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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.

66 of 496 comments (clear)

  1. Here we go again by sinij · · Score: 5, Funny

    Here we go again. Timothy, are you angling for a gig at Jezebel?

    1. Re:Here we go again by Dr.+Evil · · Score: 4, Funny

      Previous story was about Barbie and sexism, this one is about pay equity. I think the next story should be about minorities in tech.

      Maybe we'll find out Bill Cosby did a stint for Apple. That would wrap it all up nicely.

    2. Re:Here we go again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ...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!

    3. Re: Here we go again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Equality of opputunity not outcome matters.

      Also, correlation does not imply causation. Is amazon paying women less for same job?

    4. Re:Here we go again by geekoid · · Score: 2

      You people are idiots looking for an excuse to be outraged.
      It's just data, and the question is 'why?'. No one is outraged.

      Half the population makes less money then the other half, and looking at the data and trying to see if we can find parity is reasonable.

      Why do you think we should ignore this issue?

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    5. Re:Here we go again by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
    6. Re:Here we go again by Dr.+Evil · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "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.

    7. Re:Here we go again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Slashdot has become incredibly racist and sexist lately, I think it's time to go.

      How will we know that you're gone? Could you check in now and again to remind us?

    8. Re: Here we go again by MitchDev · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "Also, correlation does not imply causation. Is amazon paying women less for same job?"

      The REAL question that never seems to get an answer

    9. Re:Here we go again by spire3661 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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
    10. Re: Here we go again by fishthegeek · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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
    11. Re:Here we go again by MachineShedFred · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.
    12. Re:Here we go again by slashdice · · Score: 2

      Don't forget homophobic! I remember back in the day when linux was the alternative OS for people with alternative lifestyles. I guess GLBT crowd went mac and linux was overtaken by jocks and religious types. And with Android, Linux may have "won" but the loser wasn't Microsoft, it was Linux users. I say it's time to bring the glory (hole) back to linux. June 9th (that's 6/9) should be Hug your LUG day -- a day when linux users can go to their Linux User Group and have some good old fashioned gay sex.

      --
      Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
    13. Re:Here we go again by LoyalOpposition · · Score: 2

      What other reasons? dumbass.

      Strangely, among other reasons women are much more likely than men to require maternity leave. I have no idea what that stems from.

      ~Loyal

      --
      I aim to misbehave.
    14. Re:Here we go again by LoyalOpposition · · Score: 2

      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.

      Thereby proving Archangel Michael's point about political correctness. Just to be clear, are you saying that it's much more acceptable for people to be unemployed than for employers to pay more for their more valuable employees?

      ~Loyal

      --
      I aim to misbehave.
    15. Re:Here we go again by qbast · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yes, it is being accounted for - by hiring males.

    16. Re: Here we go again by PRMan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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...
    17. Re:Here we go again by Wycliffe · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?

    18. Re:Here we go again by gstoddart · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If retards didn't exist, we wouldn't call them retards.

      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.
    19. Re:Here we go again by blue9steel · · Score: 2

      Legalized drugs ... has consistently lead to property crimes (and often assaults) increasing several hundred percent in other countries/states/cities.

      Citation? It's usually the other way around. You're right about the firearms though.

    20. Re:Here we go again by Shakrai · · Score: 2

      I think it's funny that people are surprised that burglaries are skyrocketing in Seattle (and to a lesser extent the rest of Washington). Legalized drugs and outlawed firearms has consistently lead to property crimes

      Outlawed firearms? Washington has shall issue concealed carry and relatively liberal (by American standards) firearm laws. It's not exactly Utah but it ain't New York either....

      --
      I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
      We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
    21. Re:Here we go again by cbhacking · · Score: 2

      Citation on the "legalized drugs" causing a problem? It's not like weed was hard to get before, you just had to buy it from criminals and were a criminal yourself for doing so. Now that this is no longer true, people have less, not more, incentive to commit crimes.

      Outlawed firearms: you don't live anywhere near WA, do you? The state rate of concealed carry is quite high, especially for a "blue" state. People raise a fuss about it sometimes, but overall there's still a good number of guns around.

      --
      There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
    22. Re:Here we go again by Shakrai · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
    23. Re:Here we go again by NotDrWho · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.
    24. Re:Here we go again by blackomegax · · Score: 3, Funny

      Liberterians are usually sane, pleasant people. AC's are not.

    25. Re: Here we go again by Matheus · · Score: 2

      I do believe a while ago there was another article that went through here talking about just this issue. Specifically about women's ability to negotiate their salary. An employer is going to try to pay *anyone (regardless of gender or race) as little as possible. If the prospective employee is not going to fight for their salary then they are going to get the least the employer puts on the table.

      Here's a loosely related article posted on Dice because hey... it's posted on Dice ;-)

      http://news.dice.com/2014/02/0...

    26. Re:Here we go again by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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
    27. Re: Here we go again by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      Didn't Microsoft just lay off thousands of people?

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    28. Re:Here we go again by NotDrWho · · Score: 2

      Disagreeing with the ideology of a particular group of women and men is NOT "attacking women." You don't get to label everyone who disagrees with your particular ideology as a misogynist just because you don't dig what they have to say.

      --
      SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
    29. Re:Here we go again by Aighearach · · Score: 2

      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 guess you don't know about our culture out here on the West Coast, but yes they do! Family Leave is not just for women. We don't write special rules for women here, we write rules for everybody, and men indeed have kids and take their family leave time. And then they come back, and are even more loyal workers because now they have to think about their kids and their job is more important to them.

      It is just a total load of sexist partisan crap.

    30. Re:Here we go again by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 2

      It also has no-license-required open carry, which is actually better than a bunch of southern states. Oh, and concealed carry license doesn't cost $200.

  2. I bet Amazon would love to hire more women. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:I bet Amazon would love to hire more women. by geekoid · · Score: 4, Insightful

      " One was competent (but a manly lumber dyke), the rest were air thieves."
      So you add a worthless antidote, use negative slang to describe them, and imply the more manly one is the better they are?

      Nice way to stack up the microaggression right into misogyny AND homophobia.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  3. Bullshit Stats. by arbiterxero · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Bullshit Stats. by wcrowe · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That's right, and I wish I had mod points today. Unless the author can show that female techs in Seattle are making less than male techs in Seattle, this is not a story.

      --
      Proverbs 21:19
    2. Re:Bullshit Stats. by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Bullshit Stats. by geekoid · · Score: 4, Informative

      In Seattle tech, the average pay for a man is:$89,400 for a women its: $79,000

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    4. Re:Bullshit Stats. by countach74 · · Score: 2

      There are many studies that verify his claims. Once you account for various factors, the wage gap all but disappears. This sort of article does nothing but affirm the stupidity of comparing apples to oranges. *Of course* if a high-paying employer moves into an area and hires a bunch of one demographic, but not another, the group it hires will gain financially, relative the other group. If you bother to look up the data, you'll find that women *do* consider more factors than finances than men do; preparing to have and care for children is one of the obvious things they consider.

    5. Re:Bullshit Stats. by geekoid · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So people who are artists and nurses are stupid?

      You are a moron,and I hope you have a lot of daughters so you can watch and try to fight a variety of entrenched attitudes and systems that push them away from what they want to do.
      I have a daughter who like science and want's to be a game designer. I see how she has it stacked against her compared to my son.

      Society pushes those biases onto the kids, not just parents.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    6. Re:Bullshit Stats. by Charcharodon · · Score: 2
      I would back you, but then women by the simple virtue of having boobs get paid a heck of a lot more than men as food servers/bar tenders and make an absolute killing in strip clubs, so cry me a river about no skill jobs paying dick all.

      There is the simple fact the women tend to gravitate towards professional jobs that are physically comfortable and safe, which tend to pay less. People that work in McDonalds and in Amazon warehouse represent less than a few percent of the total labor market.

      At my time at UPS unloading trucks. There were a grand total of 4 women that worked with us out of 100+ people. The other dozen women that worked in the same unit were auditors, where the heaviest thing you had to lift was a clip board and a pencil. In 1989 the truck unloader started at $8 and could get up to $10 after the first year. The auditors made minimum wage, if I remember was around $4 at the time. They might see an extra 50 cents after a year. As soon as the "little girls" are willing to step up and do the hard dirty work, they will get paid more.

    7. Re:Bullshit Stats. by HornWumpus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Tech is not a job title and is far too broad to base any judgements on. Typically once you look under the covers study authors also engage in trickery to make it worse.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
    8. Re:Bullshit Stats. by 0123456 · · Score: 2

      Except negotiating on a person by person bases for the same work is stupid. Why should a great engineer be paid less because they aren't a social adept as someone else?

      Because someone has to talk to customers.

    9. Re:Bullshit Stats. by countach74 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      In my relationship with my wife, as is the case with many families, I am the one who is tasked with earning the money. Some may take it that we're just playing into a stereotype, and that may be true to an extent, but it works for us and plays to both of our strengths. I admittedly did not plan my career around the possibility of myself getting pregnant and having to take a year off of work for each of my three young children, but to do so would be silly, since I am, after all, a man. In my family's situation, my earning more money (time spent working held constant) is synonymous with caring for my children. Like it or not, most women--even today--do plan their lives, at least to a certain extent, around being a mother. This affects the sorts of careers they go into and how quickly they move up the ladder. But is it wrong? No, I don't think so. They receive non-monetary compensation for their decisions. I do not get to experience my children all day long, which I consider a downside to my working; my wife does. Can't have your cake and eat it too. :)

    10. Re:Bullshit Stats. by Kjella · · Score: 2

      True, but how often do you hear people here complain about CEOs making millions? Either it's related to effort "He's golfing with vendors and reading trade magazines while I work my butt off 60+ hours a week" or results "I've created millions in revenue for them and after 20 years they lay me off and outsource my job to India." Does anybody tell you to STFU, take an MBA and become a CEO yourself? No. But if a nurse complains about long shifts and crappy pay for saving lives then it's easy to pull the same card and say if you wanted to become an engineer, well you could have picked a different career. If you want to argue that the free market hasn't provided you with a pay equal to what you're worth that's fine, just don't be a hypocrite when others do it too.

      Your pay is basically as much as necessary and as little as they can get away with, if the job is important or not doesn't really matter only the price of your replacement. That's why they made minimum wage laws, otherwise they'd have people underbidding each other until they were all working for pennies. It's nice when you're on the upside having a rare skill that's unexpectedly in demand and can command a fat pay check, but if you think your real worth to society is so high because you can make big money throwing a football in NFL or writing HFT routines for Wall Street you're wrong.

      How does sex tie in to this? Well, according to feminists the reason "female" professions is paid so low is because the jobs are being systematically undervalued compared to equivalent work dominated by men because the executives - that are mostly men - can get away with it. Kind of like the two wolves and a sheep story, except the wolves are just deciding sheep work is worth less, if you want wolf pay you must do wolf work. Note that in many of the "female" professions like grade school teachers or nurses there's no direct economic output. What second grade math is worth is largely what society's perception of the value is. It's a lot easier to say that without this developer we can't deliver this product that'll create this much revenue.

      I'm not saying that there actually is a problem, but it's not an open and shut case. Since it's inherently comparing apples and oranges I guess there'll never be absolute truth. I think it happens with minorities though, for example in cleaning services because the language requirements are practically none. If companies more-or-less collude to depress prices, they can squeeze out the natives which get better paying jobs elsewhere while the immigrants have very little choice but to keep working. Is creating such an ethnicly-dominated, extremely low paid underclass racism? Or reflection of their lack of work skills? I'm inclined to go with pure captialism, if women can't/won't leave "their" occupations that will be exploited to pay them less.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    11. Re:Bullshit Stats. by PRMan · · Score: 2

      At many companies I have worked at "female tech" (as a majority) is usually a Project Manager. "Male tech" is a developer. These do not have the same salary.

      --
      Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
    12. Re:Bullshit Stats. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

      Mining. Fishing. Oil drilling. Infantry. It's not about sexism. It's about hazard pay. Men think it's worth it, women don't.

      I wonder why men value their lives and safety less than women do. It could just be an instinctive hold-over from old evolutionary roles, but as we all know, Occam's razor is a tool of the patriarchy. (Occam was, after all, a man, right?) So let's assume that men are really fucking stupid, and women are really fucking smart. Smart enough to say, "These pieces of green paper are not worth the risk that I might be buried alive in a collapsed mineshaft, or dragged overboard and drowned in the freezing ocean, or caught in drill machinery and ground to a paste, or ripped apart by an IED planted by some jihadi with fifteen underage wives."

      And that's why women go into careers like nursing or teaching that may not pay exceptionally well, but give them the opportunity to help people live better in every sense. Those careers are essential to any civilized society. Men are off busting their asses and risking their lives - for what? Making John Q. Fatcat even richer than he already is. Oh, look, the poor slobs get ten cents more on the dollar for their sacrifice.

      And guess where that money goes when men's stupidity gets them killed in a horrific accident? Their wives.

      See? Women smart. Men dumb. I'm going to go back to dragging my knuckles and farting now.

    13. Re:Bullshit Stats. by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 2

      You hit the mark with "children". If you compare childless women to men, the pay gap completely disappears. If sexism were the root cause of the pay gap, it seems like whether or not women had children wouldn't make a difference.

      Children are a big distraction from a career if you happen to be the primary care-giver. Of course, women tend to fill that role more often than men. And obviously, childbirth is going to significantly impact a woman's career more than a man.

      None of that matters, of course, since logic really has no place in this argument...

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    14. Re:Bullshit Stats. by Znork · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "I have a daughter who like science and want's to be a game designer. I see how she has it stacked against her compared to my son."

      In what way? If she gets through her education and can demonstrate that she's even remotely competent, she'll get hired simply due to being female. At least a minimum level of gender balance in the work force is a bonus to company social dynamics; too high concentration of either gender and you start getting a culture drift into extremes that enhance the worst aspects of some gendered trait expressions. Keep a certain level of balance and moderation tendencies will keep the culture decent either way. IT has so few women that the imbalance aspect itself can be a good reason to take on female prospective hires if they are at all available and capable of doing the job.

      Now of course after the last few years it's become fairly obvious that one will have to do some research and interview probing to avoid hiring somone like Adria Richards, Rose Eveleth, Julie Ann Horvath or Matthew Garrett. The damage they'll cause through toxic interpersonal relationships will outstrip any productivity by massive amounts. Unless you have found an insurance policy that will actually reimburse you for F60.3 damage to your company. But that has nothing to do with gender.

  4. OTOH by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    On the other hand, ladies, if you're looking for a husband, try Seattle!

  5. Re:Slashdot: polical-correct leftists anti-freedom by NotDrWho · · Score: 2

    Maybe we should ask Slashdot and DICE what percentage of *their* professional staff and execs are women and minorities.

    --
    SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
  6. The workplace is changing. by XB-70 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Here is a possible reason for the disparity in income:

    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.***
    1. Re:The workplace is changing. by geekoid · · Score: 2, Insightful

      A) You can't seem to do math.
      B) Female Vets do work the same hours
      C) Female vets general spend more time with the pet owners then men.

      "t 4-5 female vets do the job of one male vet."
      this just keep driving me up a wal. So by your "logic" a female vet works 3 hours a day?

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    2. Re:The workplace is changing. by ScentCone · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.
    3. Re:The workplace is changing. by puzzled_decoy · · Score: 2

      Ok, so 11*6=66. 66/4 = 16.5. 16.5/5 = 3.3. So, on average, a female vet would work 3.3 hours a day. If you include the fact he said 4-5 rather than just for, that number would drop to 2.64. With the 3.3, that does average out to right about 3. Not that I'm agreeing with anyone. I'm just saying his 3 hours a day figure was pretty much accurate, given the numbers.

  7. TFA is a crappy piece of socialist propaganda by roman_mir · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. "Getting whiter" by swb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:"Getting whiter" by Thanshin · · Score: 3, Funny

      As the city gets whiter, it reflects more light, which is bad for cities with long, cold, winters.

    2. Re:"Getting whiter" by CauseBy · · Score: 2

      Reasons it sucks for a city to be too white:

      1. Nobody can dance
      2. The music sucks
      3. The racists stop feeling uncomfortable
      4. Too many sweater vests
      5. Car details are boring

      And apparently Slashdot no longer allows the ordered-list tag? Fuck it, I'm leaving it as it is.

    3. Re:"Getting whiter" by klek · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Wow. Really? Your post is incredibly obtuse.

      Well, one issue is that the people who HAVE been living here getting displaced, due to rocketing rents, and being forced to move out of the city.

      The other issue, since you obviously don't live in a coastal city, is that when you have a diverse mix of cultures living cheek-by-jowl, you have a very interesting, creative and vigorous culture. Education is improved, understanding is improved, and cuisine is improved - among other things. Port cities with a wide diversity have historically been the loci of learning and tolerance and artistic creativity. You want a peaceful civilization? Encourage lots of different people to live next to each other. You want to encourage intolerance and "racist" violence? Encourage cultural homogeneity.

      "Race" doesn't exist, btw. You're talking about cultural background & skin color. There is only one human race.

    4. Re:"Getting whiter" by jlar · · Score: 2

      If you look at:

      Seattle demographics

      in combination with the article you will see that the city is in fact more colored now than in 2000. The original poster is cherry picking statistics to prove his/her point. Seattle is less white now than in 2000. You could say that after a prolonged browning of the city it is now whitening slightly. The long term trend is however not clear.

      I am also a bit confused by the article. It seems like Amazon is only hiring from Seattle itself and not the suburbs. Otherwise they would not employ 5-7% of the city population. Is that really true or is it another one of the authors mind tricks?

    5. Re:"Getting whiter" by swb · · Score: 2

      You want a peaceful civilization? Encourage lots of different people to live next to each other.

      Wow, I feel misinformed despite my NY Times subscription. You mean to tell me there's a war going on in 90+% white Scandinavia and I didn't know about it? Given how oppressive their governments are known to be and the complete absence of social welfare there, such barbarism I guess should be expected.

      I'm especially glad to know that multiethnic regions like Africa and the Middle East are so peaceful and nonviolent, that must have been another article I missed out on.

  9. Killing us with rent by klek · · Score: 2

    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

  10. Bullshit by CauseBy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  11. Tech news vs. political news by Kohath · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Tech news vs. political news by Mashiki · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "Social justice warriors" and the people in media trying to push a particular narrative point of view.

      --
      Om, nomnomnom...
    2. Re:Tech news vs. political news by dave420 · · Score: 2

      You'd most likely call Rosa Parks a SJW if she was still around. Calling for equality, and studying why it doesn't happen, is never a foolish endeavour, even if your insecurities make it feel like one to you...