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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'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.
Even if this is true, it will be labelled misogyny and never be accepted by rabid feminists.
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.
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?
There's quite a lot of dispute that there was ever a gender based wage gap. Reading Dorothy Dix from the 20s and 30s, she seemed to think that men and women were compensated equivalently at that time, and earlier. Which if you think about it makes sense, if a company could hire one gender for less, why wouldn't they hire that gender exclusively?
Given that, why is the POTUS parroting these myths? Is he planning to mandate higher wages for women and quotas when employers are unwilling to hire these more expensive employees or what?
Why would employers be hiring so many overpriced men?
Kids are only a bigger obligation for women because society expects them to do the majority of care and household work, even when they have full time jobs. If that weren't true, then you would see dads having the same problem and working less hours.
Those are interesting hypotheses, but as you mention, the evidence in the article directly contradicts your first point. It would be interesting if you found a study or something better than your friends to support that point.
And let's be honest, who hasn't had lousy bosses and annoying coworkers? Those are reasons to find another company, not to change careers.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
As for the rest of your post, I refer you to the last line of the article:
this perception is just one more factor discouraging women from entering the tech space.
No beer and no TV make Homer something something
"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."
Hours worked is where I've seen the numbers most distorted. Most studies I've seen talking about pay gap don't account for hours and are based on the premise that most women in opposite sex relationships still opt to take on the role of picking up kids from school and such instead of their partner and so do less hours, but as this is omitted from the study the claim is made that they're paid less. Certainly in the UK few studies seem to take in hours worked, most just take the sex, the profession, and the annual salary and do nothing more than that.
So the issue of disparity in most cases is that in most couples it's still the female that is taking on the role of housewife but this is entirely a choice between couples and not a workplace problem in the slightest beyond the fact that this also impacts womens career progression because statistically you're more likely to know the company better the more hours you spend there, and hence be a more suitable candidate for promotion, hence why women are less likely to be promoted - because they're also more likely to be less committed to work and more committed to home.
The fact is some feminists want women to be able to take the housewife option, do less hours, AND still get paid as much as their male colleagues working longer hours and it's this that distorts the argument and makes the whole discussion nonsensical most of the time.
I don't pretend sexism doesn't exist and isn't a problem, I've certainly witnessed women suffer sexism in the workplace and have called it out when I've seen it, though I've also witnessed women abuse their sexual attractiveness to gain promotion with stupid sexually desperate male bosses too so I'm not overly convinced those two things don't balance out and I believe both need to be eliminated as far as possible.
The real key issue is getting a better balance between males and females that act as home makers vs. breadwinners if we want to see things balance out. Heeding calls for quotas based on statistically fraudulent studies that omit things that make it like for like such as hours worked though simply build resentment and have the opposite effect of making members of each sex view each other equally in the workplace.