's a different issue, I replied to a comment about compensating performance. There are already metrics for teacher performance (at its crudest: What's the average grade going in and out of the teacher's class?) which could be used to determine salary. (And maybe it is in some places.)
rayiner 9y ago
> 3. Women tend to choose lower paying jobs, such as teacher, caregiver etc. In general women tend to care about people while men care about things (STEM). Again: biology or social construct Social construct. Look at Asian countries that by all accounts have less gender quality than the west but have more women science graduates. India is double the U.K. on that metric. The fact that Sweden has skewed representation doesn't capture what I call the "princesses and fairies" problem. Just because society doesn't explicitly discriminate against women doesn't mean that it's not telling women that they should be interested in princesses and fairies instead of legos. My daughter, four, is the only one of a few girls in the STEM programs I signed her up for at summer camp. This is entirely parents projecting gender norms onto their kids. My mom grew up in bangladesh in the 1960s. She majored in chemistry as did several of her sisters. The expectation was that an upper class woman would be educated so she could marry well, not for work. But the western gender norm about women being suited for certain professions doesn't exist.
- oldboyFX 9y ago
  I thought that Swedish kindergartens and schools make sure not to force gender roles on children. Isn't that a big thing in Sweden? Perhaps money is still a better motivator than gender equal society.
  - BinaryIdiot 9y ago
    > I thought that Swedish kindergartens and schools make sure not to force gender roles on children The problem is, even if they didn't do that what about parents who grew up thinking that and then project it on their kids? What about TV and other media consumption that shows stereotypical roles? It's hard to account for and eliminate all types of gender roles because many are more subtle and / or "normal" to most people who grew up with it. A quick anecdote: my daughter, who loves science and computers, was playing 'house' with her classmates in preschool when several children told her she had to play the role of mommy while they go out and work in this pretend scenario they created. This made my daughter think "I want to be a boy because girls can't have cool jobs". Those kids she was playing with weren't ever told this is how things had to be but they all had stay-at-home moms so they just assumed it was normal and how things are supposed to be. My wife is also a stay-at-home mom which likely helped reinforce it regardless of how much encouragement we both give our daughter. So everything influences kids. It's hard to control for all of these variables.
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soneca 9y ago
>1. If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits? I believe this is a very weird ponderation. The whole point is that capitalists don't do that because there is sexism among them. They are ignoring rational evidence because they have a preconceived idea that women are worse employees. If capitalists were actually these rational straw man devoided of human flaws, we wouldn't have sexism at all. So this line of thinking is basically saying: if there wasnt sexism we wouldn't have sexism. A more practical way of making my point. In past decades black athletes werent admitted in competitive sports teams. Would you say that you believe that wasnt racism because if it was, team owners would be tripping themselves to hire talented black athletes that were being ignored by most teams? No, they werent because they were racists. It took a lot of civil right activism to give black athletes the same access to sports jobs as white athletes. And today we know for a fact that black athletes werent worse athletes back then. Why are today employers more enlightened that past team owners?
- oldboyFX 9y ago
  Great point!
- deno 9y ago
  And your model only requires that all men are equally sexist. There are, believe it or not, women entrepreneurs (and btw the very conservative Poland is leading the rankings[1]), so even if all male employers were in fact equally sexist, that would just mean female-led companies would out-compete them. [1] http://wbj.pl/poland-high-in-global-women-entrepreneur-leaders-scorecard/ http://wbj.pl/poland-high-in-global-women-entrepreneur-leade...
  - civilian 9y ago
    As long as we're playing with thought-experiments, soneca could just say: "oh no, women have internalize misogyny too". Which is kind of backed up by research? (I remember reading an article about how female Principal Investigators tended to be biased against female grad student applicants? Couldn't find it in a few minutes of googling.) But you're right, there should be _some_ data-driven company with an analyst that would say something like: "Oh hey. We're getting as much productivity out of men and women, but the women are cheaper. Let's keep one guy on to manage and interrupt them and fire the rest."
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twobyfour 9y ago
Do women choose jobs that are lower paying? Or do we pay less for careers that are female-dominated? There are some observations (sorry, don't have the links right now) that typical salaries for careers such as teaching and primary care medicine have decreased as they've transitioned from being male-dominated to female-dominated.
- sheepmullet 9y ago
  > There are some observations (sorry, don't have the links right now) that typical salaries for careers such as teaching and primary care medicine have decreased as they've transitioned from being male-dominated to female-dominated. Of course. What did you think would happen when a field gets an oversupply of new employees who aren't pay-sensitive? As an aside why do you think big tech companies are pushing for more women in tech? Because nerds and women don't focus on pay as much as men in general do.
siliconc0w 9y ago
"The logical solution would be to increase pay in women dominated professions. But this kind of thing spits in the face of capitalism." The problem is that "thing" work often scales better than linearly while "people" work does not. You can't really socially engineer yourself out of that reality.
rhizome 9y ago
If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits? Invert this: what explains capitalists paying women 25% less for the same skills? Why aren't the salaries of men decreased in light of actual proof that the work can be done for less?
- OJFord 9y ago
  That's not an inversion, it's the same point: apparently it can't.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    Either I don't understand or I disagree. GP's point was not that a true capitalist would reduce the overall compensation.
    - OJFord 9y ago
      The point GGP is making is that the difference does exist, but wouldn't if the same job was being done; therefore it is not.
      - rhizome 9y ago
        Their point is that women wouldn't be getting paid 25% less if they actually were as good as the men, that they aren't doing "the same job?" That's the only interpretation I can think of that supports the explanation.
belorn 9y ago
I currently find an explanation based on incentives to be best in resolving why there is gender segregation in the work place and a strong correlation to pay grades. The way women selects men is heavily weighted towards how much the man earns. According to dating statistics from dating sites, its the biggest single strongest attribute to predict if a message sent from a man will give positive response. This can also be seen in surveys around the globe, like one which said that 90% of women in china would not consider dating a man who earn less than the median income. So if this incentive based explanation is true, lets make some test by making some predictions. If its true then we should see that boys during adolescence think in a higher rate than girls about selecting a profession based on earning potential. We should also see a higher number of young non-married men around the age of 20 trying to enter the work force as early as possible in order to improve their own status and impress the opposite sex. Those men should be more eager to get higher wages and attempt more risky ventures in order to compete with other men. The need and risk taking for higher wages would be correlated to how much other peers of the same sex earn in their perceived environment. Increase pay in women dominated professions would lower the earning difference, but it would not change the incentives. In order to get that we would need to change our culture so that either women stopped prioritizing earning when selecting a mate, in which men would loose that incentive, or men need to prioritizing earning when selecting a mate, in which women would get that incentive applied on them.
- solidsnack9000 9y ago
  It doesn't take much to see adverse selection at work, here. Men who accept lower salaries -- as salary equality more or less requires, during a certain interim period -- will disproportionately find themselves without mates, esteem, &c. Their influence will be correspondingly less. The men who figure out how to maintain higher salaries -- relative to other men, and to women -- will be the ones who most shape the communities they are a part of.
- rad88 9y ago
  > 90% of women in china would not consider dating a man who earn less than the median income. 4/5 women in China are married by age 30. By ages 35-39 only 4.6% are unmarried. I guess eventually they all settle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_nu#Culture_and_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_nu#Culture_and_statistic...
forapurpose 9y ago
> Women are less likely to negotiate salary and assert themselves, as women in general are more agreeable than men. Is this behavior based in biology or is it social construct? Something to consider, though I can't back it up: Perhaps the whole method of determining salary, the negotiation process, is a social construct. I mean, it is a social construct almost by definition, but maybe that process, and many other constructs of the business world, are creations of an era when business was populated by men and when therefore the processes and customs naturally were based on the way men interact. Sometimes I try to think of it this way: If the business world had been populated only by women for generations, and if men were now trying to break in, how would things be different? Perhaps an aggressive negotiating style would be unprofessional, and people would say that men don't get equal salaries not because of discrimination, but because they don't represent themselves well.
lkbm 9y ago
> 1. If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits? Here's another claim I've heard many times and never seen refuted (or even challenged): Tall men are paid more than short men (extending into non-physical work such as programming.) A company that recognizes this should hire a bunch of short programmers at a discount and trounce their competition...but they don't. I'd suggest these factors: 1. Despite the fact that short men get paid less, you can't just take a tall candidate, find a shorter one with equivalent skills, and hire him at a discount. Finding and identifying the optimal fit for a job is already beyond our abilities--adding in this extra restriction just isn't feasible. 2. This bias isn't an explicit bias like "I hate short people". It's a subconscious "I feel better about this candidate". Our decisions are based on black box gut feelings, so offsetting our subconscious bias is extremely difficult. 3. Tall men might actually be more effective in programming jobs, simply because we afford them higher status as a society--that adds value in a job that involves working with other people...such as programming. Suppose 3 is true--I suspect it is. Even if I overcome my bias and hiring challenges to get past 1 and 2, 3 means the rational thing for me to do when hiring is to pay the extra for tall programmers, because in our society, they'll perform better. But an alternative universe where no one has this bias in the first place will result result in a more optimal allocation of resources. There are times where you can get an advantage by overcoming a bias others experience, but there are times where you can't and the only fix is to fix society at large. (Maybe I can just fix that bias in every one of my employees, but limiting myself to the small set of people who lack a pervasive bias means reducing my talent pool--probably so much that it offsets the competitive gain I get.)
- BurningFrog 9y ago
  The advantages of tall people (not just men) has been researched. The research doesn't confirm your assumptions very well. Part of the reason they get paid more is that they actually are smarter and healthier. Height correlates with good health and a well nutritioned childhood. More detail here: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-financial-perks-of-being-tall/393518/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-fin...
sheepmullet 9y ago
> 1. If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits? Spot on. Decades of outsourcing should have convinced everyone that businesses are not out to help the working class white man. Profits above all.
Powerofmene 9y ago
No they will not trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits. Remember, women take maternity leave; they must stay home when the kids are sick; etc. If they had a workforce of women then men I have worked with in the past would talk about the lack of stability in that workforce because of the extended leave time that women take that men do not typically require and or utilize. Further women choose teachers, based on a number of studies, because they want to be home in the summer with their children and because they want to nurture. The one thing that most school systems do that is go is they have a pay matrix that determines pay on a step system where education and years of experience determine your pay scale and gender is not a factor. The downside to this pay system is that high performers make the same as sub par performers.

vkou 9y ago

Because outside of tech, there's a glut of trained, capable workers.

projectileboy 9y ago

Point (1) makes perfect sense, except that historically the answer has very clearly been "no", as it has applied to capable women, people of color, LGBTQ, etc. etc.

cisanti 9y ago
Source?
dixie_land 9y ago
the answer is yes if you simply look at how many Chinese and Indians there are for entry-level software engineering jobs. if the answer is "no" for women or any other particular group then it just proves the point of the article, i.e. there's barely a pay gap when factoring in exact job responsibilities.
- ebola1717 9y ago
  > job responsibilities Job title* Which means that there is still a well-paying-job-title gap between the sexes

ringaroundthetx 9y ago

HIRED has a report out which reveals demographics on what the employees themselves ask for, and what employers offered them. It reveals, as in a piece of data that wasn't typically part of the conversation, that some groups ask for less to begin with while the employer offers them more. But this 'more' amount is still less than employees that asked for more than that to begin with. The average of black candidates, and women candidates, simply asked for less than the average of white male candidates. Got offered more, took the 'generous' offer and retroactively find out they are on the lower side of the pay gap, again on average. Much of the discussion seems to place a blame squarely on employers, describing a cabal of shadowy prejudiced men in the board room ensuring someone gets 30% less or 30% more just because. And I think that is not an entirely productive discussion, if all the reactionary HR training fails to find this while other aspects aren't even discussed at all.

Quanttek 9y ago
> Much of the discussion seems to place a blame squarely on employers, describing a cabal of shadowy prejudiced men in the board room ensuring someone gets 30% less or 30% more just because Nobody says that. It's the larger society, which also teaches black people and women to ask for less
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  I think we agree that we should address it, but I have heard .... things. The understanding of this topic is a wide gradient, with lots of incomplete and incorrect information repeated by authoritative political figures including Presidents.
- emsy 9y ago
  Genuine question: Where does that happen?
- beaconstudios 9y ago
  it seems to me that if you spend all your time telling people they are oppressed, they'll believe you. There are certainly aspects of society that are unfair on women and racial minorities but hammering the idea of privilege and that as a person of group X you'll never be as successful as a white male you're just teaching people to accept and expect less.

Jare 9y ago

You don't see how all these surprising facts where people are doing things that go against their best interest, can be explained by irrational but strong forces such as sexism?

oldboyFX 9y ago
I understand, but blaming it on irrational sexism in the ether doesn't help us fix the problem. It's not an actionable piece of information.
- swift 9y ago
  It's more actionable than you might think. Attitudes can be changed - by social pressure, through the media, and through education. And while legislation may not directly change attitudes, it can also help create pressures that reshape them indirectly.
  - the_gastropod 9y ago
    I think the parent's point is "sexism" (and most "isms") themselves aren't specific enough to be actionable. There are many beliefs and actions that can be classified as "sexist". These specific ideas may be corrected. But "sexism" is too vague to be addressed itself.
- Jare 9y ago
  The first step is to understand that the problem does exist, even if it may not be apparent, or even if we can find other, simpler or more comfortable explanations. That's all my reply could hope for at best. There are many smarter and better people than me offering plenty of detailed analysis and paths to action.

bitexploder 9y ago

As mentioned elsewhere, doesn't this article sort of refute the idea that women don't negotiate salary well if their pay for the same rank/role is just 1% different than that of their male counterparts?

disiplus 9y ago
my wife does not know how to negotiate, multiple times have i said to her that she should fight for more, but she will not or does not know how to do it. but there is also another side. women that i have worked with have used social norms to ask for more. like in some conversation make a joke about how they deserve promotion and pay incrase, like hehe im such a great team member/worker i deserve a pay incrase, wink wink, and such comments multiple times. I never heard a man use this method. If its from a man then he asks to speak to you and directly says what he wants.
ar-nelson 9y ago
True, but it could support the idea that women don't negotiate for promotions as well or as often. Or that they are less likely to be promoted in general, for whatever reason. Whether the underlying reason is innate personality, socially-conditioned personality, or sexism, this seems like the simplest explanation for why the pay gap looks the way it does.
- bitexploder 9y ago
  That definitely seems possible. I have also read some interesting stuff around how women tend to end up a few years behind their male counterparts due to child care, maternity leave, and them choosing not to take less demanding positions to spend more time with kids. There is a lot in there to unpack and you could still argue it is a societal discrimination thing (women are expected to do more child care duties), but that is not an argument supporting pay discrimination at a corporate level, but more of a societal shift that has to happen between child rearing partners. I don't know if this matches up with data and studies, but just logically, it is inevitable for a woman to have to take at least a little more time out than a man due to the biology of child birth and child rearing. I think all of this points to women not attaining the same rank/position as the key factor in gender differences, not a discriminatory pay gap.

Antrikshy 9y ago

Well, point (1) doesn't work because sexist capitalists who would be willing to pay women less would also probably think women do less work.

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago

1. "If women were 25% cheaper than men" That is not what the article said. 2. "women in general are more agreeable than men" ??? 3. "women tend to care about people while men care about things" ???

oldboyFX 9y ago
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/ "For example, women are often found to be more agreeable than men (Feingold, 1994; Costa et al., 2001). This means that women, on average, are more nurturing, tender-minded, and altruistic more often and to a greater extent than men."
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  I won't speak to the veracity of that...I have no scientific knowledge on that. I wonder if part of the solution involves women understanding that if you want to look out for your self interest, then you don't need to be agreeable all the time.
marksc 9y ago
For #3 see 'Gender Differences in Personality and Interests: When, Where, and Why?'[1] The difference between being thing-oriented and people-oriented is larger than the things we think of as obvious gender differences like physical aggressiveness or attitudes toward casual sex. "For the people–things dimension of interests, the results in Table 1 are clear, strong, and unambiguous. Men tend to be much more thing-oriented and much less people-oriented than women (mean d = 1.18, a ‘very large’ difference, according to Hyde (2005) verbal designations" [1] http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x http://sci-hub.cc/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00320.x

swift 9y ago

When you say that women are "more agreeable" than men and "tend to care about people" more than men, you should consider that there is a social expectation that women have these qualities. You should also consider why the link between "lower paying jobs" and "jobs that women tend to choose" exists in the first place, and that "jobs that people of a certain gender tend to choose" is a self-reinforcing notion that limits your options no matter what your gender is. As for why capitalists don't trip over themselves to hire only women to increase their profits, well, what makes you think they don't, at least in industries where margins are low and there isn't a strong counteracting social force? Take a look at the gender ratio in the notoriously low-margin garment industry, for example. There has been a lot written on these topics, if you look around. You can learn a lot very quickly if you move beyond the realm of HN comments. =) That might make it easier to decide what to believe.

Quanttek 9y ago

> If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits? THis is not how it works. at all. There's not some cabal taht decided they should pay women less. Instead, the larger culture prootes behaviors and attitudes and devalues others that, as a consequence, lead to women getting paid less. Those are unconscious biases that influence hiring or promoting decisions. One example: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09585192.2015.1072100 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09585192.2015.107...

deno 9y ago
> I find it useful to adapt to other people, and I believe my cultural background is not as important in my work > I find it useful to be different than other people, I believe I can make use of my unique cultural background in my work So the recruiters in that study decided candidates that make an explicit issue of their ethnicity in their CL would not be the perfect fit for a team (they were asked to select for coherence). What a bunch of racists!
- Quanttek 9y ago
  If you read the study they show that not only is their social/cultural fit assessed more negatively but also their pure performance assessment.
  - deno 9y ago
    The question is how would they fare against a control group of applicants with similarly suboptimal first impression to boot.

whiddershins 9y ago

It's interesting to consider that many of these lower paying jobs - such as teachers/caregivers are very hard to tie performance to profits. Therefore the market forces are different or nonexistent, who hires a $500,000/year rock star grade school teacher? Even if such a thing exists and has real impact.

OJFord 9y ago
I'd have thought that would be easier to do for teachers than for (the implicit comparison) software engineers.
- sheepmullet 9y ago
  Not at all. As a parent I have limited choice in who my kids teachers are. Where I lived I didn't even get a choice of schools. But the market is clearly there - plenty of people here pay $25-$30k/year for private school. With a small class size of 10-15 students that's $250k-$450k/year. On top of that most people here pay maybe $10-$15k to schools via property tax. So that's another $100k-$150k.
  - OJFord 9y ago
    But that's a different issue, I replied to a comment about compensating performance. There are already metrics for teacher performance (at its crudest: What's the average grade going in and out of the teacher's class?) which could be used to determine salary. (And maybe it is in some places.)

rayiner 9y ago

> 3. Women tend to choose lower paying jobs, such as teacher, caregiver etc. In general women tend to care about people while men care about things (STEM). Again: biology or social construct Social construct. Look at Asian countries that by all accounts have less gender quality than the west but have more women science graduates. India is double the U.K. on that metric. The fact that Sweden has skewed representation doesn't capture what I call the "princesses and fairies" problem. Just because society doesn't explicitly discriminate against women doesn't mean that it's not telling women that they should be interested in princesses and fairies instead of legos. My daughter, four, is the only one of a few girls in the STEM programs I signed her up for at summer camp. This is entirely parents projecting gender norms onto their kids. My mom grew up in bangladesh in the 1960s. She majored in chemistry as did several of her sisters. The expectation was that an upper class woman would be educated so she could marry well, not for work. But the western gender norm about women being suited for certain professions doesn't exist.

oldboyFX 9y ago
I thought that Swedish kindergartens and schools make sure not to force gender roles on children. Isn't that a big thing in Sweden? Perhaps money is still a better motivator than gender equal society.
- BinaryIdiot 9y ago
  > I thought that Swedish kindergartens and schools make sure not to force gender roles on children The problem is, even if they didn't do that what about parents who grew up thinking that and then project it on their kids? What about TV and other media consumption that shows stereotypical roles? It's hard to account for and eliminate all types of gender roles because many are more subtle and / or "normal" to most people who grew up with it. A quick anecdote: my daughter, who loves science and computers, was playing 'house' with her classmates in preschool when several children told her she had to play the role of mommy while they go out and work in this pretend scenario they created. This made my daughter think "I want to be a boy because girls can't have cool jobs". Those kids she was playing with weren't ever told this is how things had to be but they all had stay-at-home moms so they just assumed it was normal and how things are supposed to be. My wife is also a stay-at-home mom which likely helped reinforce it regardless of how much encouragement we both give our daughter. So everything influences kids. It's hard to control for all of these variables.

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soneca 9y ago

>1. If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits? I believe this is a very weird ponderation. The whole point is that capitalists don't do that because there is sexism among them. They are ignoring rational evidence because they have a preconceived idea that women are worse employees. If capitalists were actually these rational straw man devoided of human flaws, we wouldn't have sexism at all. So this line of thinking is basically saying: if there wasnt sexism we wouldn't have sexism. A more practical way of making my point. In past decades black athletes werent admitted in competitive sports teams. Would you say that you believe that wasnt racism because if it was, team owners would be tripping themselves to hire talented black athletes that were being ignored by most teams? No, they werent because they were racists. It took a lot of civil right activism to give black athletes the same access to sports jobs as white athletes. And today we know for a fact that black athletes werent worse athletes back then. Why are today employers more enlightened that past team owners?

oldboyFX 9y ago
Great point!
deno 9y ago
And your model only requires that all men are equally sexist. There are, believe it or not, women entrepreneurs (and btw the very conservative Poland is leading the rankings[1]), so even if all male employers were in fact equally sexist, that would just mean female-led companies would out-compete them. [1] http://wbj.pl/poland-high-in-global-women-entrepreneur-leaders-scorecard/ http://wbj.pl/poland-high-in-global-women-entrepreneur-leade...
- civilian 9y ago
  As long as we're playing with thought-experiments, soneca could just say: "oh no, women have internalize misogyny too". Which is kind of backed up by research? (I remember reading an article about how female Principal Investigators tended to be biased against female grad student applicants? Couldn't find it in a few minutes of googling.) But you're right, there should be _some_ data-driven company with an analyst that would say something like: "Oh hey. We're getting as much productivity out of men and women, but the women are cheaper. Let's keep one guy on to manage and interrupt them and fire the rest."

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twobyfour 9y ago

Do women choose jobs that are lower paying? Or do we pay less for careers that are female-dominated? There are some observations (sorry, don't have the links right now) that typical salaries for careers such as teaching and primary care medicine have decreased as they've transitioned from being male-dominated to female-dominated.

sheepmullet 9y ago
> There are some observations (sorry, don't have the links right now) that typical salaries for careers such as teaching and primary care medicine have decreased as they've transitioned from being male-dominated to female-dominated. Of course. What did you think would happen when a field gets an oversupply of new employees who aren't pay-sensitive? As an aside why do you think big tech companies are pushing for more women in tech? Because nerds and women don't focus on pay as much as men in general do.

siliconc0w 9y ago

"The logical solution would be to increase pay in women dominated professions. But this kind of thing spits in the face of capitalism." The problem is that "thing" work often scales better than linearly while "people" work does not. You can't really socially engineer yourself out of that reality.

rhizome 9y ago

If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits? Invert this: what explains capitalists paying women 25% less for the same skills? Why aren't the salaries of men decreased in light of actual proof that the work can be done for less?

OJFord 9y ago
That's not an inversion, it's the same point: apparently it can't.
- rhizome 9y ago
  Either I don't understand or I disagree. GP's point was not that a true capitalist would reduce the overall compensation.
  - OJFord 9y ago
    The point GGP is making is that the difference does exist, but wouldn't if the same job was being done; therefore it is not.
    - rhizome 9y ago
      Their point is that women wouldn't be getting paid 25% less if they actually were as good as the men, that they aren't doing "the same job?" That's the only interpretation I can think of that supports the explanation.

belorn 9y ago

I currently find an explanation based on incentives to be best in resolving why there is gender segregation in the work place and a strong correlation to pay grades. The way women selects men is heavily weighted towards how much the man earns. According to dating statistics from dating sites, its the biggest single strongest attribute to predict if a message sent from a man will give positive response. This can also be seen in surveys around the globe, like one which said that 90% of women in china would not consider dating a man who earn less than the median income. So if this incentive based explanation is true, lets make some test by making some predictions. If its true then we should see that boys during adolescence think in a higher rate than girls about selecting a profession based on earning potential. We should also see a higher number of young non-married men around the age of 20 trying to enter the work force as early as possible in order to improve their own status and impress the opposite sex. Those men should be more eager to get higher wages and attempt more risky ventures in order to compete with other men. The need and risk taking for higher wages would be correlated to how much other peers of the same sex earn in their perceived environment. Increase pay in women dominated professions would lower the earning difference, but it would not change the incentives. In order to get that we would need to change our culture so that either women stopped prioritizing earning when selecting a mate, in which men would loose that incentive, or men need to prioritizing earning when selecting a mate, in which women would get that incentive applied on them.

solidsnack9000 9y ago
It doesn't take much to see adverse selection at work, here. Men who accept lower salaries -- as salary equality more or less requires, during a certain interim period -- will disproportionately find themselves without mates, esteem, &c. Their influence will be correspondingly less. The men who figure out how to maintain higher salaries -- relative to other men, and to women -- will be the ones who most shape the communities they are a part of.
rad88 9y ago
> 90% of women in china would not consider dating a man who earn less than the median income. 4/5 women in China are married by age 30. By ages 35-39 only 4.6% are unmarried. I guess eventually they all settle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_nu#Culture_and_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_nu#Culture_and_statistic...

forapurpose 9y ago

> Women are less likely to negotiate salary and assert themselves, as women in general are more agreeable than men. Is this behavior based in biology or is it social construct? Something to consider, though I can't back it up: Perhaps the whole method of determining salary, the negotiation process, is a social construct. I mean, it is a social construct almost by definition, but maybe that process, and many other constructs of the business world, are creations of an era when business was populated by men and when therefore the processes and customs naturally were based on the way men interact. Sometimes I try to think of it this way: If the business world had been populated only by women for generations, and if men were now trying to break in, how would things be different? Perhaps an aggressive negotiating style would be unprofessional, and people would say that men don't get equal salaries not because of discrimination, but because they don't represent themselves well.

lkbm 9y ago

> 1. If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits? Here's another claim I've heard many times and never seen refuted (or even challenged): Tall men are paid more than short men (extending into non-physical work such as programming.) A company that recognizes this should hire a bunch of short programmers at a discount and trounce their competition...but they don't. I'd suggest these factors: 1. Despite the fact that short men get paid less, you can't just take a tall candidate, find a shorter one with equivalent skills, and hire him at a discount. Finding and identifying the optimal fit for a job is already beyond our abilities--adding in this extra restriction just isn't feasible. 2. This bias isn't an explicit bias like "I hate short people". It's a subconscious "I feel better about this candidate". Our decisions are based on black box gut feelings, so offsetting our subconscious bias is extremely difficult. 3. Tall men might actually be more effective in programming jobs, simply because we afford them higher status as a society--that adds value in a job that involves working with other people...such as programming. Suppose 3 is true--I suspect it is. Even if I overcome my bias and hiring challenges to get past 1 and 2, 3 means the rational thing for me to do when hiring is to pay the extra for tall programmers, because in our society, they'll perform better. But an alternative universe where no one has this bias in the first place will result result in a more optimal allocation of resources. There are times where you can get an advantage by overcoming a bias others experience, but there are times where you can't and the only fix is to fix society at large. (Maybe I can just fix that bias in every one of my employees, but limiting myself to the small set of people who lack a pervasive bias means reducing my talent pool--probably so much that it offsets the competitive gain I get.)

BurningFrog 9y ago
The advantages of tall people (not just men) has been researched. The research doesn't confirm your assumptions very well. Part of the reason they get paid more is that they actually are smarter and healthier. Height correlates with good health and a well nutritioned childhood. More detail here: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-financial-perks-of-being-tall/393518/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/the-fin...

sheepmullet 9y ago

> 1. If women were 25% cheaper than men while being as competent, wouldn't white/male capitalists trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits? Spot on. Decades of outsourcing should have convinced everyone that businesses are not out to help the working class white man. Profits above all.

Powerofmene 9y ago

No they will not trip over themselves to only hire women to increase their profits. Remember, women take maternity leave; they must stay home when the kids are sick; etc. If they had a workforce of women then men I have worked with in the past would talk about the lack of stability in that workforce because of the extended leave time that women take that men do not typically require and or utilize. Further women choose teachers, based on a number of studies, because they want to be home in the summer with their children and because they want to nurture. The one thing that most school systems do that is go is they have a pay matrix that determines pay on a step system where education and years of experience determine your pay scale and gender is not a factor. The downside to this pay system is that high performers make the same as sub par performers.