Slashdot Mirror
All Else Being Equal: Disputing Claims of a Gender Pay Gap In Tech
An anonymous reader writes "Synthia Tan writes that when you investigate the actual data, controlling for non-gender factors (like number of hours worked) the gender pay gap seems to disappear. 'A longitudinal study of female engineers in the 1980s showed a wage penalty of essentially zero.' In some cases women make more than men: women who work between 30 and 39 hours a week make 111% of what their male counterparts make." The researchers were studying more recent data, too; what are things like on this front where you work?
I really have no idea what any of my colleagues earn (within salary bands), but I have no reason to think there is a difference. Certainly both make and female seem to be as happy with their packages.
I haven't even heard of a study that says there is a significant wage gap for at least a decade. When accounting for career, hours worked, experience, etc. the worst I have heard is a 3% wage gap. When you factor in that women are known to negotiate less for salary the gap probably disappears completely.
The focus now needs to be on why women don't enter as many high paying fields (and whether that is even a problem at all). Focusing on the wage gap is pretty silly now.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
From a very small sample set, women seem more into the whole work/life balance thing and are more burdened by their life schedule. Guys seem more into the live at work and make a tonne of money but have no life thing.
I've been discriminated against because of both my gender and my religion, but I have NEVER been paid less than my male colleagues. I may not have had the opportunities to grow given to me, but I've always made good money. In my current job I'm one of the highest paid people on my contract. My personal experience is that there's no pay gap - do your job and get paid accordingly,.
Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, which is why engineers sometimes smell really bad.
I have 2 junior engineers and 2 engineers-in-training working for me. One of each sex (like Noah's Ark really) and men and women in each job class are paid the same. I have one senior guy who is paid more, but he has 25 years in the field and a lot more knowledge and skills.
Even if this is true, it will be labelled misogyny and never be accepted by rabid feminists.
This was pretty evident to anyone, except ardent feminists, policy makers who want to regulate and control everything and people without even the most basic grasp of statistics. Good to see that there is now a peer-reviewed study that explicitly debunks the gender-related salary gap myth.
When you control for species, there are no differences between humans and lizards.
It's good that sexual discrimination legislation has (mostly) sorted out the problem of women not being paid the same for equal work. That doesn't change the fact that, on the whole, there's a salary gap. As the linked article points out, some big factors out of this are the fact that women tend to leave their jobs more early, to have more intermittent commitments to work. The article seems quite content to leave the implication that, basically, this means that it's all the fault of women for just not caring about their career enough. Much more relevant would be an examination of why women are more likely to have this lack of commitment, and whether e.g. bullying in the work place, or unfavourable maternity/paternity leave arrangements are contributing to this. In the UK, for example, the statutes are actually quite sexist in this regard: statutory maternity leave is available for a year, but statutory paternity leave is only available for at most half a year, and that requires that the mother return to work; otherwise it is only two weeks. Which means that, should a couple wish to start a family, it is necessarily the mother that is going to take the brunt of time away from work and the perceived lack of career commitment that will result.
Of course anyone who has looked into the actual data has already discovered the amazing level of lies directed at the male in our society - and keeping him 2nd class. Just ask yourself - just how hard and how long did you have to work to earn your shot at reproduction.. and your sister? Did she just have to find some guy to enslave (18-24 years) .. that's the level or parity we have. Open eyes please.
Men 'earn' more. Normalized. The gap is life choice, not gender.
Actual decent information may be found at www.avoiceformen.com
The level of this is clear and disgusting. In the last year or so I have been staggering at what I realize was brain washing (that we all get! and still kids are.) otherwise this would leap out at you. Instead you will ignore and dismiss - most will.
My crazy comments here: http://www.salon.com/profile/S...
As a manger in the tech field, I state for the record there is no pay gap. Starting pay is based on someone’s ability to negotiate and raises are based on skill. As far as a pay difference over all, a recent study says the entire pay gap is easily explained by choices of work. Women historically have selected employment that pays less. Teachers make less than engineers. The percentage of women in the teaching field is higher as is the percentage of men in the engineering field. Thus, if averaged just men vs women, men on average make more (in that example). However drawing that as a conclusion is erroneous, so people just need to get over themselves and do their best.
A recent news article essentially compared the median income for men and women in the geographical area, and claimed that women in tech make about half what men do. That's a more obvious screw up.
But, in general, for "new hires" the salaries are at parity, and I would expect that this has been the case for the last 10-20 years
The real discrimination is in promotion practices and the slow trickle up to higher pay grades. And in some industries, your "work hours" have a very large effect on that: If you're in marketing, the more time you spend beating the streets, the more success you will have (all other things being equal); If you're a developer, the more time you spend developing, the higher the probability that you'll be associated with a successful project/product and/or be able to demonstrate your skills and develop new ones.
There is well documented evidence that women (in general) spend less time at work than men (in general), both in a day to day sense and in over years sense. For a large part, I think this is because of cultural norms (women as caregivers) more than inherent discrimination by tech companies. Sure, tech companies can reinforce it (rigid schedules, etc.), but it's a bigger cultural issue than just "evil what male overlords".
There's also a very difficult to control for effect due to the phenomenon that your salary tends to be tied to whatever you made at your first job. If you were lucky enough to get hired during a boom, with high salary, you'll have high salary for the rest of your life (until you quit, are laid off, or retire). If you were hired during a low wage period, then your salary will be low. Most companies for lack of a better strategy do a "everyone gets the same small percentage increase", and the same applies when changing jobs. Sure, there are exceptions, but when looking at mass statistics, it's "most companies" and "average toiler" that make up the population.
I may get accused of being a sexist and all for saying this, but it's been my experience that a feminist vision of "equality" is very different from my definition. "Equality" in their mind is getting all the perks of being a woman (men fawning over you and buying you free food and drinks, sexual power, the taboo on physically attacking you, etc.) while simultaneously also getting all the perks of being a man (higher breadwinner pay, political power, etc.)--and all without having to suffer ANY of the downsides of either gender.
In short, they want it ALL, they want it NOW, and they want it all for FREE.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
About 15 years ago I was routinely paid 30% less than my male colleagues. There just didn't seem to be a reasonable explanation. So I started a company with another woman. Seemed to solve the problem.
If I could hire females with the same qualifications, same productivity, and willing to work the same hours why would I hire a male if I could pay females 75%? We could cut payroll by 25% by just hiring women. I believe that misogyny exists, but i doubt it would be enough to increase payroll by 25%. Even the most misogynistic business owner would hire just females to save on costs. Since this isn't the case, we know women are not being paid less than their male counterparts generally.
I was under the impression that one of the issue was that women are less likely to get offered exciting projects, overtime, etc. etc. so they wind up stuck in relatively junior positions doing limited hours.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Forbes and WSJ pointed this out a couple of years ago:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/re...
If you actually look at how much work is done and actual years worked (not just age) etc. the gap disappears. Actually, according to the summary here there *is* a gap as women get paid more. I'm sure the feminists and looney lefters will want to fix this new problem. Not.
Do you have ESP?
The big qualifier left out of the summary - the original article describes how the wage gap has gone *in the tech sector*. The article doesn't claim equity in the economy in general. "According to the study, there are seven professions with pay equity".
What that means to me isn't that all work is done, but it does mean that we (techies) are at the forefront of that. We as an industry find ourselves in the enviable position of being a role model - something we haven't acheived lately regarding gender relations.
I would hate to be judged on my hours worked. Sometimes I am less efficient than others and have to work more hours, sometimes I am more efficient and have to work less. I have generally been salary, generally been expected to work enough to get my work done, and generally been paid for the getting work done. Now, if I were a paper pusher then the hours worked would be a good metric. If I were a check out person at walmart then the hours worked would be a good metric. But hours worked has never seemed to me a good metric for technical people, unless you are talking about the geek squad.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Why would employers be hiring so many overpriced men?
You're gonna be in trouble. I'm telling.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Making any sort of statement AT ALL that suggests men and women are treated equally these days will result in the wrath of the Social Justice Warriors! You will be required to check your privilege (can't carry it on per TSA regulations) and will be labelled as sexist scum!
There are a few key points to this argument. One, feminist assholes love to mess with the math to make things that aren't true seem true. They're always perpetual victims in their own minds no matter what the real math says.
Secondly, if you aren't getting paid what you want, get a different job. In fact, don't take the job in the first place. The (pretend) wage difference problem is solved!
Third, I don't get months and months free time off constantly like women do every time they get pregnant. That's why every company in the world hires a man for a job over a woman. You can't afford to lose someone for months at a time in important positions.
She hates to be reminded of the fact that she can't be working more then 6 hours a day. Yet she has a way of making sure that all my surplus hours are carefully filled in with me doing extra tasks like grocery shopping, going to the doctor with the kids etc... She get's to appreciate both sides of the spectrum all in her advantage.
When you control for working hours and years of experience (as opposed to simply age - women more often take time off work to raise children), there hasn't been a male/female pay gap for decades. However, this is not PC. Feminists don't want to hear that they're done, that they have long since achieved their goals, and that feminism has become counterproductive. Hence, the studies that show this are routinely ignored, and certainly never publicized.
Taking months or years off for child raising, or working only part time, or refusing to travel - none of these things should affect your career or your pay. It ought to be possible to drop out of the workforce at 25, raise your kids full-time for 20 years, and then rejoin the workforce as a senior manager.
It makes as much sense as the rest of the progressive agenda...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I guess the race to pay everyone as little as possible has leveled the pay out!
I know, troll. But I'm serious. It's a factor in manpower planning, especially in smaller teams.
There's none so blind as those who refuse to see. Studies showing the pay disparity disappears when you account for "non-gender" differences have been around for decades, but they have always been ignored, as this one will be, because they don't advance the prejudicial concept that men are bad.
Yeah, sure.
All employers are evil-bad. Not only to they pay women less, because they want to maximize profit, they pay men more because the want to ... uhhh ... Hmmm ... Be bad to women!
(moving past the logical inconsistency, nothing to see here)
So, in conclusion, employers are bad!
If women really did get paid only $0.75 per a man's $1 and yet performed equally to men then I must ask you - which businessman would not hire all women seeing as they are 25% off! The so called gender pay gap is just a myth that women attempt to use to get more money for nothing. Warren Ferrell's book, Why Men Earn More, explains all of this.
I applaud the author for trying to keep things even and dig into the numbers, but she missed two rather critical things.
The first thing she touched on was women staying in STEM. She dismisses this as personal choice and finding something 'more fulfilling', but most women I have talked to that dropped out of STEM did so more because of problems they encountered with coworkers and managers. They did not really want to leave the industry in order to take a lower paying job in another field, but they found treatment to be pretty bad and opportunities to be fairly restricted.
And that brings us to the second point, opportunities. While it is true that actual pay for the same job tends to be fairly even, advancement opportunities for women still tend to be pretty limited. The same quality of work is often praised more for a male then a female and men are generally seen more as 'management material' and 'leaders', while the same leadership behaviors in women are often dismissed as being 'bitchy'. Dominance is often rewarded in men and punished for women, which results in fewer women getting those higher paying jobs within the same organization.
They took a look at the single guy, fresh out of college, who wails himself against a wall for that extra few percent and they are like: have it! They apparantly figured it out awhile ago that getting that last few percent relates to an exponential increase in effort and it's just not worth it. Why work 60+ hours a week (+50% increase in hours) for a +7% increase in pay?
About time somebody said this.. Ladies, if you want to get paid well, study the HARD STUFF; maths,science, engineering, computer science, medicine etc.... My mom was an engineer, and she never complained about wage disparity..
Let's pretend that's true. Let's pretend most families are like that. They aren't, but let's pretend you're right.
Bob works for me, and he puts in 60 hours / week when needed, 50 hours average. His wife, Sally, works for a competing company, you. She leaves at 3:00 to pick up the kid from school. Are you going to pay Sally as much as I pay Bob, because she has a good excuse? As your competition, I sure hope so because you'll go broke that way. Bob, working those long hours, produces twice as much.
You know what's funny? In that "traditional family" where mom takes care of the house and kids, they don't even CARE if both paychecks are the same. They go into the couple's bank account anyway , so Sally and Bob are perfectly happy if "Bob's" paycheck is three times the size of "Sally's" - either way, it's THEIR money.
Since your working pay is defined by the PHB who, famously, does not know the difference between hours worked and work done, and that the former is the only one easily and therefore routinely used to determine whether you're earning your pay or deserve a promotion, what the FUCK is the point of whinging about the latter not being used?!?
Is this merely so that you can claim it's flawed, because it uses a metric that, despite being better for working out the value of an employee, IS NEVER USED IN REAL LIFE?
If you control for # of hours worked, that's fine and dandy as long as this factor is something NOT based on gender discrimination.
If men get offered longer-hours, and therefore more-annual-pay, jobs or assignments, because they are men or because of some underlying factor where men have an advantage because they are men, then you SHOULD NOT be factoring this out.
If everyone gets offered such assignments without any gender discrimination and men choose to work longer hours, or if the reasons for any differences between what men are offered and what women are offered are all based on things that happened earlier in life that were based on free choices rather than gender discrimination, then you SHOULD factor these out.
Example:
If promotions are offered to those who have current skills for the new job, and those current skills are usually developed by taking extra training classes on the employee's own time, this may seem like a gender-neutral reason for selecting who gets promoted, even if its effect is to have many more of one gender promoted than another. In some environments, it may actually BE a gender-neutral way of selecting who gets promoted.
However, if the company's employee pool has a large number of women who simply do not have the time to take such classes (say, due to being single parents - single moms significantly outnumber single dads in the USA) and the employer either knows this or would have to be willfully blind to not know it, then using "who has current skills for the new job" for internal promotions without finding some way of ensuring everyone has a REAL opportunity to get skills training is, at best, indirect gender discrimination. If it's a deliberate "bwuhahahaha let's see if we can fool everyone into thinking we can play fair while ensuring most promotions go to men bwuhahahaha" deliberate technique, then the company better hope there is no smoking gun or they will lose any related employment lawsuit and probably alienate their customers as well.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Been reading Stormfront, eh?
Here's their 2012 Charity Navigator info.
If you think of the SPLC as a company that shops a product called "tolerance" or "racial equity" (or even "pain and suffering for violent racist assholes") you might think it's a marvelously financially effective organization. What other CEO accepts $300,000 a year for a job that entails multiple assassination attempts and constant harassment? Of course if you are one of the SPLC's targets (and slashdot has always had a vocal racist contingent) you might think differently.
In any case, they are funded almost entirely (99.5%+) by donations freely given. So if you have a problem with them, don't give them money. Maybe the KKK and WAR will send you a thank-you note!
It's subtitled, but has lots of rough language and some nudity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4UWxlVvT1A
I think you might find it relevant to your interests.
Many differences in outcome can be explained by controlling for variables; people who advocate "equality of outcome" don't care. If there are variables that cause unequal outcome, then whatever causes those variables to be different must itself be racist/sexist. Women work fewer hours? It must be a sexist society that allows men to work more hours than women.
Not all companies are crazy software development shops run by 20somethings who don't mind working 100 hour weeks. If you go to a company like that and ask about wage parity, you'll get all the excuses that were posted in this thread -- time off for kiddies, inability to travel, inability to work 100 hour weeks when needed, etc.
The reality is a little different. My wife and I both work, and we have 2 little kids. They take an insane amount of BOTH our time. Both of us have to share the responsibility of sick days, chores around the house and running errands, and especially this winter, snow days. We both have technical jobs, mine in IT, hers in finance. The difference is that we work for companies that don't expect 100 hour weeks. So far, it's worked out as long as one of us isn't taking all the time off work. It's not the 50s anymore -- most companies are mainly concerned with whether you get your work done and less obsessed with the butts-in-seats factor. The trade off for this is that sometimes we end up having to do a little extra work to catch up after the kids go to bed, which sucks when we're dead tired for working AND taking care of the kids. But, we're (at least not publicly) referred to as the one team member who can't get their stuff done.
So it's less of a female wage parity problem, and more of an "old guy/girl with kids" problem. That really bites as the two of us get older. We have to be smarter about the type of companies we choose to work for, and yes, both of us are leaving money on the table compared to the wages in our area. Single people who just graduated and have zero obligations will always have more choices. They can choose to work at an investment bank, or for a consulting firm that will fly them to clients' offices 300 days out of the year. They could go work for EA and fulfill their "lifelong dream to break into the exciting video game industry." These are choices only, not necessarily good or bad ones. It's just that as we get older, if we don't want to ignore our kids, we have to give up some of our options. ECO 101 - opportunity costs.
For fathers that aren't totally disconnected with the responsibility of raising kids, it can be very close to the same amount of extra time off the woman needs. You need to be there for them. It's harder to understand as you get to your late 30s and are still single or married and childless, but in my experience good managers have been able to at least relate. If one of your team members is still doing great work and needs to work a weird schedule, you would be silly to dump them and replace them with a fresh grad who doesn't have the experience but is willing to work themselves to death for you.
First, men and women are not the same. One would think this is obvious, but it is not noticeable when people speak about opportunities. If I thought that there was a chance a woman would get pregnant and require a substantial leave of absence, why would I want to entrust a great deal of responsibility to her? This is not sexist; it is sensible. Women are the compassionate sex. They leave work to take care of aging parents or sick family more often than men. They give birth and raise children. They require more time away from work, so if there is a gap in opportunity because of that, that is understandable and not inequality, but the market adjusting to reflect the difference in the sexes. Trying to treat a woman as a man should be humiliating,not galvanizing.
Did you see the photo of the author, Cynthia Than? She's freaking hot!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Generally speaking women make horrid managers and leads. They are emotional and vindictive and even the majority of honest women will admit that working for a female manager is tough at best. Much like relationships.. if a woman feels "wronged" she wont simply "let it go" but will find some way to make you suffer long after whatever "event" that led her to feel wronged has transpired. More and more people are learning this as we approach this mythological "equality" and it IS reflected in what little play gap actually exists. Sexist.. ya whatever. Its a simple fact and any honest professional knw I speak the truth. Female managers that rule with reason and have the ability to lead without using fear as a tool are few and far between.
What I remember in California was that one had approximately 4 categories of developers: 1. Journeyman level, typical employee, good enough 2. Short term hired guns, contractors 3. H1-b visa guest labor from India, very affordable at the time so very popular 4. Truly exceptional guys, the much talked about rockstar talent For the rockstar guys, they were so much more valuable and productive than the other 3 categories that it was well worth it to pay double the prevailing wages. The interesting thing in hindsight is that these rockstars really were all guys. No women. Given how the arithmetic behind averages works, I can't help but think that the pay packages of male rockstar techies in the U.S. skews the figures. If one removed the top and bottom 10% of the pay data for men and women in tech work, I think you'd find the average pay for men vs. women would be much closer.
WHY does the gender wage gap consistently get rammed down the public's throats?
It has been disputed over, and over, and over again, but it keeps afloat by interests that find it necessary to brainwash the masses. IOW, feminist organizations.
In 2008, the U.S. federal givernment (specifically, the U.S. Dept of Labor) commissioned a non-biased group to research the proposed myth and come back with a final answer. Now keep in mind that this is during President Obama's watch, and he has said in several speeches himself that the gender wage gap exists, so one would assume that this entity researching the answer would side with him and his government.
Not so.
In 2009, CONSAD (the group doing the research) completed their assessment and found with all things being equal, THERE IS NO GENDER WAGE GAP.
The interesting thing with the report is that it was posted on the US Dept. of Labor's web site for all to see for a few weeks, and then mysteiously vanished. It just so happens that a month after it disappeared, President Obama signed into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to combat "gender wage gap" issues.
Coincidence?
Conversely, several studies over the last few years have actually shown that WOMEN in the 20-34yr old age group actually earn MORE than MEN.
What I'd like to know is with all the data (from non-biased resources) showing just the opposite, why do politicians, the media, etc., keep pumping the myth?
I am guessing you are the same rabid feminist who has been commenting all over this post as an AC, yes?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Really?
Wow!
If he only had a pen....
I trust anonymous posts pretending there is no pay gap about as much as I trust the corporations behind the anonymous posters.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The amount of fraud generated by the SPLC is evidence of their character. They wouldn't have to create incidents if any occurred naturally. And like the other race baiters, their "contributions" are usually not quite as voluntary as you might think.
As for these assassination attempts? Citations required.
> Since I actually NO how to run a company ... I would destroy YOU company
I'm glad you _no_ how to run a company, since you don't know basic English. So how exactly is your company doing.
One of mine has 60% market share.
Also? Cynthia Than's headline is the opposite of the conclusion in the research results. A more serious treatment of the structural problems that lead to these gaps.
Also an assertive woman risks being called a "bitch", then women get blamed for not negotiating high enough salaries.
While I also think women don't actually get paid less in general, when taking into consideration other factors, like hours worked (over lifetime), other rewards such as more emotionally gratifying jobs. Women an men are different we may in general look for different qualities in jobs. Is that such a bad thing?
All the surveys I have seen, seem to be look at the average wage of a male, compare it with females, and say oh no we have wage inequality.
But to play devils advocate it, maybe profitable to pay women less money and still hire more men, because women maybe willing to accept less for some physiological reason. (Women in general may be just be less pushy). You still have to hire people, and there is only a limited supply, it is skilled labor which may mean getting the right person may be more important to your bottom line than paying them a bit less. So out of 100 potential employees you pick the best, say 10% are women, assuming random skill level you hire 10% women. Then you negotiate in sexist manner either, consciously or unconsciously.
The simple fact is wages are not fair, they do not accurately reflect skill/effort put into it. If it did why do fund managers get paid millions when their funds under perform the market (basically you would expect trained monkeys to do better). I doubt they work harder than say a fruit pickers either. You may say they have more risk, but that is not really true either, say they loose all your money, as long as they didn't commit a crime while doing it, the worst that will happen is they will have to get normal paying job like the rest of us. If you want fair you are living in the wrong world.
> Not gonna say you're sexist,
Feminist handbook, rule #37: Passive/Aggressive Shaming - "Not gonna say you're sexist" (though you are, just not gonna say it - oops, I did)
> just that you hang out with bad women.
Oh! Not only are you sexist, but you have bad taste in women too.
> What you've just described is the typical gal who hangs out in a bar waiting for Prince Charming to come along and pay her way through life.
Because getting married and having a family is so last millennium. Woman up already!
> My sister was one such woman,
Never miss an opportunity to take cheap shots at your siblings.
> and I viewed her as a negative role model.
Because you can blame all your faults on not having a good role model (Victimhood 101).
> If a woman is hanging out in a bar trying to meet guys, it's because she's a boring person and doesn't have anything else better to do with her life.
Sorry, not just my sister, but *ANY* woman who doesn't behave as I do.
> Women with actual hobbies and interests have no trouble finding men (which is why they're taken), and they tend to be nicer people overall.
Real Woman fallacy (similar to Real Man fallacy). If they're not like me, they're not *REAL* women!
I hate feeding trolls, but sometimes you just have to ;)
Geekoid's sig explains 100% of geekoids posts.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
How many of those careers where there is allegedly no pay gap are civil service, or on contracts where the pay is equalized with civil service?
mark, working for a federal contractor, and yes, my salary *is* dead even with civil service salaries"
Lol
This very study shows a 6.6% wage gap, more than twice the 3% you claim is the "worst" you've seen.
A 6% wage gap is not trivial. Getting a 6% raise or pay cut is generally considered significant. Even if the study is 100% accurate, going from "6.6% gap" to "there is no gap" is simply wrong.
There is no pay gap for those who are talented. At least if a woman was working for me and she could code, or function as a Sr. Systems Engineer I'd pay her whatever is allowed for top contributors.
I just recently read a study about the effect maternity leave has on earning capacity. It seems that taking time off work to have children impacts your earning power in a way that leaves you permanently behind the curve. Interestingly this applies whether you are female (maternity leave) or male (paternity leave). In fact the effect on men is slightly higher than the effect on women.
Notably the top female CEO's (Marissa Mayer etc.) took hardly any time off work when they had children.
pgmer6809
Assuming that a business owner could cut payroll by 25% by hiring all women, unfortunately, he would also see an immediate drop in productivity of about 75%. I have observed in numerous office and work environments that a given work space has a maximum number of females it can have in it before it reaches a critical mass. Once it reaches that point, productively will severely decline, because all of the women will spend all of their time in-fighting, gossiping about each other, and generally doing everything then possibly can to make each other's lives a living hell.
For unskilled labor, you are absolutely right.
For skilled labor though: pay is largely determined by how well you can convince management of your worth. In technology, management or really any white collar area, there are few metrics that really measure how well employees are performing, and management has to go with their perceptions to decide who is on target and who is falling behind and those perceptions can be clouded by all sorts of things that have nothing to do with how much an employee actually deserves.
You can not tell me overpriced employees don't exist; I know plenty who will readily admit to being those overpriced employees. I have no idea where you work, but I think if you take a moment to contemplate it, you'll realize that no one is paid anywhere near what they are actually currently worth to the company.
I have seen one small company where gender was a known factor in deciding which employees were more valuable. Being a small company, salaries were all over the place and they had plenty of overpriced men and a couple overpriced women (I got a lot of this from the accountant who told me nothing about this if asked in court). Luckily this does not seem to be the case across the industry.
We are also assuming throughout this discussion that men and women perform at the same level in tech careers...maybe we _should_ be seeing a pay disparity in one direction or the other and it is shocking that we don't.
Perhaps interestingly the publication that had been on a government website for the Government Accountability Office disappeared shortly after Obama took office after Bush.
For fucks' sake! I can not believe that I have to point out that many of you have let a particular politically motivated group hijack a word that does not mean what you are describing.
Feminist != women
Feminist ! = anyone who fits the quote "they want it ALL, they want it NOW, and they want it all for FREE."
In fact people who fit the quote " they want it ALL, they want it NOW, and they want it all for FREE." really don't believe in equality.
Please stop thinking your wife is not a feminist if
a) she has some form of college or university degree
AND/OR
b) believes that little girls have as much right to an education as little boys
AND/OR
c) believes that a woman should be able to vote
AND/OR
d) believes that a woman has the right to choose who she may or may not be in an intimate relationship with
Those are practical examples of fundamental feminist concepts. Wrap your head around the fact that you are allowing non-feminists to hijack a word.
Ergo, by your logic above, there is no problem with gender pay.
You insist that if there is still a criminal assault that it doesn't matter how seriously it's treated, then I can assert just as validly that if women get paid to do work, then it doesn't matter how much they get.
What!? Women earn procreation rights next!?
What a nut. Pretty soon he'll be pointing at the fact that men have ALWAYS had to earn procreation rights, and now women not only can earn more money at the same job doing the same work - she doesn't even need to spend any of that setting up a home.. just have to find some fool, and then clame a richer fool is the father.
What!? You want equality this side of death!? Ha.
Government employee salaries are set by *LAW*. The President can't create a law. That responsibility (and capability) lies with CONGRESS.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those that divide people into two kinds and the others.
Actually a lot of charities spend most of money on CEO salary/administration, just one example from same site you cited:
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=3698#.UxhegvldUUs
these guys spent only 7% of gathered money on actually helping their cause, remainder was spent on "administration"
maternity leave is not a problem really, risk of maternity leave just gets calculated into salary
well Bob and Sally should between themselves agree who will do what percent of house work, they might even decide to both work 80 hours/week and hire cheap Mexican housekeeper/nany/cook/gardener to do all their housework/childwork if 9 months for bearing a child is problem, they could even use surogat mother or adopt ...
Company should not pay more for less work just because Bob and Sally decide to split work the way they did