9 ms·

If talented women are being overlooked just because they are women, doesn't it make sense to seek them out and give them an opportunity to reach their potential

• devereaux 9y ago
  Opposite side of the argument - why would this overlooked talent bother to work for someone else (and luck out, or not)? Also, you may hire based on talent, but still at a discount. Just because you can, and it is profit maximizing! Personally, I'd rather keep the profits of my extra productivity for myself.
  • AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    Not everybody wants to be in business for themselves.
• oh_sigh 9y ago
  Yes, absolutely. Just like, if women actually made only 77 cents for every dollar an equivalent man would make, then wouldn't it make sense to start labor intensive businesses and staff them with only women? Split the difference, pay them 89 cents on the dollar, and then have a competitive advantage because you are saving 11% on your labor costs. Of course, no one has actually done this. Why is that? Perhaps we are starting from the wrong assumptions, and there is no appreciable pay gap between equivalently qualified applicants based on gender?
  • dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Of course, no one has actually done this. Why is that? Because the "staff them with only women" part is bright-line illegal, and because if you try to disproportionately attract women by being known for offering sub-scale salaries on the premise that men, with better average alternatives, will just not bother with you, then women won't either, because they'll assume that they'll also get lower salary than they would elsewhere.
    • oh_sigh 9y ago
      Well, the goal isn't to only hire women - you really just want moneyball employees, and since women are discriminated against(per the initial assertion), they will naturally be the ones attracted to it. Simply offer 89 cents salary for whatever field it is in, and naturally most of the qualified applicants will be women(because what man is going to take an 11 cent pay cut, and what woman wouldn't take a 12 cent pay raise?)
      • dragonwriter 9y ago
        > Simply offer 89 cents salary for whatever field it is in, and naturally most of the qualified applicants will be women No, because if there is pervasive wage discrimination in the industry, then women will already be factoring that known discrepancy in when reading job listings and claimed salary ranges. They'll just assume that you are paying 89% of the average pay in the industry, with the usual 23% discount for being female.
        • oh_sigh 9y ago
          So you're saying that when women read a job description that says the salary is $100k, they actually assume it will only be $77k?
          • dragonwriter 9y ago
            I'm not saying the 77% thing is accurate. I'm saying that if it was accurate in the sense your proposal tries to exploit (and, which you seek to suggest disproves the 77% thing because no one has done it), the natural consequence would be women discounting claimed salary ranges that way, since that would be both the learned experience of working women and the transferred knowledge from them to career-entering women, and that this would render the exploit non-functional. You'd need a way to signal that this is the actual salary women would get, and also the actual salary men would get, and get that message believed in a world where everyone else was claiming to offer equal salary for equal work while paying women 23% less.
  • deleted 9y ago
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  • entee 9y ago
    Also perhaps because pay gaps tend to be much more subtle and propagate themselves through similarly subtle mechanisms s opposed to, "we pay men more than women!" policies. Doesn't make them less real or deleterious, but does make them harder to get rid of.
    • mistermann 9y ago
      Does it make them harder to detect?
      • InitialLastName 9y ago
        Yes. See the arguments above and surrounding this discussion about things like "how big is the pay gap, actually" and "what metric do we even use to define the pay gap".
        • mistermann 9y ago
          There are two distinct opinions on this "fact" of unequal pay, I was curious to know if a person who noted subtlety in discrimination also had difficulty identifying cases of it - in my experience, typically there's no difficulty whatsoever in them seeing it, only in them being able to get others to see what they see so clearly. A wise person would just stay out of these discussions. ;)
  • jonshariat 9y ago
    Actually reminds me of many practices in the industrial age. Women and children were cheaper.
    • hiram112 9y ago
      Most of the jobs in the industrial age were powered by human labor. Women and children are weaker, and thus, would tend to earn less. Old men probably didn't earn as much as the 20 year olds at the shipyard or meat packing plant, either.
  • ohyes 9y ago
    Your statement indicates you don’t understand the issue; women make less money than men overall. It’s not about same job pay (4% difference there), it’s about the glass ceiling. Women are less likely to get promoted to higher paying positions and because of that are defacto less qualified. So there can be an unfair pay gap without an obvious arbitrage situation.
    • oh_sigh 9y ago
      If you have a woman who is a level X, and the only reason that she isn't at X+1 is because she is a woman, then hiring her would be a great opportunity if your company doesn't have a glass ceiling. And I do understand the issue - at least more than you give me credit for. If you see in my original post, I explicitly mention that these people are equivalently qualified. People abuse the 77 cents on the dollar figure to say that equivalent employees get paid less if they are women, which is what I was trying to call out with my post.
      • ohyes 9y ago
        In that case I agree, the initial hypothetical is wrong because it isn't about same job/position pay, it is about likelihood to get promoted to a higher paying position. It is about women being stuck in the same position, while men are more likely to get to the next level. From my reading of your post, it appeared you were arguing that the pay gap wasn't a thing at all. It is a common talking point, which is the reason for my (and maybe others) confusion. Anyway it seems it was a bad reading on my part. Unfortunately, the language we're using is a bit too loose to be accurate. Equivalently qualified isn't a stand in for equivalently competent. If women are less likely to get promoted, they therefore are less likely to have as many qualifications as men. This is an externality you would have to deal with, it would lead you to actually pick less qualified women to hire into promotions because there's a higher chance that they were passed over in favor of a man.
      • baddox 9y ago
        > If you have a woman who is a level X, and the only reason that she isn't at X+1 is because she is a woman, then hiring her would be a great opportunity if your company doesn't have a glass ceiling. Uhh, yes, but your company probably does have a glass ceiling even if you are unaware of it and don’t want it.
  • deleted 9y ago
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  • TheHegemon 9y ago
    Probably because women make pretty much the same (within around 7%) for the same work: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-can-uber-teach-us-about-the-gender-pay-gap/ http://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-can-uber-teach-us-about... ?
  • zappo2938 9y ago
    It is interesting that if a firm hires a woman and she can't get hired at another firm because they have sexist hiring practices, she will not have leverage to negotiate a higher salary at either firm. In terms of pure market forces, it makes sense for firms to seek out women like in this article. They get more talented employees and they get to pay them less, not because they are sexist, but because of market forces with their competition being sexist. (Please note I'm talking about this purely objective. I want a world where women get equal pay for equal work.) Of course, it is a monkey see monkey do world so once hiring women gains traction and companies that do are more competitive than those that don't, their salaries will equalize.
  • hiram112 9y ago
    The pay gap has been debunked for over a decade by numerous studies. It is hardly even discussed anymore by higher level academics, though obviously this doesn't stop the undergrads, politicians, and mass media from still spewing the false statistics. The ultimate goal is to allow women to take months or years off but still be pushed upward the same as men who do not take time off, while also subsidizing services used disproportionately by women: universal healthcare, paid daycare, job subsidies and government admin jobs, quotas on senior positions, massive equalization of salaries, free graduate level education, etc. Look to Scandinavia for a clue on what feminism wants to bring to the US. While Norwegians certainly enjoy great healthcare, have you ever seen any competing startups offering SV or London salaries in Oslo? Guess why? Software engineers don't make a whole lot more than the HR employee or day care workers, especially once taxes are taken into consideration. From the article, here is the money line: Gusto also addressed its compensation policy. Since 2016 its salaries have been audited by Mercer, a human resources consulting firm, which has found no gender pay disparity. Benefits include 16 weeks of paid leave for a primary parent, plus an additional $100 a week for groceries and food deliveries, $100 a month for six months of housecleaning and up to $500 for a baby-sleep coach. How many men do you think are the primary parent at most jobs? They also claim that 16 weeks of paid vacation given to some employees, but not others, means NO gender pay disparity.
• ralusek 9y ago
  The problem is that the situation you just described is a fiction. Most engineering divisions hire on talent, irrespective of gender, so the talented woman would have been hired over the mediocre man by the system which pays no attention to gender at all.
  • baddox 9y ago
    Perhaps so. But perhaps the talented woman also experienced a hostile or otherwise undesirable work environment and leaves after a short period of time. Or leaves the industry altogether.
    • zappo2938 9y ago
      A Baby Bell utilities company lost a court case in the 60s which requires them to hire women in the field. Their argument was that women can't handle the heavy tools. After losing they purchased aluminum ladders to replace the heavy wooden ladders and wrenches with longer handles so they had more leverage being easier to use. A reporter interviewed some of the men about the changes and asked what they thought. One man replied, "Everything is so much easier now. I wish we did this a long time ago." Edit: I heard this story in the 80s when I was a kid. It may be real or not, but the point is the same. I'm still looking for the FWD: FWD: FWD: but I've never heard it again since the mid 80s.
      • dragonwriter 9y ago
        > A Baby Bell utilities company lost a court case in the 60s No it didn't; the Baby Bells were created by the 1984 breakup of AT&T. EDIT: As a sibling post provides details, the error was calling it a "Baby Bell"; the essence of the story, at least the lawsuit itself, is true, but Southern Bell was a pre-breakup Bell Operating Company (an AT&T subsidiary), not a post-breakup Baby Bell. [Errors like pointing to a Baby Bell 20ish years before they existed are often, but as this incident shows not always, signs of folk mythology.]
      • Gargoyle 9y ago
        The case was real, dunno about the new tools part. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorena_Weeks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorena_Weeks