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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.
Here we go again. Timothy, are you angling for a gig at Jezebel?
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.
Stop making me want to gouge my eyes out when I look at billboards. That is all.
Slashdot: polical-correct leftists anti-freedom crap that no one cares about.
Amazon should be free to hire who them like, even only bald man, or only black man, or only white bald tall women - it's property and freedom that we gained (and now lost again back to communist-socialism). And you are free to criticize them for such choices.
How ever, I am preety sure, they simply do hire the muscular and durable employees which turn out to be man;
Also flash news, weman do not prefer hard physical work all that much you know.
What next, article about gender gap in the breastfeeding/surrogate industry?
I have friends that work at Amazon have interviewed there a couple times myself.
The confrontational culture is there, and it's "on purpose." It was chosen to make sure that they have a large number of smart people who speak up when there is a better idea afoot. It has a cost; the Amazonians know it has a cost in making the workplace more intense, and even more contentious, and they believe it's worth it.
If you make a choice like that, and it happens that in your society one gender more often has the emotional characteristics compatible with that atmosphere it doesn't mean you are expressing ANY opinion about the other gender.
The Amazon interview process: being grilled by legions of the semi-competent, people-skills impared, with the actually interesting question a rare diamond in the rough, is something most sane people should run away from. It is a compliment to any gender that they outperform another gender by correctly choosing to run away from this.
What Amazon has not yet invented and valued are the socially well adjusted nerds. By optimizing for "nerds that solve problems just like our current nerds" they are neglecting the people, of both genders, that could make that a better place to work.
That women more often figure this out in the interview process and men take an average of a year, isn't really discrimination.
On the other hand, ladies, if you're looking for a husband, try Seattle!
it has the worst weather!
Again, another article about the sufferings of women in America, the most privileged class of people to have ever existed.
It is not even that! I would be happy to see some correlations here and there, but they are comparing means FFS. If they would only TRY to control for other variables like, hours worked, education and so on, they would find NO differences, but that would make feminist lady in the corner sad.
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
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.
Here’s a hot tip for Bezos and other technology leaders — if you want to hire more women, offer your competitors’ female employees more money and fund an ongoing array of collegiate technology scholarships for women and minorities.
Really, that's such a hot tip! Poach women from other companies! I'll bet Bezos never thought of that! On the other hand, the author isn't trying to make sense, he's just trying to get people to click on his article, so I guess he succeeded.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The Seattle area has 3.6 million people [1]. 45k is only 1.2% of that.
That puts them about the same size of Microsoft in the Seattle area today. [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_metropolitan_area
[2] http://news.microsoft.com/facts-about-microsoft/
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.
As a Seattlite, the impact that Amazon is having here is distinctly bad. Rents ARE rising at remarkable rates largely because Amazon has gone from 5,000 to 25,000 employees in the last 5-8 years, and they're being paid so much that they can easily afford $2k for 800sqft.
If we're to expect *another* 20,000 Ama-workers... then fuck me. Anyone paid less than $100k/year will be forced to the fringes of the city, and traffic with become so bad that we'll have to adopt J.G. Ballard's "Chronopolis" solution, where different workers use different clocks in order to mitigate rush hour (or rather, rush hour just becomes permanent, instead of total gridlock for 2-3 hrs a day).
If Amazon wants that many workers, they should build their own dormitories for them. Lord knows these pale-faced socially-inept "bro-grammers" don't really use their living spaces for anything but re-heating microwave meals and whacking off. o_O
Except that's not true at all.
Women make over 6000 dollars less for the same job. 11,000 is they have one child.
You idiots keep bringing up the well debunking or misleading points. Maybe you should shut the fuck up and read up on the issue?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Problem solved.
Jesse, I told you to stop posting on Slashdot!!
-Walter
If an employee is out for several months, do you count that time when considering raises? I wouldnt. Thats why women with children make less.
Good-bye
First she complains that Amazon employee are too standoffish, passive, and boring. Then she complains that they're too entitled, confrontational, and intense. Which is it?
So you are already counting in some controls. YAY for SCIENCE! Now add some more (tenure etc) and those 6000 $ will disappear.
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
Except negotiating on a person by person bases for the same work is stupid.
No it is not. Even people hired for the same job vary in competence and qualifications. This is particularly true in programming - the difference in productivity between a competent programmer and a great programmer can literally be an order of magnitude apart. Should you pay two people with vastly different productivity levels the same amount merely because they share the same job title?
Why should a great engineer be paid less because they aren't a social adept as someone else?
Probably because business is a team sport and social ability matters even in engineering. Your ability to effectively communicate and work with others is important.
It's the same work.
That doesn't mean everyone is equally good at doing it.
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.
Don't worry, most of those jobs will go away soon. Amazon's newer warehouses use Kiva robots to move merchandise around to picking stations. Picking is still manual; the computers do all the thinking, the humans just pick up what the laser pointer points at. But Bezos owns a robotics startup working on automating that. At Amazon, being replaced by robots isn't a future problem. It's here now.
Customer service is already mostly automated. It's can't be long until customer service chat is with a computer, not a human. Then Amazon will need fewer people.
Except that's not true at all.
Except that you are demonstrably incorrect, and not only that, it has been pointed out to you elsewhere, sometimes even with a backing citation (maybe you skipped reading that far into the responses, perhaps due to a slavish dedication to your beliefs). And that is not the only instance, including for this article and recent articles covering related subjects. Other readers need only examine your posting history to verify that for themselves.
Of course you are welcome to your own opinions, though not your own facts. However, it should be abundantly clear to anyone who reviews your posting history on this subject, along with the meaningful responses to those posts, that you are willfully resistant to the facts of the matter. You are not helping anything; indeed, you are part of the problem.
- T
Can you imagine if a man wrote an op-ed about how work is killing his sex life because his female coworkers aren't successfully arousing him?
The writer also makes it clear she has nothing but contempt for the non-neurotypical she encounters. She could do with bit more empathy for those that struggle to master the complicated social rituals that come so easily to her.
It isn't about 'lower pay for women working the same job as men', I quote:
'Women' versus 'Men' - no mention of positions held or even I dustry worked in, just gender average vs. gender average...
Can we all just take a deep breath and realize men and women SOMETIMES have different career priorities and make different choices, and that does NOT qualify as gender discrimination, it's simply an easily quantifiable manifestation of their different choices...
Ken
https://www.change.org/p/barac...
Casteism
Speaking as an economic professor . . .
It's not hard to explain why Amazon or any other employer would pay women (or greens, or redheads, or . . ) less. Of course they want to pay less.
What we cannot explain is why on earth they would pay white males more than a purple woman with green hair . . .
doc hawk