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As Amazon Grows In Seattle, Pay Equity For Women Declines
reifman writes Amazon's hiring so quickly in Seattle that it's on pace to employ 45,000 people or seven percent of the city. But, 75% of these hires are male. While Seattle women earned 86 cents per dollar earned by men in 2012, today, they make only 78 cents per dollar. In "Amageddon: Seattle's Increasingly Obvious Future", I review these and other surprising facts about Amazon's growing impact on the city: we're the fastest growing — now larger than Boston, we have the fastest rising rents, the fourth worst traffic, we're only twelfth in public transit, we're the fifth whitest and getting whiter, we're experiencing record levels of property crime and the amount of office space under construction has nearly doubled to 3.2 million square feet in the past year.
I bet Amazon has a lot of computer-programmer hires, and would love to hire more women and to pay them computer-programmer salaries to program computers. And I know that there are women programmers out there. I've seen and worked with several in my career. Like coders in general, some are incompetent, some are incredibly competent. The big difference is that not a single female programmer I've worked with was white, or even native to the United States.
Just my $0.03. Blame Computer Engineer Barbie if you'd like. :P
Except that when you look at pay equity with relation to what role/job they pay, this feminist bullshit disappears.
When you look at the overall without understanding it at all.....it looks like we live in a sexist society because women choose more emotionally rewarding careers than financially rewarding.
...And another law that the first person to criticize the term "SJW" is almost always a white male.
Go, my white knight brother! Relieve your white guilt by apologizing in the ghetto! Alleviate the pain of your oppressor privilege by carrying a sign in some march in Ferguson, Missouri! Go forth to a womyn's rights rally and stand beside a butch lesbian as a compatriot, so that you, my noble knight, might make up for the crippling misdeeds of your evil white male ancestors!
Equality of opputunity not outcome matters.
Also, correlation does not imply causation. Is amazon paying women less for same job?
A relative of mine is a Veterinarian.
When he graduated in the '80s 80% of Vets were male. They worked from 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM or longer - often six days a week.
Today, 80% of Vets are female. Rather than working long hours, they often choose to have a family and work part-time. The net result is that 4-5 female vets do the job of one male vet.
This is not a bad thing. They get to have both a career and be at home for their families.
The net result though, it that their incomes are substantially lower than a male vet's would be.
Is this wrong? No. Is this a new way of having a work-life balance? Yes.
*** Don't be dull.***
The entire 'article' reeks of class envy and jealousy nothing more than that. It's sounds like a socialist cry to arms more than anything else.
Women are not paid less if they are doing the same jobs and spending the same time doing them as men do, otherwise businesses would only hire women if they could actually pay them less to do the same exact shit.
Amazon is a company, it's not its job 'to create diversity' in any way, it already does more than any socialist ever could to grow the economy by hiring people, by paying them wages, by offering cheap products to everybody, including those very women and minorities that this garbage 'article' is yapping about.
The women who use Amazon likely already save more than 25% on their purchases compared to what they would have to pay if there was no Amazon at all. If 'investing in public transit' made Amazon money and was actually fucking legal in the fucking socialist/fascist ran cities, Amazon could certainly get into that business, but it's not clear that it could profit a retailer to get into transportation business. Should a chip manufacturer get into sewer business? Should a pastry chef get into electronics repair business?
Just because more white qualified males apply to Amazon than minorities or women do doesn't mean that this somehow is Amazon's problem to fix and that it is even a problem in the first place. I am sure there are jobs that minorities and women apply for in overwhelming numbers compared to white males.
If Amazon is not retaining people at the same rate as Microsoft for example (mentioned in this garbage 'article'), it doesn't mean Amazon is mistreating anybody, it means that Amazon gives people an opportunity to find a low level job that others wouldn't provide to those very people. Can the people that are hired by Amazon be hired by Microsoft? I doubt it very much. However once they worked for Amazon maybe their chances of being hired by other companies increase quite a bit, after all, if a year later people quit it means they can now find better jobs that they couldn't a year before, so Amazon is doing a fine job training people, giving them the lower run of the ladder to step on.
If it was up to the author of this garbage 'article', Amazon maybe would have the same hiring practices as Microsoft, but then where would all the people that Amazon hires right now find their first jobs?
Philanthropy has nothing on running a successful business and providing products/services that people are willing to pay for. It's easy to give away money to people, it's hard making money. Making money requires providing enough customer satisfaction to offset your costs, giving money away requires nothing of the sort. Everybody likes getting free lunch, but paying for lunch means that the people paying value it enough to give their money in exchange for that lunch and it's much harder to provide that type of satisfaction than to provide free money. Philanthropy destroys capital that otherwise can be used to increase real customer satisfaction and that's a crime as far as I am concerned. Africa will not get better with hand outs, it will get better with real business growth and opportunities provided by business growth.
As to the fucking ridiculous advices from this garbage 'article', they stink socialism so high, it's should be embarrassing even to most socialists. 'Advocate for an appropriate tax system in Seattle and Washington state'. WTF is an 'appropriate tax system'? AFAIC the only appropriate tax system is 0 tax, all other tax systems are inappropriate. I hope Amazon advocates for that. 'Lead in diversity both in Seattle and worldwide'? What? How about lead in customer satisfaction. 'Lead on supporting economic programs that make it easier for lower income, lower skilled Seattleites to stay in the city'? Fucking hell, how about save more money and build more business so that all the lower income folks can save even more by buying at Amazon and some of them work there anyway.
This 'article' is what is wrong with America and the Western world today, total, uninhibited socialist crapola that needs to die in fire, but instead it's spreading like worst type of cancer.
You can't handle the truth.
If Women make less money than men, then businesses should hire the women first, since it would lower costs.
The problem is, it might be more expensive to hire women, because of other reasons. But we dare not speak of those other reasons, for political correctness reasons.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
"I wonder what the conclusion of such an article would be?"
That this isn't a site for sociologists or experts in race or gender studies.
If we talked to sociolgists, race or gender study experts, they'd probably have a non-sensationalist, well researched and well reasoned approach to discussing sensitive issues. And they probably wouldn't be happy if people jumped on their communtiy forums and started talking about SATA drivers.
While Seattle women earned 86 cents per dollar earned by men in 2012, today, they make only 78 cents per dollar.
Well then fucking step up, ladies! Why the fuck do you get away with doing 22% less work than men do? Why do men constantly have to carry you? Men do almost a third more work than women do and frankly, as a feminist, I find that disgusting. Men deserve equality. Men shouldn't have to do more work than women do.
Meanwhile, during this time when women are only doing 78% of the work men do, women earn the same wages for the same work. That problem is solved, so the remaining problem is that women do unequally little work compared to men.
Time to stop lolligagging, women.
"Also, correlation does not imply causation. Is amazon paying women less for same job?"
The REAL question that never seems to get an answer
Welcome to LIFE 101. Humans have kids, if your business runs on such thin margins that you cant account for that, YOU HAVE NO BUSINESS HIRING EMPLOYEES, period. Humans have babies, it MUST be accounted for. If you are running your business without accounting for this, then you are a shitty human.
Good-bye
It isn't that Amazon decided to pay women less one day, it just doesn't work that way. Here's the scenario:
Amazon attempts to pay each employee as little as possible on a per-employee basis. The job description only defines what the upper range of the pay will be but NOT the lower end. Experience, demand shifts in the labor market, education, internal connections at the company, and a bazillion other influences exist to determine pay. I'd suggest that there is a wide pay gap between men doing the same job too, and that we are getting a heavily curated view of what's happening. By illustrating the problem the way the article does it is like shooting a piece of paper and drawing the target around it and then claiming LOOK AT THE PROBLEM. It isn't a problem that has a solution in a market where salary can be negotiated.
load "$",8,1
Yeah, because Slashdot hasn't been a libertarian hangout for the last 15 years or anything.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Half the population makes less money then the other half ...
If only. It's more like "99.9% of the population makes less money than the other 0.1%."
Yes, it is being accounted for - by hiring males.
Amazon most likely can't find techs of any talent in Seattle without making the prices outrageous. After all, Microsoft is already there scooping a lot of them up. Since women are highly underrepresented in a field where there are not enough people to go around anyway, this is going to skew the results. I'm sure a talented female programmer would be paid the same and Amazon would love to have her. She's just not there. Even her male counterpart is barely there, at least based on the hiring that I have done.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
If these things didn't exist, a business would be foolish to NOT hire women, since they cost less than men on salary alone.
Businesses are NOT not hiring women. The practice of paying men (or breadwinners) more for the same job is a thing of the past.
If a man and a woman apply to the SAME job with the SAME qualifications then they get paid the SAME. There is actually a little
bit of data showing that a woman actually get paid MORE all else being the same. The problem is that there are far fewer women
that want certain type of jobs. You can attempt to change personal preferences but should we really care if people are freely
choosing their careers and some people chose careers that pay more while others choose careers that pay less?
And if douchebags didn't exist, we wouldn't call them douchebags.
Shall I pencil you in?
See, I'm pushing 50, and while I have a penis I don't define myself in terms of it, and I honestly can't understand the sheer amount of hatred and bile I've seen on Slashdot (and the internet in general) which is directed at women.
To me, it's just a bunch of completely irrational hate by people who feel the need to blame someone else for their problems. I would find it equally idiotic if someone was blaming blacks, Jews, or people with glasses.
So, me I'm more inclined to ascribe this to some mass resurgence of stupidity than some well-reasoned people who have an actual point to make. It's just childish and serves no purpose, and it's like watching a four year old act out to get attention.
I don't care if you're PC or not -- but some people seem to be deliberately acting like loud mouth assholes just for the sake of it.
It's like a bunch of angry 12 year old kids with ADHD is the intellectual level of the discussions around here. And, I'm sorry, but angry 12 year olds with ADHD are annoying little pricks, and not to be given any credibility.
It's almost like there's a bunch of drooling idiots who want to take every possible opportunity to shout down women -- in which case you assume they're bitter, mouth breathing losers with nothing of value to add to the discussion.
Slashdot didn't used to be filled with so many people like this. So either as I get older I'm more sensitive to it, or the level of it is ramping up over time.
So, yeah, if people are going to act like whiny, immature children, I'm going to treat them as such.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I honestly can't understand the sheer amount of hatred and bile I've seen on Slashdot (and the internet in general) which is directed at women.
No, there's no hatred directed at women here. That's the bullshit narrative that white knights like you want to create so you can portray any critics of your shit as evil hate-mongers. The anger here is directed at professional-victims, self-righteous SJW's, self-hating white knights--and hypocrites in general. It's also directed at those who want to forcibly turn a tech news site into some SJW support camp, by labeling anyone who doesn't toe the SJW line as misogynists, racists, slut-shamers, bigots, etc. Well, fuck you, I'm not playing ball.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
It's more subtle than that. Better paying jobs are more likely to go to men, so a women with similar qualifications and experience is likely, on average, to earn less than a man. It's easy to fix too, just make the jobs more accessible to female candidates. Obviously you still hire the best candidate, it's not about favouritism.
For example, a lot of well paying jobs are found through networking. If most of your current employees are male and network with other males, you are less likely to get female candidates applying or head hunted. All you need to do to correct that is to make an effort to network with women, and maybe ask some of the women in your company to put the word out. It benefits you because you have a wider pool of talent to pick from. It's actually dumb not to do it.
There is also bias at the hiring stage that can be eliminated. Some managers don't want to hire women because they worry that they will go on maternity leave or quit completely if they get pregnant. That one is harder to deal with, but does again exclude good candidates and diversity from the company.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"Social justice warriors" and the people in media trying to push a particular narrative point of view.
Om, nomnomnom...