5 ms·

The Gap Table: Analyzing the gender gap in equity

32 points by Varcht 8y ago

BillinghamJ 8y ago
They're often proportional to salary, so this isn't exactly a surprise...
- sjbp 8y ago
  Equity is not proportional to salary. Perhaps only after you control for "time-to-join", andwhether you are a founder/investor/employee, but definitely not without that. On another note, there's something about a disparity on ownership and %founders that seems more profound than the salary IMO (with the caveat that it is hard to study this controlling for the right things).
  - BillinghamJ 8y ago
    Actually it often is when allocating options by value etc. Bear in mind, I didn't say that it always is.
aliston 8y ago
This study is meaningless without more data to make it an apples to apples comparison. There is no pay gap if you control for occupation and experience. Similarly, my guess is this supposed equity gap would disappear if you control for these factors. The section on founders is interesting, but by making the comparison about the calculated monetary value rather than the equity percentage and without looking at possible differences in the types of companies and associated valuations, it’s also not very meaningful.
- slg 8y ago
  >There is no pay gap if you control for occupation and experience. The old 75-80 cents on the dollar wage gap that some people still cite (including this article) drops drastically once correcting for occupation and experience, but women still earn less then men even when doing the same job at the same company. You can click through the link in the article to get that data. [1] [1] - https://hired.com/wage-inequality-report https://hired.com/wage-inequality-report
  - doctorpangloss 8y ago
    I'm not sure why you're being downvoted here. The reported pay difference is 4% more to men than women for identical roles at identical companies. The pay difference grows to 7% for women in their mid 30s. Wealth compounds, and the increase in the gap over time is a double whammy. Women wind up significantly less wealthy than their male peers by the time they hit 35, for the same jobs. I don't know what's up with all the conspiratorial rejection of these basic stats. We all know very smart women, and we all know they're paid worse than their male colleagues. Surely, if it's right in front of your goddamned eyes, there's a problem!
    - gizmo686 8y ago
      >I don't know what's up with all the conspiratorial rejection of these basic stats. That's an easy one. There is a massive political movement for solving the wage gap; and that political movement is overwhelming dominated by people who insist highly misleading statistics, and call out anyone who questions those statistics as sexist. This is why you don't want to lie in politics. Once people catch on, they won't believe the kernel of truth you were basing the lie on; they'll just assume your still lieing (which is objectivly closer to the truth than believing the original claims being made).
    - tomp 8y ago
      > The reported pay difference is 4% more to men than women for identical roles at identical companies Do they take years of experience, days & hours worked, overtime and salary negotiation into account? The claim is, if controlling for industry/company/position brings down the gap to 4%, then adding more variables will likely bring it down to 0%.
  - ummonk 8y ago
    It depends on how many factors you control for. I’ve seen pay gaps of anywhere between +10% and -3% depending on how aggressive they are in controlling for confounding factors (willingness to negotiate being a particularly notable factor). The studies that show men out earning women are probably not controlling as aggressively as they should. It should of course be noted that e.g. controlling for level is not justifiable if women get unfairly denied promotions.
- aklemm 8y ago
  But why do those occupations pay less and why are women more often in them? Why do women have less experience? Why do they have less access to economic output after taking on the lion’s share of caregiving needed in society? That is the rest of the question. “There is no pay gap if you control for...” is not an explanation and doesn’t move the needle in terms of creating a more equitable work environment.
  - zaarn 8y ago
    Likely, men get low paying jobs very often too. I would argue that this is similar to some other attributes found in studies; there is a higher standard deviation due to higher risk taking on part of men, since the lower limit of income is 0, there is a natural plateau but there is no maximum income to level off on, so the average/median will be skewed towards risk-taking. At least, that seems to be a fairly rational explanation of the data. Men get into a lot of horrible low end paying jobs too but if 1 out of 100 makes 100 million per year, it averages to 1 million per year.
    - tomp 8y ago
      Men also get into a lot of horrible high-paying jobs, like trucker, miner and pretty much anything in the oil industry.
      - zaarn 8y ago
        Sewage cleaners, firefighters, combat pilots (which IIRC are fairly male dominated but also place hefty physical limits like body type and sizes on you), etc. These horrible jobs are all fairly high risk (injury, sickness, death), they can pay well, sometimes they don't. And basically, yeah, as I said, that'll skew you averages and medians around.
  - tomp 8y ago
    > Why do they have less access to economic output after taking on the lion’s share of caregiving needed in society? Because they produce less economic value. You can argue that's unfair, but forcing employers to pay less productive employees more is not the answer. There are other society-wide changes you could implement, such as alimony, which is mostly awarded to women, because they miss out on career opportunities taking care of the children. Personally, I'm strongly against alimony (it seems sexist, unfair and the wrong kind of incentive), but I would support initiatives such as paying young parents/families to have children, and longer & better paid parental leave (which would be a cost to society/taxpayers, but assuming that children are valuable to society, that cost is worth paying).
bigbang 8y ago
The study doesn't compare equity held by men and women in same position, but total equity. There is a huge imbalance in equity held by founders/execs most of which are men.
sctb 8y ago
We've updated the link from https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/19/women-dont-just-face-gender-pay-gap-they-also-suffer-an-equity-pay-gap/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/19/women-d....
tomp 8y ago
> In 2017, women earned 80% of what men earned, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full and part-time workers in the United States. Second sentence tells you that you can't take this article seriously.
User23 8y ago
This needs to be controlled by employee number to be remotely meaningful.
nodesocket 8y ago
Somewhat unrelated to the post, but I recently saw a news article about how the USA women's soccer players make less than the men's USA soccer players. The author was trying to insinuate it's inherently sexist an example of the gender biased wage gap. Seems obvious to me why men's soccer players make more. They generate more revenue. It's basic economics and business. Unless it can be proven that the USA women's soccer and men's team bring in the same revenues for matches, advertising, etc it's an absurd thesis that it is sexist and gender wage bias. Furthermore it promotes the rampant alienation and villainization of men as a whole without being factually accurate and following the basic rules of economics and successful business.
- throw55 8y ago
  Could also be somewhat related to this https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-boys-squad-beat-the-u-s-womens-national-team-in-a-scrimmage/ https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-b...
- bethly 8y ago
  Your assumption that they generate more revenue is sexist and incorrect. In 2015, when the complaint was made, the women's team raised more revenue than the men's team: https://www.si.com/planet-futbol/2016/04/06/uswnt-us-soccer-wage-discrimination-revenue-unequal-pay https://www.si.com/planet-futbol/2016/04/06/uswnt-us-soccer-... (The reason is simple: the men's team sucks, while the women's is one of the best in the world and is the only reason why the US has ever won a World Cup. The revenue discrepancy would be even more, of course, if both World Cups received equal rewards for winning.) You are probably correct, though, that sexist assumptions like yours are why they are paid less. You aren't helping your case about how we should assume the best of the people speaking out in support of discrimination, though.
gammateam 8y ago
in tech, if there are successful pushes for women in the companies, then the success would be seen more recently, in which case they would have less equity than existing holders which would contain less women. this also doesn't account for how the candidates negotiate their salaries to begin with, HIRED has this data in their diversity report. similarly, further funding rounds would dilute people even more which takes me to some worthwhile further investigation of the female founders roles, aside from how things may be negotiated there may be a factor of needing additional funding rounds given challenges of being taken seriously? I would need to know how many separate events of dilution took place by the time of this analysis thoughts?

32 points by Varcht 8y ago

BillinghamJ 8y ago

They're often proportional to salary, so this isn't exactly a surprise...

sjbp 8y ago
Equity is not proportional to salary. Perhaps only after you control for "time-to-join", andwhether you are a founder/investor/employee, but definitely not without that. On another note, there's something about a disparity on ownership and %founders that seems more profound than the salary IMO (with the caveat that it is hard to study this controlling for the right things).
- BillinghamJ 8y ago
  Actually it often is when allocating options by value etc. Bear in mind, I didn't say that it always is.

aliston 8y ago

This study is meaningless without more data to make it an apples to apples comparison. There is no pay gap if you control for occupation and experience. Similarly, my guess is this supposed equity gap would disappear if you control for these factors. The section on founders is interesting, but by making the comparison about the calculated monetary value rather than the equity percentage and without looking at possible differences in the types of companies and associated valuations, it’s also not very meaningful.

slg 8y ago
>There is no pay gap if you control for occupation and experience. The old 75-80 cents on the dollar wage gap that some people still cite (including this article) drops drastically once correcting for occupation and experience, but women still earn less then men even when doing the same job at the same company. You can click through the link in the article to get that data. [1] [1] - https://hired.com/wage-inequality-report https://hired.com/wage-inequality-report
- doctorpangloss 8y ago
  I'm not sure why you're being downvoted here. The reported pay difference is 4% more to men than women for identical roles at identical companies. The pay difference grows to 7% for women in their mid 30s. Wealth compounds, and the increase in the gap over time is a double whammy. Women wind up significantly less wealthy than their male peers by the time they hit 35, for the same jobs. I don't know what's up with all the conspiratorial rejection of these basic stats. We all know very smart women, and we all know they're paid worse than their male colleagues. Surely, if it's right in front of your goddamned eyes, there's a problem!
  - gizmo686 8y ago
    >I don't know what's up with all the conspiratorial rejection of these basic stats. That's an easy one. There is a massive political movement for solving the wage gap; and that political movement is overwhelming dominated by people who insist highly misleading statistics, and call out anyone who questions those statistics as sexist. This is why you don't want to lie in politics. Once people catch on, they won't believe the kernel of truth you were basing the lie on; they'll just assume your still lieing (which is objectivly closer to the truth than believing the original claims being made).
  - tomp 8y ago
    > The reported pay difference is 4% more to men than women for identical roles at identical companies Do they take years of experience, days & hours worked, overtime and salary negotiation into account? The claim is, if controlling for industry/company/position brings down the gap to 4%, then adding more variables will likely bring it down to 0%.
- ummonk 8y ago
  It depends on how many factors you control for. I’ve seen pay gaps of anywhere between +10% and -3% depending on how aggressive they are in controlling for confounding factors (willingness to negotiate being a particularly notable factor). The studies that show men out earning women are probably not controlling as aggressively as they should. It should of course be noted that e.g. controlling for level is not justifiable if women get unfairly denied promotions.
aklemm 8y ago
But why do those occupations pay less and why are women more often in them? Why do women have less experience? Why do they have less access to economic output after taking on the lion’s share of caregiving needed in society? That is the rest of the question. “There is no pay gap if you control for...” is not an explanation and doesn’t move the needle in terms of creating a more equitable work environment.
- zaarn 8y ago
  Likely, men get low paying jobs very often too. I would argue that this is similar to some other attributes found in studies; there is a higher standard deviation due to higher risk taking on part of men, since the lower limit of income is 0, there is a natural plateau but there is no maximum income to level off on, so the average/median will be skewed towards risk-taking. At least, that seems to be a fairly rational explanation of the data. Men get into a lot of horrible low end paying jobs too but if 1 out of 100 makes 100 million per year, it averages to 1 million per year.
  - tomp 8y ago
    Men also get into a lot of horrible high-paying jobs, like trucker, miner and pretty much anything in the oil industry.
    - zaarn 8y ago
      Sewage cleaners, firefighters, combat pilots (which IIRC are fairly male dominated but also place hefty physical limits like body type and sizes on you), etc. These horrible jobs are all fairly high risk (injury, sickness, death), they can pay well, sometimes they don't. And basically, yeah, as I said, that'll skew you averages and medians around.
- tomp 8y ago
  > Why do they have less access to economic output after taking on the lion’s share of caregiving needed in society? Because they produce less economic value. You can argue that's unfair, but forcing employers to pay less productive employees more is not the answer. There are other society-wide changes you could implement, such as alimony, which is mostly awarded to women, because they miss out on career opportunities taking care of the children. Personally, I'm strongly against alimony (it seems sexist, unfair and the wrong kind of incentive), but I would support initiatives such as paying young parents/families to have children, and longer & better paid parental leave (which would be a cost to society/taxpayers, but assuming that children are valuable to society, that cost is worth paying).

bigbang 8y ago

The study doesn't compare equity held by men and women in same position, but total equity. There is a huge imbalance in equity held by founders/execs most of which are men.

sctb 8y ago

We've updated the link from https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/19/women-dont-just-face-gender-pay-gap-they-also-suffer-an-equity-pay-gap/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/19/women-d....

tomp 8y ago

> In 2017, women earned 80% of what men earned, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full and part-time workers in the United States. Second sentence tells you that you can't take this article seriously.

User23 8y ago

This needs to be controlled by employee number to be remotely meaningful.

nodesocket 8y ago

Somewhat unrelated to the post, but I recently saw a news article about how the USA women's soccer players make less than the men's USA soccer players. The author was trying to insinuate it's inherently sexist an example of the gender biased wage gap. Seems obvious to me why men's soccer players make more. They generate more revenue. It's basic economics and business. Unless it can be proven that the USA women's soccer and men's team bring in the same revenues for matches, advertising, etc it's an absurd thesis that it is sexist and gender wage bias. Furthermore it promotes the rampant alienation and villainization of men as a whole without being factually accurate and following the basic rules of economics and successful business.

throw55 8y ago
Could also be somewhat related to this https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-boys-squad-beat-the-u-s-womens-national-team-in-a-scrimmage/ https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-b...
bethly 8y ago
Your assumption that they generate more revenue is sexist and incorrect. In 2015, when the complaint was made, the women's team raised more revenue than the men's team: https://www.si.com/planet-futbol/2016/04/06/uswnt-us-soccer-wage-discrimination-revenue-unequal-pay https://www.si.com/planet-futbol/2016/04/06/uswnt-us-soccer-... (The reason is simple: the men's team sucks, while the women's is one of the best in the world and is the only reason why the US has ever won a World Cup. The revenue discrepancy would be even more, of course, if both World Cups received equal rewards for winning.) You are probably correct, though, that sexist assumptions like yours are why they are paid less. You aren't helping your case about how we should assume the best of the people speaking out in support of discrimination, though.

gammateam 8y ago

in tech, if there are successful pushes for women in the companies, then the success would be seen more recently, in which case they would have less equity than existing holders which would contain less women. this also doesn't account for how the candidates negotiate their salaries to begin with, HIRED has this data in their diversity report. similarly, further funding rounds would dilute people even more which takes me to some worthwhile further investigation of the female founders roles, aside from how things may be negotiated there may be a factor of needing additional funding rounds given challenges of being taken seriously? I would need to know how many separate events of dilution took place by the time of this analysis thoughts?