9 ms·

There is no gender gap in tech salaries

162 points by goronbjorn 13y ago

adamwong246 13y ago
It's nice to see woman writing on this subject. As a man, you'd be a fool to say such things in public. The social fallout from uttering these unpopular ideas will earn you only contempt, unless you want to be on the wrong end of a twitter witch hunt.
- bdg 13y ago
  > The social fallout from uttering these unpopular ideas will earn you only contempt, unless you want to be on the wrong end of a twitter witch hunt. I agree. The fact I have a penis attached to me means that I don't get to participate equally with all conversation partners. So while I'm all for equality, I keep quiet about things I both disagree and agree with, because my opinion is branded patriarchal bullshit a priori.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    I gotta say I don't buy this. I was the token conservative on a lot of issues in grad school and I never got flack for saying my opinion on gender or race or economic issues as an Asian male from a privileged background. Not being an asshole about it works wonders.
    - benihana 13y ago
      >Asian
      - sp332 13y ago
        Asians are considered privileged academically. In America they get better grades than average, on average.
        tw268 13y ago
        Social justice is largely a white self-loathing thing, a perverse way to mark yourself as one of the cultural elite. There's a reason why Amy Chua is the public face of books she cowrites with her white husband. "White guy says that some cultures are better than others" doesn't go over so well. You'll be relegated to selling books through websites owned by Pat Buchanan. Among social justice academics, Asian success in majority white countries is largely ignored. It upsets the Marxist narrative of oppressor/oppressed, where the oppressors are white and the oppressed are everybody else. In academic circles, "Asian privilege" is considered a myth and an attempt to derail a conversation.
        rayiner 13y ago
        >> Not being an asshole about it works wonders. > Social justice is largely a white male self-loathing thing
        tw268 13y ago
        I find it bizarre that anti-white racism from a Marxist perspective is an academic discipline with reputable journals and funded by the federal government in a majority white country. As far as I could tell in university, most of the professors involved were also white. Check out some whiteness studies material some time and be amazed at what people can get tenure for. Asian studies is still about how Asians are oppressed by white culture, only white studies is hostile towards its subject. I guess my point is that white people are bona fide official second class citizens, as classified by taxpayer funded research. Asians aren't given special privileges like other minorities, but neither is their success considered evidence of oppression.
        railsdude 13y ago
        > Asians are considered privileged academically. In America they get better grades than average, on average. So studying more and harder and partying less is considered a privilege?
        deleted 13y ago
    - Crito 13y ago
      Talking to people in person works wonders. The social media sphere of the internet seems to share a peculiar property with automobiles: when social media or cars are involved, people often dehumanize others and turn into massive assholes. Normally perfectly well adjusted people turn into tire-iron wielding maniacs.
    - bowlofpetunias 13y ago
      It also helps if you do not pre-emptively open a full frontal attack on others, like the previous two posters did with "twitter witch hunt" and "my opinion is branded patriarchal bullshit". Such people aren't interested in having a constructive discussion in the first place, make that perfectly clear in the same sentence as in which they express their opinion, and then proceed to act indignant if the other side responds in kind...
      - bdg 13y ago
        My feelings are invalid and actually just an attack?
      - johnbm 13y ago
        Except of course, those two things have actually happened, multiple times. When Adria Richards tweeted that guy's picture in DongleGate, he got fired, and she got called a hero and fashioned herself Joan of Arc (no really). When Feminist Software Foundation appeared on Github, Ashe Dryden tweeted the list of people who starred the repo and suggested their employers should be told. Shanley Kane's medium.com posts are full of blaming "white men", "privilege" and "patriarchy" for this or that, with usually nothing to back it but anger and indignation. To me, the phrases "twitter witch hunts" and "being branded patriarchal bullshit" seem entirely accurate. Or would you call that being interested in a "constructive discussion"?
    - __pThrow 13y ago
      > Not being an asshole about it works wonders. That is just incredibly presumptive.
    - thenerdfiles 13y ago
      That's because you were the token conservative. A stereotype has no role to shift the status quo because the token exists to demonstrate that which is to be corrected. If you're a good token, you're just being used to buy another round.
    - lobotryas 13y ago
      Difference: you were in gradschool, not online where people feel entitled to attack others for any difference in opinion.
  - dovel 13y ago
    You seem to have a bad attitude going into it. If you have thoughts and feeling and you can explain your position when 'under attack' then you need not be worried about such things. If you think people discredit your opinions because of your penis then you are wrong. I am not saying that discrediting your opinions is a good thing or valid way of discussing things but the reason for it is not your genitalia, it is because male, female, trans etc all have very different experiences of how society reacts/treats their gender or sexuality. Some people may get agitated when they hear someone who is not in their situation, talking about their situation. But that is because of their past experiences and if you provide a comprehensive explanation of your beliefs, then there is no reason for you to worry about how people react to you, because you will know you have been understood. Some people are quick to throw opinions around without reason and it means people like you become afraid to voice yours. If you focus on what you are trying to say then it will contribute to a discussion and if it descends into something you did not expect (a twitter witch hunt?) then you know that you have articulated yourself in such a precise and intricate manner and you know your remarks cannot be taken incorrectly.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
    It's pretty bullshit a posteriori as well.
- gcb0 13y ago
  It's not really. Dishing out the previous trend on hn about women needing handicap still removed merit from all the serious, hard working women. So speaking up is in the best interest of the ones not willing to compromise the achieved equality for a little easier ride in the short term.
rayiner 13y ago
I agree with the decision to leave "makes the same career choices" out of the equation, but I think people have to admit a lot of those "choices" aren't free from gender based social pressure. My wife's attitude going into parenthood was that she was going to "parent like a father." This was a necessary consequence of us both maintaining busy careers, but I have to say that I make out a lot better in peoples' eyes for doing the same level of parenting. I take the night feedings? I'm some sort of wizard dad. She prepares the lunch for daycare? Why doesn't she make this or that toddler puree? When a stranger glares for our daughter not wearing socks in the cold (I swear she had them on when we left the house!), its never at me, always her. As a result, she's racking up a non-trivial amount of working mom guilt. She doesn't want to mommy track her career, but it irritates her that if she did people would support her decision in a way they wouldn't if I did the same.
- fibbery 13y ago
  As someone who will be in the same position as your wife not too far from now, this is both good to know and frustrating. Have you ever had people refer to your taking care of the kids as "baby sitting"? I've heard that one is common.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    That sort of comment just sets the bar low for what's expected of me. Meanwhile, my wife wants to be perceived as a good parent too, but she can't get too invested in that because she can't reconcile her career with all the baby wearing/toddler puree/breastfeeding until two stuff that's the benchmark in her circle of mommy friends.
velis_vel 13y ago
> Regression analysis was used to estimate wage differences, after controlling for the following choices and characteristics: graduates’ occupation, economic sector, hours worked, employment status (having multiple jobs as opposed to one full-time job), months unemployed since graduation, grade point average, undergraduate major, kind of institution attended, age, geographical region, and marital status. The problem with controlling for all those things is that you leave out other factors; for example, if men were preferentially hired over women, that wouldn't show up in this data.
- ameister14 13y ago
  That's true, but we're talking about equal pay for equal work. Such a case would definitely be discrimination, it just wouldn't be germane.
simonsarris 13y ago
I'm a little surprised that there is a serious concern that this article doesn't address with gender-gapped salaries, though, and it's been touched upon several times on HN. Women tend to negotiate starting salaries and raises much less than men do, to the point where it can skew wage statistics by a nontrivial amount. There was someone on HN a while ago who hired several engineers, and said that his company pays women less than men because he makes the same starting offer to several people, and almost all the men asked for more money, yet none of the women did. So the offers the company made were "fair", but the end results were very skewed wages. There are entire books about this subject, such as "Women Don't Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation"[1] Companies could fix this overnight by disallowing negotiation (Didn't Fog Creek do this?), or making all employees salaries transparent (countries like Norway do this, and we do this for C-levels often in the US, just not plain old employees). I suspect nothing institutional will change though because it would ultimately cost companies money. They benefit too much from workers who negotiate poorly. [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0553383876 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0553383876
- breischl 13y ago
  I suspect it will not change because stopping negotiation is not actually achievable. Certainly you could disallow negotiation for direct, monetary compensation, but that would just push the negotiation into other areas. People would start negotiating for more vacation, more holidays, better benefits, a bigger office, a company car, an assistant, a private "education budget" (ie, pay me to take a vacation) or whatever else they can. The number of ways to compensate someone are limited only by imagination and can move much more quickly than regulation can catch up. A small example of this is when the US froze wages during World War 2, thus employers started offering perks like company-paid health insurance. That has since evolved into the mess we have now - that sure worked out great for everyone, didn't it?
  - phillmv 13y ago
    Intra (small) company you could achieve this - "sorry, everyone gets the same deal: $x0k/year and y weeks of vacay and we only have one company benefits plan". Gets trickier once if you're immense and have very specific skillset requirements.
btcfn 13y ago
There's no gender gap in most industries if you control for the level of education, experience, average number of work hours, health, etc. One can always cherry pick a niche where that's not the case, but it goes both ways.
ameister14 13y ago
I posted this in another thread, but it's valid here as well: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09279.pdf http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09279.pdf Basically, in a study of federal workers, a 7% unexplained gap exists between male and female worker's wages when controlling for occupational, experiential and educational differences, among other things. Especially relevant data is on pages 84-86. (edited for clarity)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- twistedpair 13y ago
  At least it's no longer an integer multiple difference between male and female wages. But why would we ever expect them to be 0% different? Recall that natural unemployment is ~3%. The market and real world are not perfectly efficient and making them perfectly efficient would make them less efficient in the process.
  - ameister14 13y ago
    Yeah, sorry I wasn't more clear; specifically the difference is one of wages, not overall employment level. I wouldn't expect uncontrolled wages to be entirely equal. I would expect that eventually controlling for employment history, experience, education etc. would make the difference approach zero, though. I think that'd be good.
- rmc 13y ago
  So what if there was sexist reasons why women weren't going into certain professions? That's consistant with your claim.
  - ameister14 13y ago
    That's entirely possible, but it's not really what we're talking about. The women that don't get the job because of discrimination don't play into the wage gap because position is controlled for. Discrimination is an important discussion in general, but most of the time it's extremely hard to prove that someone didn't get a job because the hiring officer was prejudiced. This wage gap stuff is easier to quantify and is a visible problem to solve.
btcfn 13y ago
There's no gender gap in most industries if you control for the level of education, experience, average number of work hours, health, etc. One can always cherry pick a niche where that's not the case, but it goes both ways.
abalone 13y ago
Very poor methodology. The study only looked at first year salaries and the author extrapolated from there. Totally invalid.
- TheCowboy 13y ago
  It's not a poor methodology if you are simply measuring starting salaries only, or if salaries never increase. But it is reckless to make a bold declaration that "there is no gender gap in tech salaries" based on this data. I don't think it's hard for people to imagine that there is less variance in starting salaries. Reading into this data and thinking it applies to anything beyond that is a guess and should be treated as such with that guess being tested in future studies. Even if you demonstrate there is no wage discrimination over the course of people's careers, it doesn't account for the huge gender gap in the industry.
  - abalone 13y ago
    Right, it was the blogger who made the error. Very poor reporting, I should say. "7% gender gap in starting tech salaries" would have been a fairer headline.
    - demallien 13y ago
      Yes, exactly. I fully believe that there isn't much discrimination in tech at the entry-level. On the other hand, after 20 years in the industry, I have never seen a woman promoted internally. I have seen women climb up the ladder by changing jobs, getting recruited into a higher position, but women never seem to get picked internally to go into senior engineer or team leader positions. That has got to have a major impact on salary by the end of a woman's career.
    - 001sky 13y ago
      This is actually quite flawed. The correlations between starting salary and continuing salary (at the same company) is close for large and meaningful data partitions. You can glean some of the indights (if you don't have firsthand experience, if you do...this is obvious) from something like this study. The TLDR is that adverse starting points are meaningful for explaining career earnings anomoly. http://www.nber.org/digest/nov06/w12159.html http://www.nber.org/digest/nov06/w12159.html
anovikov 13y ago
In the coder freelancing world, women easily command higher wages than men do (and with reason). Easy proof is that there seem to be a lot of female freelancer profiles on sites like odesk.com, but most of them hide a man behind them (just try to make them do a voice call). Because guys know women are better paid. I have never heard of reverse.
Carioca 13y ago
Here's an interesting analysis: http://www.metafilter.com/126704/with-numbers-like-these-why-would-women-want-to-work-in-games#4905768 http://www.metafilter.com/126704/with-numbers-like-these-why...
sonnyz 13y ago
I think it's wonderful that it's uncommon for there to be a gap in salaries based on gender. This is something I've paid close attention to over the past 8 years. My wife and I are both software developers with roughly the same level of experience and expertise. So far it seems like the person with the highest salary is usually the one that most recently changed jobs, since negotiating a new salary is much easier then negotiating a large raise.
undoware 13y ago
Yes, just statistical gaps in who gets those salaries. Wake me when there's justice.
caiob 13y ago
Are we still discussing the whole women vs men in tech thingy? I miss when HN used to discuss real issues.
Spooky23 13y ago
IMO, this is all about the tech market being more about skills than seniority. My wife was out on unpaid leave for nearly two years when we had our first child. That meant that she missed two salary scale steps, which are earned based on satisfactory performance over a period of at least 1,500 paid hours/year. In her case, that means that a male who started the same day as her makes approximately $2,500 more than her, assuming the same career path. (She started at level-x and is at level-x+y.) For a nurse, or techie, salary is driven by the market in most cases.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  If you're doing such a comparison, then it points towards a salary system that's working as it should, but a disbalance in gender roles in childcare - which can be fixed not by changes to salaries, but by changes in childcare policies such as those successfully implemented by Sweden and others, where male nurses in similar situation as your wife would take time off comparable to female nurses. They'd still be behind childless workers, though. That's how it works, if your family is more valuable to you than your career, then you'd be happy with getting more family at the tradeoff of less career - and that explains why the positions at the very top get a disproportionally large number of divorces/etc - if someone is consistently neglecting family because of their career, then they do get to the top easier than someone who'd sometimes actually prefer going home to their kids.
michaelochurch 13y ago
I think there is, but I can't prove it. I have anecdotes about specific companies, and some companies are viciously sexist while others aren't. Most of the sexism comes from the mainstream business culture (what I sometimes call "MBA culture" but that's not entirely fair because some MBAs are fine) and not from tech itself. (Brogrammers are trying to be ballers, not hackers.) The more "corporate" a tech company is, the more it will be sexist. Often this isn't overt, so much as an artifact; women get the shaft not because of explicit sexism but because they don't negotiate for themselves or elbow their way on to the best projects. Regression analysis was used to estimate wage differences, after controlling for the following choices and characteristics: graduates’ occupation, economic sector, hours worked, employment status (having multiple jobs as opposed to one full-time job), months unemployed since graduation, grade point average, undergraduate major, kind of institution attended, age, geographical region, and marital status. That's really misleading. Some of those variables at least might have gender baked into them. For one example, let's say that women are more likely to have longer unemployment spells after college. (I don't know if this is true.) Then there could be zero gender correlation in the model not because there is none, but because that input factors it out. With 11 variables, some of those being categories, you're going to almost certainly have "small data" issues on real world datasets, where the inputs (empirical "design matrix") are not even remotely orthogonal. So pardon me if I don't buy it. The issue isn't that companies explicitly choose to pay women poorly. It's that many tech companies end up with shitty cultures that exclude women, which leaves them out of the loop and causes them to end up on shitty projects. It doesn't happen by intention. The leadership of most tech companies is criminally negligent on a lot of cultural issues, but not explicitly sexist. ETA: it's also worth pointing out the "women don't negotiate" argument. I think this is because they get worse results. My wife is a better negotiator than I am, in terms of skill level, but whenever we have to haggle on the price of something, I go out... and I often get more, not because I am better, but because a 6' male is more intimidating.
michas 13y ago
Paying men and woman equally is unfair. Men deserve slightly higher salaries, for the following reasons: - we don't have the PMS (which clearly decreases productivity for the few days a month) - we don't get pregnant and don't get maternity leave (which forces employer to pay salary for someone who doesn't even show up at the office) - we don't take sick leaves when our child is sick (at least this is much more common for women) Lower salaries for women are just compensation for all of the above. [edit] Also, the whole idea that salaries for all people doing the same job should be equal can be questioned. Because there are no two identical people in this world. Even if job titles are the same there would always be someone doing his/hers job better and someone doing it worse. So paying the same salary to all of them is unfair. And it also removes much of motivation towards becoming better at their jobs.
codr 13y ago
Looks like there's a 6.6% salary gap? "When controlled for all factors other than gender, the earnings difference between men and women is about 6.6%, something most people don’t know."
- jldugger 13y ago
  That's across all occupations.
collyw 13y ago
One thing that is interesting is that "their sample was restricted to those under 35 years old receiving a first bachelor’s degree". I wonder how how it would look after that age range. I am guessing from my anecdotal experience that most professional women usually wait until around that sort of age to have children, and how much having children is a factor in gaining higher salaries. In addition to that, I am guessing that people early in their careers are less likely to negotiate salary. I certainly was. Now I have a fair bit of experience, I can see that I am more knowledgeable and valuable than some of my colleagues, and so I am in a position to negotiate, with good reasons to back it up. Graduating in the dot-com bust, I was happy just to get a job after nearly a year and a half of searching. I didn't feel I was in any position to negotiate then.
iamwithnail 13y ago
Mildly ridiculous to draw the line at35 though, which will be around the time a lot of high performing women will have kids.
- gaius 13y ago
  If a person, male or female, takes some significant amount of time off work, for any reason, should that person continue to accrue seniority, be considered for raises and promotion, equally to colleagues who didn't take the time off, who were working and contributing? Strip the gender politics out of it and the answer is very obviously no.
  - iamwithnail 13y ago
    That's my point really; women are still expected to bear the brunt of child rearing, so pay the financial penalty. Cf Norwegian policies and smaller gender pay gap.
    - gaius 13y ago
      Women aren't expected to do anything; the proof is that birth rates are falling all across the developed world. Consider two women, A doesn't want children and B does. How do you think A will feel having worked hard for a year while B was on maternity leave, only to find that B's seniority etc has kept up with zero effort or contribution to the company on her part?
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
callesgg 13y ago
But three is a gender distribution that is of the charts.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
NinjaEconomics 13y ago
My article in Quartz didn't address all of the reasons women earn less than men do because of space constraints. Also, the article was discussing new research on pay equality in STEM fields, with a summary on gender wage gap as background. It is interesting to discuss whether there is more pay equality in STEM fields, specifically engineering, because females in these fields are also more comfortable with (and better at) negotiating higher salaries for themselves. At the moment there isn't research to suggest this but it could be a contributing factor. - @NinjaEconomics

162 points by goronbjorn 13y ago

It's nice to see woman writing on this subject. As a man, you'd be a fool to say such things in public. The social fallout from uttering these unpopular ideas will earn you only contempt, unless you want to be on the wrong end of a twitter witch hunt.

bdg 13y ago
> The social fallout from uttering these unpopular ideas will earn you only contempt, unless you want to be on the wrong end of a twitter witch hunt. I agree. The fact I have a penis attached to me means that I don't get to participate equally with all conversation partners. So while I'm all for equality, I keep quiet about things I both disagree and agree with, because my opinion is branded patriarchal bullshit a priori.
- rayiner 13y ago
  I gotta say I don't buy this. I was the token conservative on a lot of issues in grad school and I never got flack for saying my opinion on gender or race or economic issues as an Asian male from a privileged background. Not being an asshole about it works wonders.
  - benihana 13y ago
    >Asian
    - sp332 13y ago
      Asians are considered privileged academically. In America they get better grades than average, on average.
      - tw268 13y ago
        Social justice is largely a white self-loathing thing, a perverse way to mark yourself as one of the cultural elite. There's a reason why Amy Chua is the public face of books she cowrites with her white husband. "White guy says that some cultures are better than others" doesn't go over so well. You'll be relegated to selling books through websites owned by Pat Buchanan. Among social justice academics, Asian success in majority white countries is largely ignored. It upsets the Marxist narrative of oppressor/oppressed, where the oppressors are white and the oppressed are everybody else. In academic circles, "Asian privilege" is considered a myth and an attempt to derail a conversation.
        rayiner 13y ago
        >> Not being an asshole about it works wonders. > Social justice is largely a white male self-loathing thing
        tw268 13y ago
        I find it bizarre that anti-white racism from a Marxist perspective is an academic discipline with reputable journals and funded by the federal government in a majority white country. As far as I could tell in university, most of the professors involved were also white. Check out some whiteness studies material some time and be amazed at what people can get tenure for. Asian studies is still about how Asians are oppressed by white culture, only white studies is hostile towards its subject. I guess my point is that white people are bona fide official second class citizens, as classified by taxpayer funded research. Asians aren't given special privileges like other minorities, but neither is their success considered evidence of oppression.
      - railsdude 13y ago
        > Asians are considered privileged academically. In America they get better grades than average, on average. So studying more and harder and partying less is considered a privilege?
        deleted 13y ago
  - Crito 13y ago
    Talking to people in person works wonders. The social media sphere of the internet seems to share a peculiar property with automobiles: when social media or cars are involved, people often dehumanize others and turn into massive assholes. Normally perfectly well adjusted people turn into tire-iron wielding maniacs.
  - bowlofpetunias 13y ago
    It also helps if you do not pre-emptively open a full frontal attack on others, like the previous two posters did with "twitter witch hunt" and "my opinion is branded patriarchal bullshit". Such people aren't interested in having a constructive discussion in the first place, make that perfectly clear in the same sentence as in which they express their opinion, and then proceed to act indignant if the other side responds in kind...
    - bdg 13y ago
      My feelings are invalid and actually just an attack?
    - johnbm 13y ago
      Except of course, those two things have actually happened, multiple times. When Adria Richards tweeted that guy's picture in DongleGate, he got fired, and she got called a hero and fashioned herself Joan of Arc (no really). When Feminist Software Foundation appeared on Github, Ashe Dryden tweeted the list of people who starred the repo and suggested their employers should be told. Shanley Kane's medium.com posts are full of blaming "white men", "privilege" and "patriarchy" for this or that, with usually nothing to back it but anger and indignation. To me, the phrases "twitter witch hunts" and "being branded patriarchal bullshit" seem entirely accurate. Or would you call that being interested in a "constructive discussion"?
  - __pThrow 13y ago
    > Not being an asshole about it works wonders. That is just incredibly presumptive.
  - thenerdfiles 13y ago
    That's because you were the token conservative. A stereotype has no role to shift the status quo because the token exists to demonstrate that which is to be corrected. If you're a good token, you're just being used to buy another round.
  - lobotryas 13y ago
    Difference: you were in gradschool, not online where people feel entitled to attack others for any difference in opinion.
- dovel 13y ago
  You seem to have a bad attitude going into it. If you have thoughts and feeling and you can explain your position when 'under attack' then you need not be worried about such things. If you think people discredit your opinions because of your penis then you are wrong. I am not saying that discrediting your opinions is a good thing or valid way of discussing things but the reason for it is not your genitalia, it is because male, female, trans etc all have very different experiences of how society reacts/treats their gender or sexuality. Some people may get agitated when they hear someone who is not in their situation, talking about their situation. But that is because of their past experiences and if you provide a comprehensive explanation of your beliefs, then there is no reason for you to worry about how people react to you, because you will know you have been understood. Some people are quick to throw opinions around without reason and it means people like you become afraid to voice yours. If you focus on what you are trying to say then it will contribute to a discussion and if it descends into something you did not expect (a twitter witch hunt?) then you know that you have articulated yourself in such a precise and intricate manner and you know your remarks cannot be taken incorrectly.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
  It's pretty bullshit a posteriori as well.
gcb0 13y ago
It's not really. Dishing out the previous trend on hn about women needing handicap still removed merit from all the serious, hard working women. So speaking up is in the best interest of the ones not willing to compromise the achieved equality for a little easier ride in the short term.

rayiner 13y ago

I agree with the decision to leave "makes the same career choices" out of the equation, but I think people have to admit a lot of those "choices" aren't free from gender based social pressure. My wife's attitude going into parenthood was that she was going to "parent like a father." This was a necessary consequence of us both maintaining busy careers, but I have to say that I make out a lot better in peoples' eyes for doing the same level of parenting. I take the night feedings? I'm some sort of wizard dad. She prepares the lunch for daycare? Why doesn't she make this or that toddler puree? When a stranger glares for our daughter not wearing socks in the cold (I swear she had them on when we left the house!), its never at me, always her. As a result, she's racking up a non-trivial amount of working mom guilt. She doesn't want to mommy track her career, but it irritates her that if she did people would support her decision in a way they wouldn't if I did the same.

fibbery 13y ago
As someone who will be in the same position as your wife not too far from now, this is both good to know and frustrating. Have you ever had people refer to your taking care of the kids as "baby sitting"? I've heard that one is common.
- rayiner 13y ago
  That sort of comment just sets the bar low for what's expected of me. Meanwhile, my wife wants to be perceived as a good parent too, but she can't get too invested in that because she can't reconcile her career with all the baby wearing/toddler puree/breastfeeding until two stuff that's the benchmark in her circle of mommy friends.

velis_vel 13y ago

> Regression analysis was used to estimate wage differences, after controlling for the following choices and characteristics: graduates’ occupation, economic sector, hours worked, employment status (having multiple jobs as opposed to one full-time job), months unemployed since graduation, grade point average, undergraduate major, kind of institution attended, age, geographical region, and marital status. The problem with controlling for all those things is that you leave out other factors; for example, if men were preferentially hired over women, that wouldn't show up in this data.

ameister14 13y ago
That's true, but we're talking about equal pay for equal work. Such a case would definitely be discrimination, it just wouldn't be germane.

simonsarris 13y ago

I'm a little surprised that there is a serious concern that this article doesn't address with gender-gapped salaries, though, and it's been touched upon several times on HN. Women tend to negotiate starting salaries and raises much less than men do, to the point where it can skew wage statistics by a nontrivial amount. There was someone on HN a while ago who hired several engineers, and said that his company pays women less than men because he makes the same starting offer to several people, and almost all the men asked for more money, yet none of the women did. So the offers the company made were "fair", but the end results were very skewed wages. There are entire books about this subject, such as "Women Don't Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation"[1] Companies could fix this overnight by disallowing negotiation (Didn't Fog Creek do this?), or making all employees salaries transparent (countries like Norway do this, and we do this for C-levels often in the US, just not plain old employees). I suspect nothing institutional will change though because it would ultimately cost companies money. They benefit too much from workers who negotiate poorly. [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0553383876 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0553383876

breischl 13y ago
I suspect it will not change because stopping negotiation is not actually achievable. Certainly you could disallow negotiation for direct, monetary compensation, but that would just push the negotiation into other areas. People would start negotiating for more vacation, more holidays, better benefits, a bigger office, a company car, an assistant, a private "education budget" (ie, pay me to take a vacation) or whatever else they can. The number of ways to compensate someone are limited only by imagination and can move much more quickly than regulation can catch up. A small example of this is when the US froze wages during World War 2, thus employers started offering perks like company-paid health insurance. That has since evolved into the mess we have now - that sure worked out great for everyone, didn't it?
- phillmv 13y ago
  Intra (small) company you could achieve this - "sorry, everyone gets the same deal: $x0k/year and y weeks of vacay and we only have one company benefits plan". Gets trickier once if you're immense and have very specific skillset requirements.

btcfn 13y ago

There's no gender gap in most industries if you control for the level of education, experience, average number of work hours, health, etc. One can always cherry pick a niche where that's not the case, but it goes both ways.

ameister14 13y ago

I posted this in another thread, but it's valid here as well: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09279.pdf http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09279.pdf Basically, in a study of federal workers, a 7% unexplained gap exists between male and female worker's wages when controlling for occupational, experiential and educational differences, among other things. Especially relevant data is on pages 84-86. (edited for clarity)

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twistedpair 13y ago
At least it's no longer an integer multiple difference between male and female wages. But why would we ever expect them to be 0% different? Recall that natural unemployment is ~3%. The market and real world are not perfectly efficient and making them perfectly efficient would make them less efficient in the process.
- ameister14 13y ago
  Yeah, sorry I wasn't more clear; specifically the difference is one of wages, not overall employment level. I wouldn't expect uncontrolled wages to be entirely equal. I would expect that eventually controlling for employment history, experience, education etc. would make the difference approach zero, though. I think that'd be good.
rmc 13y ago
So what if there was sexist reasons why women weren't going into certain professions? That's consistant with your claim.
- ameister14 13y ago
  That's entirely possible, but it's not really what we're talking about. The women that don't get the job because of discrimination don't play into the wage gap because position is controlled for. Discrimination is an important discussion in general, but most of the time it's extremely hard to prove that someone didn't get a job because the hiring officer was prejudiced. This wage gap stuff is easier to quantify and is a visible problem to solve.

btcfn 13y ago

abalone 13y ago

Very poor methodology. The study only looked at first year salaries and the author extrapolated from there. Totally invalid.

TheCowboy 13y ago
It's not a poor methodology if you are simply measuring starting salaries only, or if salaries never increase. But it is reckless to make a bold declaration that "there is no gender gap in tech salaries" based on this data. I don't think it's hard for people to imagine that there is less variance in starting salaries. Reading into this data and thinking it applies to anything beyond that is a guess and should be treated as such with that guess being tested in future studies. Even if you demonstrate there is no wage discrimination over the course of people's careers, it doesn't account for the huge gender gap in the industry.
- abalone 13y ago
  Right, it was the blogger who made the error. Very poor reporting, I should say. "7% gender gap in starting tech salaries" would have been a fairer headline.
  - demallien 13y ago
    Yes, exactly. I fully believe that there isn't much discrimination in tech at the entry-level. On the other hand, after 20 years in the industry, I have never seen a woman promoted internally. I have seen women climb up the ladder by changing jobs, getting recruited into a higher position, but women never seem to get picked internally to go into senior engineer or team leader positions. That has got to have a major impact on salary by the end of a woman's career.
  - 001sky 13y ago
    This is actually quite flawed. The correlations between starting salary and continuing salary (at the same company) is close for large and meaningful data partitions. You can glean some of the indights (if you don't have firsthand experience, if you do...this is obvious) from something like this study. The TLDR is that adverse starting points are meaningful for explaining career earnings anomoly. http://www.nber.org/digest/nov06/w12159.html http://www.nber.org/digest/nov06/w12159.html

anovikov 13y ago

In the coder freelancing world, women easily command higher wages than men do (and with reason). Easy proof is that there seem to be a lot of female freelancer profiles on sites like odesk.com, but most of them hide a man behind them (just try to make them do a voice call). Because guys know women are better paid. I have never heard of reverse.

Carioca 13y ago

Here's an interesting analysis: http://www.metafilter.com/126704/with-numbers-like-these-why-would-women-want-to-work-in-games#4905768 http://www.metafilter.com/126704/with-numbers-like-these-why...

sonnyz 13y ago

I think it's wonderful that it's uncommon for there to be a gap in salaries based on gender. This is something I've paid close attention to over the past 8 years. My wife and I are both software developers with roughly the same level of experience and expertise. So far it seems like the person with the highest salary is usually the one that most recently changed jobs, since negotiating a new salary is much easier then negotiating a large raise.

undoware 13y ago

Yes, just statistical gaps in who gets those salaries. Wake me when there's justice.

caiob 13y ago

Are we still discussing the whole women vs men in tech thingy? I miss when HN used to discuss real issues.

Spooky23 13y ago

IMO, this is all about the tech market being more about skills than seniority. My wife was out on unpaid leave for nearly two years when we had our first child. That meant that she missed two salary scale steps, which are earned based on satisfactory performance over a period of at least 1,500 paid hours/year. In her case, that means that a male who started the same day as her makes approximately $2,500 more than her, assuming the same career path. (She started at level-x and is at level-x+y.) For a nurse, or techie, salary is driven by the market in most cases.

PeterisP 13y ago
If you're doing such a comparison, then it points towards a salary system that's working as it should, but a disbalance in gender roles in childcare - which can be fixed not by changes to salaries, but by changes in childcare policies such as those successfully implemented by Sweden and others, where male nurses in similar situation as your wife would take time off comparable to female nurses. They'd still be behind childless workers, though. That's how it works, if your family is more valuable to you than your career, then you'd be happy with getting more family at the tradeoff of less career - and that explains why the positions at the very top get a disproportionally large number of divorces/etc - if someone is consistently neglecting family because of their career, then they do get to the top easier than someone who'd sometimes actually prefer going home to their kids.

michaelochurch 13y ago

I think there is, but I can't prove it. I have anecdotes about specific companies, and some companies are viciously sexist while others aren't. Most of the sexism comes from the mainstream business culture (what I sometimes call "MBA culture" but that's not entirely fair because some MBAs are fine) and not from tech itself. (Brogrammers are trying to be ballers, not hackers.) The more "corporate" a tech company is, the more it will be sexist. Often this isn't overt, so much as an artifact; women get the shaft not because of explicit sexism but because they don't negotiate for themselves or elbow their way on to the best projects. Regression analysis was used to estimate wage differences, after controlling for the following choices and characteristics: graduates’ occupation, economic sector, hours worked, employment status (having multiple jobs as opposed to one full-time job), months unemployed since graduation, grade point average, undergraduate major, kind of institution attended, age, geographical region, and marital status. That's really misleading. Some of those variables at least might have gender baked into them. For one example, let's say that women are more likely to have longer unemployment spells after college. (I don't know if this is true.) Then there could be zero gender correlation in the model not because there is none, but because that input factors it out. With 11 variables, some of those being categories, you're going to almost certainly have "small data" issues on real world datasets, where the inputs (empirical "design matrix") are not even remotely orthogonal. So pardon me if I don't buy it. The issue isn't that companies explicitly choose to pay women poorly. It's that many tech companies end up with shitty cultures that exclude women, which leaves them out of the loop and causes them to end up on shitty projects. It doesn't happen by intention. The leadership of most tech companies is criminally negligent on a lot of cultural issues, but not explicitly sexist. ETA: it's also worth pointing out the "women don't negotiate" argument. I think this is because they get worse results. My wife is a better negotiator than I am, in terms of skill level, but whenever we have to haggle on the price of something, I go out... and I often get more, not because I am better, but because a 6' male is more intimidating.

michas 13y ago

Paying men and woman equally is unfair. Men deserve slightly higher salaries, for the following reasons: - we don't have the PMS (which clearly decreases productivity for the few days a month) - we don't get pregnant and don't get maternity leave (which forces employer to pay salary for someone who doesn't even show up at the office) - we don't take sick leaves when our child is sick (at least this is much more common for women) Lower salaries for women are just compensation for all of the above. [edit] Also, the whole idea that salaries for all people doing the same job should be equal can be questioned. Because there are no two identical people in this world. Even if job titles are the same there would always be someone doing his/hers job better and someone doing it worse. So paying the same salary to all of them is unfair. And it also removes much of motivation towards becoming better at their jobs.

codr 13y ago

Looks like there's a 6.6% salary gap? "When controlled for all factors other than gender, the earnings difference between men and women is about 6.6%, something most people don’t know."

jldugger 13y ago
That's across all occupations.

collyw 13y ago

One thing that is interesting is that "their sample was restricted to those under 35 years old receiving a first bachelor’s degree". I wonder how how it would look after that age range. I am guessing from my anecdotal experience that most professional women usually wait until around that sort of age to have children, and how much having children is a factor in gaining higher salaries. In addition to that, I am guessing that people early in their careers are less likely to negotiate salary. I certainly was. Now I have a fair bit of experience, I can see that I am more knowledgeable and valuable than some of my colleagues, and so I am in a position to negotiate, with good reasons to back it up. Graduating in the dot-com bust, I was happy just to get a job after nearly a year and a half of searching. I didn't feel I was in any position to negotiate then.

iamwithnail 13y ago

Mildly ridiculous to draw the line at35 though, which will be around the time a lot of high performing women will have kids.

gaius 13y ago
If a person, male or female, takes some significant amount of time off work, for any reason, should that person continue to accrue seniority, be considered for raises and promotion, equally to colleagues who didn't take the time off, who were working and contributing? Strip the gender politics out of it and the answer is very obviously no.
- iamwithnail 13y ago
  That's my point really; women are still expected to bear the brunt of child rearing, so pay the financial penalty. Cf Norwegian policies and smaller gender pay gap.
  - gaius 13y ago
    Women aren't expected to do anything; the proof is that birth rates are falling all across the developed world. Consider two women, A doesn't want children and B does. How do you think A will feel having worked hard for a year while B was on maternity leave, only to find that B's seniority etc has kept up with zero effort or contribution to the company on her part?
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callesgg 13y ago

But three is a gender distribution that is of the charts.

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NinjaEconomics 13y ago

My article in Quartz didn't address all of the reasons women earn less than men do because of space constraints. Also, the article was discussing new research on pay equality in STEM fields, with a summary on gender wage gap as background. It is interesting to discuss whether there is more pay equality in STEM fields, specifically engineering, because females in these fields are also more comfortable with (and better at) negotiating higher salaries for themselves. At the moment there isn't research to suggest this but it could be a contributing factor. - @NinjaEconomics