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>>According to the study, Black tech workers at the newspaper make 26 percent less than white workers >>women, who make up over 40 percent of the Tech Guild, e

• ceejayoz 2y ago
  > Whoever made this claim, did they control for other factors, like job title/level or productivity? You get that "all the black people are in lower roles or somehow all deemed less productive" is worse, right?
  • slt2021 2y ago
    Deemed “as less productive” by whom? We have a free labour market, if it was true that NYT underpaid Black workers for the same productivity, they could easily jump ship to other company and make more $$. What is stopping “black people” from escaping the supposed inequality at NYT and making more money elsewhere ????
    • ceejayoz 2y ago
      > Deemed “as less productive” by whom? You've attempted to explain away pay gaps by saying it's because of lower roles and/or lower productivity, but that's just the same problem with an extra step. Why are they in lower roles? Why are they assessed as less productive? Are they inherently dumb/lazy/bad, or are we just back to "the pay gap exists because of biases" again? > What is stopping “black people” from escaping the supposed inequality at NYT and making more money elsewhere ???? Black NYT employees are likely very well aware that the biases they encounter are not unique to the NYT.
      • slt2021 2y ago
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        • bdangubic 2y ago
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          • slt2021 2y ago
            you can do a little scientific experiment yourself: Change your linkedin location to San Francisco, add the buzz words and $big_tech_company to your profile, make sure you are of under-represented minority in profile, and watch recruiters banging your door and offering to apply and headhunt you for pay raise
          • akoboldfrying 2y ago
            See, I look at what you wrote and draw the mirror-image conclusion: "Here is a person who would prefer to shame others for being 'impolite' than let them say out loud what is obvious to literally anyone." The fact that the situation is as GP described is undeniable. But there can be reasons why things are this way that extend beyond what the racists of yore believed about genetics. Most obviously: Not all subgroups of white people are equally represented in tech either. (When was the last time you were in a team where the majority hailed from Appalachia?) But actual investigation and remediation can't begin until we can first point at reality and describe it as it currently is.
  • Spivak 2y ago
    Jesus christ thank you, folks on the internet are so quick to dismiss pay gaps just because we know what causes them as if that magically makes it not a problem. Take one factor, women earn less because of mid-career halts due to having children, like the father didn't also have a child. Women bear the brunt because we're expected to be the primary caregivers, and this hurts men too due to the "father babysitting his kids" problem of considering the father's involvement as secondary. You can say this isn't a problem for her employer to solve but as long as we have no intention of upsetting the standard nuclear family gender roles men and women taking the default life path shouldn't consistently make one worse off than the other.
    • Lonestar1440 2y ago
      What if Women, on average, prefer to take more time away from work due to having a child than their male partners? And what if "Black" people are, on average, younger than other groups and so are more likely to be in early-career roles? More broadly, once we start dividing "People" up into groups like "Black" "White" "Man" "Woman"; isn't a bit silly to think the groups won't expect and want and do different things? Like even if we assign people literally at random (and 'Race' isn't much different than this); wouldn't differences emerge?
      • ceejayoz 2y ago
        Now, imagine you enslave one of those groups for ~400 years, prevent them from voting or getting an equal education for another ~100+. Might differences emerge in how society treats that population?
        • deleted 2y ago
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        • Lonestar1440 2y ago
          Yes. Do you agree that my point is also correct? Different groups want different things, and have different demographics, and excel in different areas. If we defined the "groups" in a less historically informed way, we'd still have differences.
• SiempreViernes 2y ago
  > claims like these always irk me, like did you just compare averages by race/gender? Probably not, the striking union is the one that contains all the data analysts at the NYTimes, so they have some experience with sociology data. > Whoever made this claim, did they control for other factors, like job title/level or productivity? As explained in the article, the data analysts union mad this claim, it's even explicitly linked! > Turns out "gender pay gap" magically disappears as soon as you start controlling for relevant variables like hours worked, job seniority, experience, etc No, that's just something you read on a blog written by a guy who would go on to write that women shouldn't get wage equality because they would have to work more dangerous jobs and thus die more, because apparently saving the lives of man by making those jobs safer is impossible. Anyway, here's a big stats heavy quote about how there is solid evidence for a pay gap, from the stats nerds at the census bureau (I link only the executive summary https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WB/media/An%20Evaluation%20of%20the%20Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Executive%20Summary.pdf https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WB/media/An%20Evaluat..., link to the full thing can be found in the summary) """In both decomposition models, the portion of the gender wage gap that could not be explained by differences in men’s and women’s work histories, work hours, industry and occupation distribution, and job characteristics was between 68 and 70 percent, yielding an unexplained wage gap of 14 to 15 percent. That is, of an estimated wage gap of 21 percent, statistical models explain between 6 and 7 percentage points of the gap, leaving 14 to 15 percentage points unexplained, similar to other major studies on this topic. Differences in the sorting of men and women between occupations do not fully explain the gender wage gap; men and women are paid differently within occupations as well. The size of the gender wage gap varies significantly by occupation even as men earn more than women in nearly all occupations. While wages are at parity in some occupations, gaps are as large as 45 percent in others. Across the 316 occupations in this study, occupations in finance and sales had the largest gender wage gaps""
  • zmgsabst 2y ago
    > finance and sales Weird that jobs with performance bonuses are the largest gap — but that perhaps suggests that the cause isnt sexism in the workplace, but yet more confounders they didn’t account for.
• doctorpangloss 2y ago
  If you feel so strongly about it, become a Union rep and advocate for whatever you see fit.
• makeitdouble 2y ago
  > claims like these always irk me, like did you just compare averages by race/gender? Whoever made this claim, did they control for other factors, like job title/level or productivity Their methodology and third party checks are explained here: https://www.nyguild.org/2022-nyt-performance-evaluations-report https://www.nyguild.org/2022-nyt-performance-evaluations-rep... Edit: removed dumb take
• njarboe 2y ago
  Employers generally would prefer to pay people less. If you don't ask for a raise you often don't get one. If you ask for a raise, you generally need to consider quitting if you don't get so kind of raise. Men are generally more aggressive about asking for raises. From a certain perspective when one sees a "pay gap" you could think, "Women need to risk more and fight for higher pay. They are bringing wages down for everyone. Let's encourage them to fight for higher pay at the same rate men do." Your mileage may vary.
  • yieldcrv 2y ago
    Some recruitment firms had some reports that corroborated that. HIRED’s annual report showed that too. In person, I’ve seen many women colleagues do things at odds with the competition For example, being worried about how to move up in their organization without coming across as “too bitchy”, as if it was a unique phenomenon to their gender When the competition is: - losing opportunities for being too cocky, and they keep trying until they find a different organization “looking for someone to make the hard decisions” - emphasis on a different organization. the competition is coming in at a higher level by bluffing and trying, not focusing on going up the corporate ladder, or worried about being married to a company its a widely replicated experience that changing jobs will get you 30% pay bump and the same level of responsibilities, while trying to move up gets you a ton more responsibility and single digit percent compensation increases if many women are adverse to doing that, it would be a significant factor in some industries
    • skuxxlife 2y ago
      Have you honestly heard any male colleague described as “too bitchy”? How did you listen to your female colleagues’ genuine experience of being unfairly labeled and come away from it thinking it was their fault? And the solution is “don’t be loyal and lie”? Sure you can probably get ahead doing that but yikes maybe it’s the system that’s the problem.
      • nickpeterson 2y ago
        I’ve worked with a bunch of men who were considered ‘assholes’. Mean or difficult women are sometimes called bitches, mean or difficult men are sometimes called assholes. There is no practical difference between the two.
• beepbooptheory 2y ago
  If you have the time, could you explain what you think "gender studies" entails? Not to step on your broader point at all, but I think you might need to pick a better strawman here. I can only speak anecdotally with my many years in the "liberal arts", but feel pretty confident you would be laughed out of the classroom for bringing such a thing up, whatever side of it you are on. Its just more of a thing people like us argue about on message boards, not really something academics would care about beyond a fraught data point! For I hope obvious reasons. And no I cant speak for the annoying guy you met one time who was a gender studies major. I'm sure they were very annoying though.
  • slt2021 2y ago
    "Gender studies" is usually used as a dog whistle for low rigor Liberal Arts programs like Psychology (as opposed to high rigor STEM programs like Physics). Colleges aggressively enroll low-SAT high schoolers in these low rigor fields, because they want their federal student loan money at overinflated tuition. Colleges have only incentive to overproduce students and hand out diplomas like candy in exchange for student loan money. The problem with over-enrollment of low-SAT students in low rigor fields is Replication crisis[1]. A lot of "research papers" are being produced every year due to sheer over-production of graduate students in these fields, and with pressure to "publish-or-perish" a lot of research ends up bogus, fake, non-replicated or p-hacked. This NYT claim caught my attention because they used words "average wage per gender/race" - which is telling sign they used simple Excel's AVERAGE() to get their "insights". In a more rigorous field like econometrics/statistics, you would be laughed at if you make such claim because average numbers hide a lot of nuance, required to understand the field. If one were to control for certain confounding variables, one would get a much better understanding of a "wage gap" or "racial gap" issue and understand each individual components of the gap, rather than blaming everything on strawman "institutional racism" or "institutional misogyny" or whatever 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
    • beepbooptheory 2y ago
      Ah gotcha. Well thanks for responding thoughtfully, reading what I actually said! Good luck with all that, you are fighting a good fight. One day those rigor-less Academia scum are gonna get whats coming to them, I'm sure.
• devjab 2y ago
  > claims like these always irk me, like did you just compare averages by race/gender? Whoever made this claim, did they control for other factors, like job title/level or productivity? I can’t speak for these numbers, but when we do them we account for these things. Obviously pay isn’t going to be fair, but it should be less unfair than it is at many places. Part of the reason women get paid less where I currently work is because they ask less. That doesn’t mean every white man is paid much better, because not all men ask either. In general, however, you can generalise across experience, productivity, seniority and so on and say that some groups are paid less. There are a lot of factors which play into this beyond people not asking. Our metrics also show that employees who ask less frequently or are in general less assertive are also much less likely to leave their jobs. As such it becomes less of a risk to not give them raises. Risk of employees leaving is a factor you consider when balancing your budget, and I’m sure you can imagine other things which may play into this, some of which, shouldn’t.
  • acdha 2y ago
    > Part of the reason women get paid less where I currently work is because they ask less. Yes, and that’s because as study after study has shown they’re less likely to successfully get more and not have it held against them. > New research by Berkeley Haas Professor Laura Kray shows the belief that women don’t ask for higher pay is not only outdated, but it may be hurting pay equity efforts. Contrary to popular belief, professional women now report negotiating their salaries more often than men, but they get turned down more often, Kray found. https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/new-research-shatters-outdated-pay-gap-myth-that-women-dont-negotiate/ https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/new-research-sha...
    • devjab 2y ago
      If you notice I spoke about my place of work. Not on the national or global norm. I’m sure times are changing, but it’s not what our internal metrics currently show at our company. I personally hope it changes.
      • acdha 2y ago
• no_wizard 2y ago
  I don't know that the American Enterprise Institute is the most unbiased source of this information. The author of this particular article you linked to (which itself doesn't really link out to much, other than an interview given by Sheryl Sandberg and references to her commentary from The Guardian, so where is the data coming from exactly?) is also a concurrent fellow at The Federalist Society[0] which has a notoriously right wing bent to its interpretation of law and policy research, which does bring up some questions of bias here, given this and the fact there isn't anything in the linked article that really supports their position, rather its a snippet of interpretation for a Sheryl Sandberg interview and a book titled Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap -- and What Women Can Do About It by Warren Farrell. To which, he uses both snippets outside of their broader context, which both argue that pay remediation is a core component to having gender equality in the workplace, but isn't the only thing I'm coming up empty here, as to what supports this assertion as any semblance of reality? Prove me wrong with facts and studies, I’m all ears. I would life to be wrong about this [0]: https://fedsoc.org/contributors/mark-perry-2 https://fedsoc.org/contributors/mark-perry-2
• skuxxlife 2y ago
  Claims that there is no gender pay gap based on clearly biased sources irks me. So firstly, you don’t know what the NYT tech guild analysis looked like, so why assume they didn’t control for other factors? It is plausible they could have, given their access to competent statisticians, but we don’t know either way. It seems like you may just want this story to fit your pre-existing narrative. Secondly, there are so many high-quality studies out there better than an a blog post about a Forbes article about an interview from a conservative think tank that show the very real existence of a gender pay gap that _is not accounted for_ by fewer hours worked, experience, or job type (yes these do contribute but are far from the entire picture). Here’s a couple (read their citations for more): https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WB/equalpay/WB_issuebrief-undstg-wage-gap-v1.pdf https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WB/equalpay/WB_issueb... https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21913/w21913.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21913/w219... Lastly, _even if_ womens’ “lifestyle choices” were to explain entirely the pay gap (which they don’t, see above), think about what kind of career choices you’d make if you had to constantly debate about your right to equal pay with your supposed peers.
  • intuitionist 2y ago
    It’s not really plausible that the NYT tech guild would have controlled for factors that would make the pay gap appear smaller, because their incentive isn’t to be truth-seeking, but to attain a superior negotiating position.
• jjmarr 2y ago
  The gender pay gap disappears when you control for hours worked, job seniority, and experience. So, why do women work less hours than men and have less experience? That's still an issue even if it's not directly sexist. If we read some bullet points from your post: > Men are more likely than women to have more years of continuous experience in their current occupation. What crawls on four legs and causes women to drop out of the labour force?
  • hansvm 2y ago
    > four legs, ... If we, as a society, want to encourage more kids, we should to allocate those funds as a society, much like roads or anything else (we do, tax benefits, ..., maybe we should do more). If we want to offer welfare for people regardless of their life constraints, that's again a societal decision (and one I'm mostly in favor of). Pushing that to each individual employer sets up a cat and mouse game where the shadiest organizations barely not getting audited are able to leverage that inequality (supposing we did fix the wage gap at an employer level without addressing underlying factors) to achieve higher profits and outperform the competition. And that's one of the _better_ outcomes. Switching gears only slightly, suppose (using round numbers for simplicity) the average cost to the employer of maternity leave is 6 months salary and you have a 10% chance of incurring that cost. An organization like the NYT can absolutely self-insure, but at the level of only a few employees you cannot. Something kind of like the unemployment insurance situation works much better in those kinds of scenarios. The government acts as an insurer to provide the service we as a society have decided is worthwhile, and each employer only has to send in a check for their average liability instead of dealing with a different mountain of paperwork and existential risks.
    • thanksgiving 2y ago
      We can't even do something simple that I would like to see happen — make WIC universal with no conditions. It already covers about half of all children so it basically only doubles the budget. We can afford it and it saves so much time and energy trying to police the system. Another one is free of cost universal pre-K. A lot of women can't go to work because there is nobody at home to take care of their children. But really the easiest lowest hanging fruit is universal WIC. Make it available to everyone so it is easier for us to tell people to get it.
• interroboink 2y ago
  > Turns out "gender pay gap" magically disappears as soon as you start controlling for relevant variables I think this is false? The gap certainly becomes smaller when you control for those factors, but it does not disappear. But don't take my word for it; search for "unadjusted gap" (or "uncontrolled") vs "adjusted gap" (or "controlled") to see various reports. Your quoted source does not cite much data that I can see. My understanding is that the adjusted pay gap is approx. 99¢ vs. $1 for men; one source, with data and a description of their methodology: https://www.payscale.com/research-and-insights/gender-pay-gap/ https://www.payscale.com/research-and-insights/gender-pay-ga... (and of course, aside from this, the question of why women would tend to have less experience and lower titles than men, is a valid topic on its own, and adjusting for it doesn't make it unimportant)
  • slt2021 2y ago
    > 99¢ vs. $1 for men isn't it on the border of measurement error ? Would it be fair to say, after controlling for some variables the gender gap narrows down to 1% (which is a fairly small number if you ask me). Like $1000 per year on a median salary in the US
    • interroboink 2y ago
      > isn't it on the border of measurement error? At least going by that payscale.com link, I don't think so. That is compiled from 600K+ responses, so they have enough data to measure small differences with some confidence, I think. I didn't sign up to download the full dataset though, so I'm mostly going by their claims. Quoting from the article: Although $0.99 may seem very close to $1, the red line in the chart below has never crossed the dotted $1 line in blue representing men’s pay. Even when women are doing the same jobs, the gender pay gap is not zero. If it were a "lost in measurement error" thing, I would expect that chart to have a lot more noise in it — some years women would be above men, other years below (that said, I do wish the charts had error bars). Instead, it's showing a small-but-consistent difference repeated across the years.
• devnullbrain 2y ago
  Surely, every other time you've raised this argument, people have pointed out that job seniority is a desirable and highly contested variable? Saying that it makes sense, because fewer women and minorities are promoted, does not actually support your point. Don't control for job title.
  • slt2021 2y ago
    I think it helps to isolate the issue and prescribe better targeted intervention measures. If we can say that for the same level, gender pay gap does not exist, but there is discrepancy in promoting women to senior/executive levels: and there could be many legitimate reasons. and the issue of gender gap becomes an issue of promoting women to senior levels from the inside, or more diverse hiring for senior job roles from outside.
• Aeolun 2y ago
  I don’t think it’s really relevant? It would be a very easy promise to make if no such thing were happening in the first place. I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re smart enough to not just straight up compare the average of all men vs the average of all women.
• groby_b 2y ago
  Given that I've got a rather nice chunk of cash (buy-a-really-nice-car nice) from a settlement in a pay gap lawsuit, there's at least existence proof that a pay gap exists occasionally to the extent a judge will believe it does. I'd consider looking at the actual data instead of blanket-dismissing via generic questions. Further, given that the AEI has a very strong incentive to lie a pay gap away, I'd at least suggest consulting additional resources.
• ConspiracyFact 2y ago
  What annoys me about the left is exactly things like this. Someone points out that an ideologically-motivated claim is baseless, and the talking heads on the left just repeat, over and over, in various ways, that bad-faith actors on the right are disputing the claim, but they’re wrong (and evil). They just do this until people get tired of arguing, and they refuse to give up the claim. With the right, a lot of it is based on religion or irreducible moral sentiment, and you just accept that some people on the right believe crazy things and can’t be swayed. On balance their beliefs are more harmful (though not by as much as in the past), but they don’t bother me in the same way because they’re admittedly irrational. Many on the left start with a set of beliefs similarly rooted in feeling and then rationalize the hell out of them, and will (often literally) scream at you if you dare to point out that their evidence is ex post facto and just poor besides.
• mdnahas 2y ago
  I am economist and former quant. I wrote a report on the gender pay gap for a candidate for Congress. There is evidence of a gap. Glassdoor has a great report showing that salaries for the same company and same job title are about 7% lower for women. An academic paper on MBA grads showed that hiring salaries for women were lower. So there is evidence for it. For the MBA grads, the paper show that with training on negotiation, women got salaries similar to men. So, there are policies that help.
• ch1kkenm4ss4 2y ago
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