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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 want pay equality with people who are better negotiators than me and get $10k more because they can argue the hiring manager into it.
There are many theories here, including job role, hours worked, and negotiation skill. It seems to me if I thought I could get 85% of the candidates I actually wanted by offering $73k as a start and negotiating, I would do that, unless I needed a higher outcome (95% etc.); but if I knew women were more likely to accept a low bid, I'd take more statistics. If I discovered I could land 85% of women applicants for the given job by offering $65k and negotiating, and 85% of the men by offering $78k and negotiating, I might offer men $78k and women $65k. It would meet my hiring goals.
Women are inherently poorer negotiators, which is why every society on earth is male-dominated. The dynamics differ after that point: in India and Saudi, a woman can be killed or brutalized or ostracized for getting snippy; while in America, men are terrified of strong-willed women, and so a woman can easily improve her place in society by training herself to be a stronger negotiator with techniques as simple as being fair, but firm. To Americans, a woman who is not easily intimidated is actively intimidating.
Even when you account for the effects of negotiated salaries, the only societal conclusions you can draw are that the problem lies elsewhere. If you want women to get equal pay for equal work, you should make sure women average equal negotiating skill. Even then, you may find that women are less concerned with money: if a woman is a powerful negotiator, but is exactly as satisfied with a $70k salary as a man is with a $75k salary, the woman will narrow the gap only that much. This is definitively not a problem: the woman is getting what she wants, and would only whine because someone else has *more*; the benchmark of "what other people have that I only care about because they have it" is not an admirable one, and any person who would be equally satisfied with the next person having less rather than themselves having more should be swiftly ignored.
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Can someone explain to me how a city getting whiter is necessarily worse for the city?
Is there a specific race that is missing? If you made it 30% Chinese, 30% White and 30% Indian is that good enough, or do you need some minimal proportion of every race?
And is it really "race" we need -- ie, if we bulk up on suburbanized, native-born nonwhites (like Mindy Kaling or Aziz Ansari as an example) does that really count, or is what we're looking for some kind of non-white cultural influence, so non-whites who act white don't count?
Please, someone tell me what the ideal racial combination is.
The first person to use the term "SJW" has probably just proven the point of the article.
Funny thing about using a group's identity pejoratively...
If retards didn't exist, we wouldn't call them retards. And if we considered retards a good thing, we wouldn't use that word as an insult. Similarly, much as "retarded" replaced "idiot" and "moron", "SJW" itself replaced "PC", once that older term had become too commonplace.
If you manage to make the actual use of "SJW" gauche, you can expect to simply see something else replace it - Of course, I suppose people could just start calling them the more accurate "indignation whores", but that seems a bit too blunt to adopt for common usage.
That's how it is at the practice we use. The owner, a man, is there six days a week. He puts in 60-80 hours a week. Off and on, he's had other full-time vets (mostly men), but in recent years he says that almost every applicant for positions in the practice have been women, and most are willing to work only 4 to 6 hours per day, and no more than 4 days per week. They also still want to be able to take maternity leave, etc. So he has a constantly shifting crew of other vets who make what feel like drive-by appearances, greatly reducing the odds that a customer will be able even see the same person twice during the course of some treatment. It's fine, the practice is well run and and they're all good, talented people. But the incoming "class" of vets shows absolutely no interest in putting in the long (and thus much better paying) hours that they used to. And they're almost all women, so hence the correlation.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Spend a few days reading nothing but technology news. Then spend a few days reading nothing but political news. For the first few days you’ll see an exciting world of innovation and creativity where everything is getting better all the time. In the second period you’ll see a miserable world of cynicism and treachery where everything is falling apart. Please explain the difference.
How about we start with the fact that your senior MALE engineer doesn't disappear for several months (with pay) in the middle of a big crunch so he can be a daddy.
I'm sorry but I think you've mistaken the United States for a Nordic Social Democracy or something. If a new parent (male or female) receives several months off with pay that's a benefit willingly provided their employer so it stands to reason they're not going to bellyache about it. The only benefit employers are mandated to offer in the United States is provided for by the Family Medical Leave Act. Mom is entitled to no more than 12 weeks off work, without pay, and that's only if she works for a company with >=50 employees. Kudos to her employer if they offer more than that but they're not required to do so.
I could contrast this experience with the foreign country I'm most familiar with (Finland) but it doesn't look very good for the United States. Different culture and country of course, I doubt we could ever match what they offer, but we certainly could do a lot better than we're doing right now....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.