This is fairly consistent with other studies. The "77%" number is arrived at by comparing the median wage of full-time male & female employees. It doesn't account for differences in industry, job title, experience, etc. It's super broad. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, but it means we need more granularity.
Coming out of uni/grad school, male and female salaries are equal in comparable fields. They depart a few years after that. Women tend to find themselves funneled into specific career paths that prioritize flexible hours and often pay less. Men face an opposite pressure - toward inflexible hours but higher pay. This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men.
That doesn't mean the "gender gap" doesn't exist, or that it isn't an issue to address. It means that the way we tackle it isn't as simple as "pass a law mandating equal pay for equal work".
We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules. We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women (normalizing parental leave for fathers with newborns is a good start).
I fully agree with everything here, especially getting rid of stereotypes around nurturing roles.
My question is, what happens if many women and men aren't funneled towards those roles? What if it's a natural preference given our evolutionary history? I'm not saying that's the case, and my parents had no problems reversing nurturing roles over 20 years ago... but given our hyper-"PC" society, I am curious how far society's responsibilities extend.
What happens when a particular group innately prefers a certain type of work that the market values lowly? Are they irrational agents suffering by their own hands? Should society subsidize their job? Do we try to re-educate the group into following economically valued jobs? What about other people that have the same job for different reasons?
>It doesn't account for differences in industry, job title, experience, etc. It's super broad.
It also doesn't account for full time covering a wide number of hours worked. Full time can be 37 hours a week or 45 hours a week, can comparing them as both just being 'full time' misses quite a lot.
>This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men.
How it is more often foisted upon women? The social pressure on men to take deadly jobs and to work longer hours is equal to the social pressure on women to choose careers where they can take time off and be with their kids. If anything, I rather be with my kid than stuck an extra 20 hours in the office... one of these pressures is for something most people find more desirable than the other.
>We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules.
So are we aiming for more men to take flexible schedules or for pay to not suffer when someone takes flexible schedules? Because if you want the former, it is more about the pressure to earn than the stigma on flexible work schedules. And if it is the latter, how is this fair to the people who don't get the flexible work schedules? I think the deeper problem is why are women forced in the child care role and men into the bread winning roles and how to fix that (which you do mention).
Here's a really interesting freakonomics radio episode that goes into some good detail here if anyone's curious where these differences really originate:
"This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men."
I disagree. The primary cause is that women can become pregnant - the possibility alone is in most cases enough - in which case they leave the work force for X amount of time. Depending on country, laws, and personal preferences this time period can range from a few weeks to years. In some countries when this hypothetical becomes a reality it can have a large negative impact on the employer. For instance, in Germany the woman's job position must be held open for her until she decides to return to work (possibly years later), not to mention the full salary compensation months before and after giving-birth, when she is no longer working.
But to simplify it down to flatland, lets assume a woman were to just take 1 day off before giving birth, have a job that required no movement or lifting, and the employer didn't have to compensate her. Still, in this simplest case, a woman is at a disadvantage compared to a man.
Because of this biological disadvantage, I think there will never be the sort of absolute equality we want until people are born in tubes or the capitalistic employer/employee relationship changes.
What if it's the case that preferences are different among men and women? Why do we assume that the women surveyed would prefer to have the higher paying but more demanding career paths?
My wife is very smart and capable of making a high salary. She chose a flexible job path and took several years off to be with our children in their younger years. We could certainly afford otherwise; our family would have more money had she decided to go the childcare route. It's just our choice, she has no regrets. It wasn't "foisted" upon her. In fact, it's the happiest she's ever been.
Is there something wrong with a woman prioritizing motherhood? Why does it feel to me that these conversations always frame parenting as some kind of tragedy that disrupts an otherwise successful career?
By the same token, I am very motivated to make enough money so that she can continue to stay home with our kids as long as she likes. I like seeing her and my kids happy. Should I be forced to slow down because this is unfair to women at my office?
This all seems crazy to me. Having kids is a blessing. I totally agree that people shouldn't feel a pressure to do it the "traditional" way or any other way for that matter -- I like when men are given the flexibility to take care of their children in support of their wives' careers. I just don't agree that slowing down one's career in order to prioritize parenthood is a problem that needs to be fixed.
I like the idea of "mandatory paternity leave", to make up for the biological asymmetry.
Even if you have a stereotypical breadwinner/housewife relationship, you are legally mandated to take time off, even if you don't want to. That way you avoid the "you're allowed to take paternal leave, but real go-getters don't!" game altogether.
edit: The way I see it, the responses just prove my point. "This would just make people discriminate against x!". That's exactly why it needs to be mandatory, affecting more people, so the issue doesn't become invisible based on it affecting only women.
> We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women (normalizing parental leave for fathers with newborns is a good
Don't have a kid, but I would think that an infant is better off having his mother close to him in his early months of life compared to having his father, for the simple biological reason that the mother can breast-feed, while a father can't. From what I remember reading kids who are breast-fed tend to do better in life in terms of health or being better from a psylogical point of view.
Women tend to find themselves funneled into specific career paths that prioritize flexible hours and often pay less. Men face an opposite pressure - toward inflexible hours but higher pay. This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men.
>>
I see no evidence to support this "funnel" at all in my life/work experience.
Workers on "flex" schedules in the tech sector underperform by a wide margin. I see little or no reason why I should prop up someone else's life / work choices with my own labor.
> We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules. We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women (normalizing parental leave for fathers with newborns is a good start).
Put another way, we need to upend the idea that hazardous and arduous jobs (often involving hard physical labor) are only the domain of men, and encourage more women to participate in industries like mining, firefighting, welding, truck driving, and construction.
Alternatively, it's because of benevolent sexism. Women aren't slobs if they want to kick back and watch day-time TV while watching kids, they're doing the hardest job in the world!
Most studies about the gender gap in pay find that most of the 77% figure is attibutable to differences in career choices/training/&c., but there remains a rough 5% difference in pay that is not attributable to those things. Ask most men if they would take a roughly 5% pay cut, and they would not say that it insignificant or something that can be ignored.
Maybe the tech industry is just immune to this, but this article is basically a press release with no information about data or methodology.
New father here. My current employer provides two weeks of paternal leave. I ended up taking a third week of vacation time to extend this, which I'm in now.
It still doesn't feel like it's enough. I'm exhausted today, despite taking a mid-day nap. When I go back next week, I will not be at my best, and there's no way of me being at my best short of sleeping in another room with earplugs while my wife does 100% of the (often literal) heavy lifting of child care.
It is all about how you calculate it as to what number you arrive at.
Statistics New Zealand calculates the gender wage gap by comparing the hourly earnings, rather than weekly/yearly earnings. This helps to take into account the fact that women tend to work less hours (for various reasons, and is a completely different conversation). [0]
Interestingly, the gap when comparing the entire workforce with this measure is 10% in NZ, and comparing full time employment drops to 5.6% (the lowest in the OECD) [1].
One thing that needs to be considered when comparing the wage gap is that >90% of workplace fatalities are men [2], and that men tend to work much more physical jobs, causing of greater rate in workplace injuries and problems later in life, just think of how many older people you know with hearing loss from work, and how the vast majority of them are men.
So while we are militarizing against the idea that woman are forced into staying at home, you do need to consider whether family care being the domain of woman is something men have foisted upon them or if it's something they themselves desire.
Now I'll admit I don't have kids, but every partner I've had has had the same view that they'd want me to continue going to work whilst they were stay at home. Any argument to the contrary is often met by the simple fact that said child would have been carried to term by them.
If you accept that as a possbility then we're starting to look at mens rights issue. Is it fair that men have less parental rights? Overall, I'd say no. Are we going to get support for these issues? Probably not.
Obviously in a better world I imagine we'd share a pool of parental leave. People should have the choice but I'd still expect the pool to largely be utilised by females because they want it that way and it's hard to argue otherwise.
>We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women
"Solely" might be a bit strong, but I don't think this is merely an "idea". It's reality. Women do the majority of child-rearing, pretty much across all species. When it comes to us humans and our bizarre, work-driven lives, their careers suffer for it. I never understood why that is so hard to understand, or why it's controversial.
>We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules
Totally agree. But I'd put much of that blame on "us", not our employers. If we weren't such a consumerist, money-driven society, perhaps more people would be willing to work those flex-hours at less pay, but increased happiness.
"Women tend to find themselves funneled into specific career paths"
Why the passive - couldn't they actively be choosing specific career paths?
"This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men."
Again, why the "foisted"? Especially for children it doesn't make sense: if it is such an unpleasant task, why not simply choose not to have children? Care for parents might end up in women's hands because they already made the choices for more flexible time (and less income) earlier on.
Instead of "foisted", it seems possible that women simply more often get the option to choose (because they were the ones who were pregnant), and men don't.
I think both men and women should stop automatically buying into the idea that your career goals should involve having inflexible hours working some high status position for some corporation. Most pay inequality in our society comes from the assumption that women are better primary caregivers for children than men, so they get custody of the children. Many men complain about this, as well, but as long as it's going to be the norm in most states, women's pay will be lower.
Why not have a flexible work schedule for both spouses, so they can raise their children? Better yet, in traditional societies (including Soviet Russia), the grandma often watched the kids instead of some teenage babysitter. The kids grew up with more respect for elders that way. Not only that, but the grandparents weren't shipped off to some nursing home so the adults could work two jobs unimpeded.
>We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules. We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women (normalizing parental leave for fathers with newborns is a good start).
Don't certain EU countries already have this in some capacity? Honestly, I think the problem with leave benefits here in the States is the fact we treat them as a privilege rather than as some form of non-monetary compensation. IMO, if I could have an comparable set of leave benefits with a lower salary (assuming leave here would have to be set to market rate for my time I would've otherwise been working to make this an equatable exchange) I probably would take it. I like my free time. I'm sure older workers would love it too if it worked well for them if they were more focused on semi-retirement.
But work that has flexible hours is not equal to work that has inflexible hours. So theoretically equal pay for equal work stands. I guess it's a matter of whether or not you can truly evaluate work equality.
I am sorry, foisted? Most women have a much higher nurturing instinct and most men have a much higher competitive instinct. Just observe little kids at play for a while. Biology is what it is regardless of the zeitgeist.
I'm surprised. In a technical PM role a few years ago I found out that I earned 20-40% less than other PM's at the company. There were more than a dozen PM's and I was the only woman who was mid-level seniority. My male direct report made almost the same as me, while my female direct reports made a lot less. In my case it was not due to lack of initial negotiation, but that at each promotion I didn't get a sufficient bump (and since I was getting a raise, I felt grateful instead of negotiating in middle of promotion/raise!) Second reason, was that a lot of the male PM's had threatened to leave in the past and negotiated their raises that way, whereas I had never done that. Since then, I have negotiated HARD for every position I've taken and have not hesitated to turn down jobs if I'm not confident that they are offering me 50th percentile relative to men in the role. I've also encouraged women to find out salary data for their peers in order to get raises. Often when someone leaves the company they will openly tell you their salary or if you are friends they will just tell you. In so many cases, where a woman is one of only 1-2 women out of 15-20+ men, it turns out that she is making far less than men who have previously held her role or been in same role. It's strange to me that HR never seems to pick up on things like this!! Seems like the first thing you'd check given all the publicity on issue. Anyway I've only seen negotiation work well (even where a woman is making way less than peers) where the woman has also gotten a competing offer, so that's number 1 thing I encourage.
Obviously it is important to be skeptical when controlling for job title.
If there were an institutional bias against women tech workers, one way it could manifest is by women receiving less recognition and promotions, or being hired in to lower positions with the same skills and experience. Which would mean they might typically have a lower job title than the equivalent male worker, so controlling for job title could hide the bias.
I'm not saying this is or isn't the case, but it is a rather blatant possibility that isn't addressed by what is seeming like a naive study.
> they’re getting equal pay for equal equal positions, education, and experience
While those are certainly relevant control factors, I would presume that any conclusions are premature without demonstrating a lack of bias in the actual positions men vs. women are promoted to, relative to their experience and education.
I.e., large disparities in salary by gender for "Software Engineer III" within the same organization are a bit hard to overlook, whereas there are often much fuzzier criteria involved in who has that title in the first place.
Not looking to necessarily refute the article, but the control factors themselves are still rather variable.
What is interesting is the breakdown of motivations between men and women. It seems readily apparent that women on the whole prefer flexible work arrangements because of child raising obligations. This is exactly the same argument lobbed across the wage gap discussion for years now. Proponents of the wage-gap point that women have an unfair obligation to child-raising duties, which puts them at a disadvantage when compared to their male peers.
I'm not a social scientist and nor am I particularly well versed in the quagmire of social & gender obligations, so I'll keep out of making a normative judgement on this topic.
Suffice to say, in Tech, the longer you spend at the office, the more you appear to be motivated and hardworking. I fear that might just be too ingrained in management psyches for a solution to be readily available.
Everyone seems to be quick to reduce the gender disparity in seniority/paygrade of jobs occupied to a childcare/parental leave/homemaking question, but is there any data for the single, infertile or asexual segment of the population to back this up?
My impression always has been that long before parenting even starts being relevant, there is a difference between the genders in terms of readiness to engage in self-sacrificial or -destructive behaviour for the sake of self-realisation and status climbing (which is often correlated to pay in one way or another). Regardless of whether this difference is predominantly biological or cultural and which gender deserves the "blame" for it if it is the latter, I think that any attempt to reduce the disparity by policymaking should at least try to address this.
"I have to say, wouldn’t it be nice if these options were in addition to, instead of a replacement for, higher salaries?"
That was a kind of pointless observation. I too would like a pony.
Obviously the jobs with both flexible work options _and_ high salaries are going to be very fiercely competed for, since they're the best jobs to have.
Nursing is a field dominated by women. And there are very large salary gaps between nurses with 0-10 years of experience and nurses with 10-20 years of experience. I'd also bet that there are much more women with 10-20 years of experience than men. So if you broke it down in the same way as the tech industry and did not control for job title or years of experience, you'd find a reverse gender gap in the same way you see in the tech industry. Controlled for job title and experience, you'd probably find it equal just like this study shows. I don't think there is any more discrimination in the tech industry when it comes to salaries than there is in nursing. I think both do not suffer from gender discrimination.
That's good news if true, the women who make it and get promoted earn the same as their counterparts. Still lots of work to be done removing the barriers that keep them from getting these jobs and promotions in the first place.
> What does still exist is a position gap as researched in earlier years.
This is key and should probably be mentioned in the title. People of different genders in the same position have similar salaries. It's the disparity in positions they attain that creates a wage gap.
Controlling for "job title" basically makes this invalid; if men are being promoted more often at the same experience/education level and consequently making more that is obviously a gender gap.
Edit: "invalid" is maybe a strong word for the study itself - the headline "no wage gap exists" is definitely invalid, but the actual results are interesting.
That's not the issue; the issue is the hiring gap in tech jobs and reasons behind it.
The film "Code: Debugging the Gender Gap" does an excellent job of documenting the phenomenon. Nationally, young women taking high school placement tests score as well or better than their male classmates, but are placed in advanced math and science classes at a much, much lower rate. Because of this, the number of female high school graduates who meet academic requirements for university STEM programs is much lower, and so on though graduate school until the number of qualified female candidates for jobs in STEM fields has dwindled to nearly nothing.
I wish I could find it but I saw a study that said when you take out hazzard pay for dangerous jobs and the jobs which experience the largest number of work related deaths, there was no pay gap by gender.
If anyone knows the study I am taking about, I'd love to take a closer look at it.
No gap in pay for the same position. But the position gap is still alive and well. Also called the glass ceiling. So, the average women in tech are paid less than men. The title is quite misleading.
Does anyone have a link to reliable breakdowns of different professions by race and gender? Tech gets slammed particularly hard for being "white male cishet scum" and I'd love to see how it compares to other fields. I can't imagine fields like law or nursing or mining or teaching or policing are much more equal.
From my anecdotal data, what I noticed the last few years I worked in Texas was that I was seeing a pretty remarkable influx of middle eastern women filling technology roles.
These women were some of the most competent people I've had the opportunity to work with. If you go out and have a drink and a conversation with some of them, you'll find out that they: feel like they have two strikes against them in the U.S. and in technology.
Their response is to work really effing hard to get insanely good at what they do. And it works for them. Most of the people I'm thinking of right now had higher titles and salaries than the males they work with.
I'm not arguing that there's no discrimination or anything stupid like that. But I do think there is some nuance to the situation. For example, the leadership and culture isn't driven by them, even if they are at the top end of the individual contributor spectrum.
It's a tough nut to crack. Knowing that you have certain knocks against you can have different effects for different people. One person can look at a situation and say, "What's the point? I'm not going to be successful because of gender/education(or lack of it, in my case)/ethnicity/company culture/whatever.
Other people look at that as part of the fun in life. Bucking the odds, overthrowing stereotypes. I don't know that there's a strong gender correlation with these attitudes.
But in my very non-representative experience, where you get hired and how much you make in the technology field are not consistently tied to whether you have boobs or if you have a college degree, or if you're a privileged white male, or if you're a recent immigrant.
I would not argue that the situation is all roses for women and minorities in this country. But I don't think it's as bad as is sometimes portrayed.
I think that the real race and gender discrimination start in early life education. Women are not-so-subtly guided in different directions than men are. And many minorities just don't have much of a chance because our education and social mechanisms are mostly just crap.
The imbalances that we do see in the job market are a direct result of our inadequate and unequal social and educational systems. The market is reflecting the values that we've decided on.
[+] [-] ahoy|10 years ago|reply
Coming out of uni/grad school, male and female salaries are equal in comparable fields. They depart a few years after that. Women tend to find themselves funneled into specific career paths that prioritize flexible hours and often pay less. Men face an opposite pressure - toward inflexible hours but higher pay. This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men.
That doesn't mean the "gender gap" doesn't exist, or that it isn't an issue to address. It means that the way we tackle it isn't as simple as "pass a law mandating equal pay for equal work".
We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules. We need to upend the idea that family care is solely the domain of women (normalizing parental leave for fathers with newborns is a good start).
*edited for typos
[+] [-] losteric|10 years ago|reply
My question is, what happens if many women and men aren't funneled towards those roles? What if it's a natural preference given our evolutionary history? I'm not saying that's the case, and my parents had no problems reversing nurturing roles over 20 years ago... but given our hyper-"PC" society, I am curious how far society's responsibilities extend.
What happens when a particular group innately prefers a certain type of work that the market values lowly? Are they irrational agents suffering by their own hands? Should society subsidize their job? Do we try to re-educate the group into following economically valued jobs? What about other people that have the same job for different reasons?
[+] [-] Lawtonfogle|10 years ago|reply
It also doesn't account for full time covering a wide number of hours worked. Full time can be 37 hours a week or 45 hours a week, can comparing them as both just being 'full time' misses quite a lot.
>This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men.
How it is more often foisted upon women? The social pressure on men to take deadly jobs and to work longer hours is equal to the social pressure on women to choose careers where they can take time off and be with their kids. If anything, I rather be with my kid than stuck an extra 20 hours in the office... one of these pressures is for something most people find more desirable than the other.
>We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules.
So are we aiming for more men to take flexible schedules or for pay to not suffer when someone takes flexible schedules? Because if you want the former, it is more about the pressure to earn than the stigma on flexible work schedules. And if it is the latter, how is this fair to the people who don't get the flexible work schedules? I think the deeper problem is why are women forced in the child care role and men into the bread winning roles and how to fix that (which you do mention).
[+] [-] ultramancool|10 years ago|reply
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...
[+] [-] jfaucett|10 years ago|reply
I disagree. The primary cause is that women can become pregnant - the possibility alone is in most cases enough - in which case they leave the work force for X amount of time. Depending on country, laws, and personal preferences this time period can range from a few weeks to years. In some countries when this hypothetical becomes a reality it can have a large negative impact on the employer. For instance, in Germany the woman's job position must be held open for her until she decides to return to work (possibly years later), not to mention the full salary compensation months before and after giving-birth, when she is no longer working.
But to simplify it down to flatland, lets assume a woman were to just take 1 day off before giving birth, have a job that required no movement or lifting, and the employer didn't have to compensate her. Still, in this simplest case, a woman is at a disadvantage compared to a man.
Because of this biological disadvantage, I think there will never be the sort of absolute equality we want until people are born in tubes or the capitalistic employer/employee relationship changes.
[+] [-] stvswn|10 years ago|reply
My wife is very smart and capable of making a high salary. She chose a flexible job path and took several years off to be with our children in their younger years. We could certainly afford otherwise; our family would have more money had she decided to go the childcare route. It's just our choice, she has no regrets. It wasn't "foisted" upon her. In fact, it's the happiest she's ever been.
Is there something wrong with a woman prioritizing motherhood? Why does it feel to me that these conversations always frame parenting as some kind of tragedy that disrupts an otherwise successful career?
By the same token, I am very motivated to make enough money so that she can continue to stay home with our kids as long as she likes. I like seeing her and my kids happy. Should I be forced to slow down because this is unfair to women at my office?
This all seems crazy to me. Having kids is a blessing. I totally agree that people shouldn't feel a pressure to do it the "traditional" way or any other way for that matter -- I like when men are given the flexibility to take care of their children in support of their wives' careers. I just don't agree that slowing down one's career in order to prioritize parenthood is a problem that needs to be fixed.
[+] [-] RodericDay|10 years ago|reply
Even if you have a stereotypical breadwinner/housewife relationship, you are legally mandated to take time off, even if you don't want to. That way you avoid the "you're allowed to take paternal leave, but real go-getters don't!" game altogether.
edit: The way I see it, the responses just prove my point. "This would just make people discriminate against x!". That's exactly why it needs to be mandatory, affecting more people, so the issue doesn't become invisible based on it affecting only women.
[+] [-] paganel|10 years ago|reply
Don't have a kid, but I would think that an infant is better off having his mother close to him in his early months of life compared to having his father, for the simple biological reason that the mother can breast-feed, while a father can't. From what I remember reading kids who are breast-fed tend to do better in life in terms of health or being better from a psylogical point of view.
[+] [-] shawn-butler|10 years ago|reply
Women tend to find themselves funneled into specific career paths that prioritize flexible hours and often pay less. Men face an opposite pressure - toward inflexible hours but higher pay. This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men.
>>
I see no evidence to support this "funnel" at all in my life/work experience.
Workers on "flex" schedules in the tech sector underperform by a wide margin. I see little or no reason why I should prop up someone else's life / work choices with my own labor.
[+] [-] parennoob|10 years ago|reply
Put another way, we need to upend the idea that hazardous and arduous jobs (often involving hard physical labor) are only the domain of men, and encourage more women to participate in industries like mining, firefighting, welding, truck driving, and construction.
[+] [-] wisty|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panglott|10 years ago|reply
Maybe the tech industry is just immune to this, but this article is basically a press release with no information about data or methodology.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|10 years ago|reply
It still doesn't feel like it's enough. I'm exhausted today, despite taking a mid-day nap. When I go back next week, I will not be at my best, and there's no way of me being at my best short of sleeping in another room with earplugs while my wife does 100% of the (often literal) heavy lifting of child care.
[+] [-] ecobiker|10 years ago|reply
It included an interview from Claudia Goldin and her research[2] which was quite in-depth.
[1] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender... [2] [PDF] http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/gender_equalit...
[+] [-] toomanybeersies|10 years ago|reply
Statistics New Zealand calculates the gender wage gap by comparing the hourly earnings, rather than weekly/yearly earnings. This helps to take into account the fact that women tend to work less hours (for various reasons, and is a completely different conversation). [0]
Interestingly, the gap when comparing the entire workforce with this measure is 10% in NZ, and comparing full time employment drops to 5.6% (the lowest in the OECD) [1].
One thing that needs to be considered when comparing the wage gap is that >90% of workplace fatalities are men [2], and that men tend to work much more physical jobs, causing of greater rate in workplace injuries and problems later in life, just think of how many older people you know with hearing loss from work, and how the vast majority of them are men.
[0]: http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/income-and-work/In...
[1]: http://women.govt.nz/our-work/utilising-womens-skills/income...
[2]: https://doe.state.wy.us/lmi/0305/a1.htm
[+] [-] nxzero|10 years ago|reply
Given that there's more female that graduate now, there's still bias in the process, just not the bias people hope to find.
[+] [-] ownagefool|10 years ago|reply
Now I'll admit I don't have kids, but every partner I've had has had the same view that they'd want me to continue going to work whilst they were stay at home. Any argument to the contrary is often met by the simple fact that said child would have been carried to term by them.
If you accept that as a possbility then we're starting to look at mens rights issue. Is it fair that men have less parental rights? Overall, I'd say no. Are we going to get support for these issues? Probably not.
Obviously in a better world I imagine we'd share a pool of parental leave. People should have the choice but I'd still expect the pool to largely be utilised by females because they want it that way and it's hard to argue otherwise.
[+] [-] forgetsusername|10 years ago|reply
"Solely" might be a bit strong, but I don't think this is merely an "idea". It's reality. Women do the majority of child-rearing, pretty much across all species. When it comes to us humans and our bizarre, work-driven lives, their careers suffer for it. I never understood why that is so hard to understand, or why it's controversial.
>We need to de-stigmatize flexible schedules
Totally agree. But I'd put much of that blame on "us", not our employers. If we weren't such a consumerist, money-driven society, perhaps more people would be willing to work those flex-hours at less pay, but increased happiness.
[+] [-] facepalm|10 years ago|reply
Why the passive - couldn't they actively be choosing specific career paths?
"This is in large part because care for family members(children and elderly parents usually) is more often foisted upon women in our society than on men."
Again, why the "foisted"? Especially for children it doesn't make sense: if it is such an unpleasant task, why not simply choose not to have children? Care for parents might end up in women's hands because they already made the choices for more flexible time (and less income) earlier on.
Instead of "foisted", it seems possible that women simply more often get the option to choose (because they were the ones who were pregnant), and men don't.
[+] [-] EGreg|10 years ago|reply
Why not have a flexible work schedule for both spouses, so they can raise their children? Better yet, in traditional societies (including Soviet Russia), the grandma often watched the kids instead of some teenage babysitter. The kids grew up with more respect for elders that way. Not only that, but the grandparents weren't shipped off to some nursing home so the adults could work two jobs unimpeded.
[+] [-] norea-armozel|10 years ago|reply
Don't certain EU countries already have this in some capacity? Honestly, I think the problem with leave benefits here in the States is the fact we treat them as a privilege rather than as some form of non-monetary compensation. IMO, if I could have an comparable set of leave benefits with a lower salary (assuming leave here would have to be set to market rate for my time I would've otherwise been working to make this an equatable exchange) I probably would take it. I like my free time. I'm sure older workers would love it too if it worked well for them if they were more focused on semi-retirement.
[+] [-] mbostleman|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thescribe|10 years ago|reply
Why do we 'need' to do this? Jobs with very rigid shifts should be at a premium shouldn't they?
[+] [-] walshemj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zarkov99|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caublestone|10 years ago|reply
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/who-are-...
Increasing minimum wage would effectively increase the 77% number also.
[+] [-] abraca|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whiddershins|10 years ago|reply
If there were an institutional bias against women tech workers, one way it could manifest is by women receiving less recognition and promotions, or being hired in to lower positions with the same skills and experience. Which would mean they might typically have a lower job title than the equivalent male worker, so controlling for job title could hide the bias.
I'm not saying this is or isn't the case, but it is a rather blatant possibility that isn't addressed by what is seeming like a naive study.
[+] [-] reversecs|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _jmar777|10 years ago|reply
While those are certainly relevant control factors, I would presume that any conclusions are premature without demonstrating a lack of bias in the actual positions men vs. women are promoted to, relative to their experience and education.
I.e., large disparities in salary by gender for "Software Engineer III" within the same organization are a bit hard to overlook, whereas there are often much fuzzier criteria involved in who has that title in the first place.
Not looking to necessarily refute the article, but the control factors themselves are still rather variable.
[+] [-] api_or_ipa|10 years ago|reply
I'm not a social scientist and nor am I particularly well versed in the quagmire of social & gender obligations, so I'll keep out of making a normative judgement on this topic.
Suffice to say, in Tech, the longer you spend at the office, the more you appear to be motivated and hardworking. I fear that might just be too ingrained in management psyches for a solution to be readily available.
[+] [-] 4bpp|10 years ago|reply
My impression always has been that long before parenting even starts being relevant, there is a difference between the genders in terms of readiness to engage in self-sacrificial or -destructive behaviour for the sake of self-realisation and status climbing (which is often correlated to pay in one way or another). Regardless of whether this difference is predominantly biological or cultural and which gender deserves the "blame" for it if it is the latter, I think that any attempt to reduce the disparity by policymaking should at least try to address this.
[+] [-] brongondwana|10 years ago|reply
That was a kind of pointless observation. I too would like a pony.
Obviously the jobs with both flexible work options _and_ high salaries are going to be very fiercely competed for, since they're the best jobs to have.
[+] [-] leeleelee|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiaro|10 years ago|reply
Nope. Male nurses still make more, which, with respect to your post, is a strong data point in favor of the discrimination hypothesis.
[+] [-] samd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elbigbad|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] borgchick|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|10 years ago|reply
This is key and should probably be mentioned in the title. People of different genders in the same position have similar salaries. It's the disparity in positions they attain that creates a wage gap.
[+] [-] itsdrewmiller|10 years ago|reply
Edit: "invalid" is maybe a strong word for the study itself - the headline "no wage gap exists" is definitely invalid, but the actual results are interesting.
[+] [-] robbyking|10 years ago|reply
The film "Code: Debugging the Gender Gap" does an excellent job of documenting the phenomenon. Nationally, young women taking high school placement tests score as well or better than their male classmates, but are placed in advanced math and science classes at a much, much lower rate. Because of this, the number of female high school graduates who meet academic requirements for university STEM programs is much lower, and so on though graduate school until the number of qualified female candidates for jobs in STEM fields has dwindled to nearly nothing.
[+] [-] thekevan|10 years ago|reply
If anyone knows the study I am taking about, I'd love to take a closer look at it.
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rqebmm|10 years ago|reply
source:http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm
[+] [-] coldtea|10 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDj_bN0L8XM
[+] [-] RA_Fisher|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kdkooo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kough|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elchief|10 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/25/the-s...
And for Asian women vs non-Asian women (vs men):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/06/why-i...
[+] [-] ianamartin|10 years ago|reply
These women were some of the most competent people I've had the opportunity to work with. If you go out and have a drink and a conversation with some of them, you'll find out that they: feel like they have two strikes against them in the U.S. and in technology.
Their response is to work really effing hard to get insanely good at what they do. And it works for them. Most of the people I'm thinking of right now had higher titles and salaries than the males they work with.
I'm not arguing that there's no discrimination or anything stupid like that. But I do think there is some nuance to the situation. For example, the leadership and culture isn't driven by them, even if they are at the top end of the individual contributor spectrum.
It's a tough nut to crack. Knowing that you have certain knocks against you can have different effects for different people. One person can look at a situation and say, "What's the point? I'm not going to be successful because of gender/education(or lack of it, in my case)/ethnicity/company culture/whatever.
Other people look at that as part of the fun in life. Bucking the odds, overthrowing stereotypes. I don't know that there's a strong gender correlation with these attitudes.
But in my very non-representative experience, where you get hired and how much you make in the technology field are not consistently tied to whether you have boobs or if you have a college degree, or if you're a privileged white male, or if you're a recent immigrant.
I would not argue that the situation is all roses for women and minorities in this country. But I don't think it's as bad as is sometimes portrayed.
I think that the real race and gender discrimination start in early life education. Women are not-so-subtly guided in different directions than men are. And many minorities just don't have much of a chance because our education and social mechanisms are mostly just crap.
The imbalances that we do see in the job market are a direct result of our inadequate and unequal social and educational systems. The market is reflecting the values that we've decided on.