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Research Suggests 'CS For All' May Mean Lower Pay For All
theodp writes: The NY Times reports that new research suggests as women take over a male-dominated field, the pay drops. "A striking example," writes Claire Cain Miller, "is to be found in the field of recreation — working in parks or leading camps — which went from predominantly male to female from 1950 to 2000. Median hourly wages in this field declined 57 percentage points, accounting for the change in the value of the dollar, according to a complex formula used by Professor Levanon. The job of ticket agent also went from mainly male to female during this period, and wages dropped 43 percentage points. The same thing happened when women in large numbers became designers (wages fell 34 percentage points), housekeepers (wages fell 21 percentage points) and biologists (wages fell 18 percentage points). The reverse was true when a job attracted more men. Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige." Addressing concerns raised about gender pay equity in tech, Amazon recently told the SEC to get off its case, explaining that it's working with organizations such as Code.org, the Anita Borg Institute and Girls Who Code to increase women's involvement in the technology industry. But even if such efforts achieve pay parity, will CS for All result in lower pay for all?
The 1% are _always_ looking for ways to stop paying you.
It occurs to me that this is more of a push by forced equality groups than anybody else. On a side note, one of the original purposes behind the first unions in the US was to keep Asians out of the workforce, up to and including through the use of violence.
He's doing what he loves, what's wrong with that? He also has a point about not only women, but many people working in technology. They get into it because it pays well, but they really lack the natural interest (passion) in the field to take it beyond being work. People like the GP are the ones who succeed in tech because they do it for the right reason, i.e. they love it and are good at it. The same can be said for any profession, and its the advice I give to my kids and others.. Do something because you love it and you're good at it. We are all good at something.
For all the examples given there is a massive oversupply of people for the jobs.
Back in the day, designer meant you were able to engineer, in the last 50 years the availability of complex compounds and small scale, custom manufacturing, you can bring to life any sort of design you want with minimal effort and minimal engineering knowledge because the internal structure of the compound you use will hold the design up whereas you can't do that with mass manufactured basic materials.
The same goes for camp leaders, back in the day, a scouts leader had military training and athletic-based camps had coaches and trainers. I remember my sports camp leadership had an olympic athlete. These days any pimply faced 16 year old is a camp leader and all they have to do is follow scripts and cater to the weakest.
The investment in the sciences in general have been in decline after the moon landing, all scientists regardless of their branch earn a lot less now than they did when America was a world power.
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As pay drops, women take over male-dominated fields.
Heck, what do I know. I'm just a middle aged heterosexual white guy.
You cannot build a scalable (grow-able) organization by depending on a few 4 sigma outliers to do all the work (read up on "bus factor"). Successful large scale means developing processes that use the median skill employee that is readily available. Maybe you need one or two with the drive and passion to set the general direction, but all the *work* is done by folks at the 50th percentile (or more realistically, people within 1 sigma on any given day of the week, with the population varying around that over time).
And that "rock star" (how I hate that term) shouldn't be "covering".. they're performing their function, and management is responsible for making sure there's enough median performers to get the work done, that budgets and schedules are aligned to median performance, not exceptional performance. And if that "rock star" gets all "divo/diva" like about "covering for others", then they either need to realign their thinking (if the company is otherwise well run) or head to the door (if the company is mismanaged).
I woke up one day in my late thirties, alone, burned out and grossly overweight. I spent thousands of dollars on dating services and many dates with obese head cases.
My employer then fired us all and sent the work to India.
I realized I spent the best years of my life in front of a fucking computer allowing myself to be exploited by employers who took advantage of my "passion". And when you get into your 40s, employers don't give a rat's ass about your 'passion' because they want cheap 20 somethings who are stupid enough to spend all their time in front of the computer and training themselves on their own dime and time.
To make a long story short, all of your "passion" will amount to nothing in the end.
And the 6' 3" ballplayer with the square jaw who got his degree in Marketing that we laughed at when we all started? Well, while we were getting kicked out after our jobs were off-shored to India, he was getting kicked up to the executive suite.
Just to put things into perspective for you guys.
As always with this kind of studies you have to wonder about cause and effect. Perhaps men tend to flee from the work fields where wages are dropping, and flock to fields where wages are going up? Perhaps women not so intensely?
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Were you trying to be funny?
Nope. Older people will need more health care in the next 20+ years as they get older, sicker and less able to care for themselves. Young people will get encouraged to go into health care because that field will be expanding significantly, and, due to fewer workers being available, paying more money.
Honestly, the trick is to funnel your passion for your work into something that pays you back in the long-haul. If you're giving 110% all the time but all your effort is just going back into a salaried job where your hard work is more taken for granted than respected? Then yeah, you're going to wind up in your 40's, burnt-out and with nothing to show for it but prematurely grey hair and a lacking social life.
The Anonymous guy who posted would have had a much different story if he had the guts to take a chance on going it alone, working for himself. If you're such a good software coder, you need to write your own killer app (or even game!) and start marketing it yourself. That, or at least work as a freelancer, getting paid per project on terms you negotiate each time.
When you look at who actually owns the companies that employ you, you'll usually find those folks had a real passion for something having to do with the business. That's how they built the whole thing up into something successful enough, they could afford to hire you. Not everyone is in a position where they can be or want to be that person .... But if you're young and full of motivation/drive and passion for a subject, you shortchange yourself not to try to be one of those people.
So what you're saying is in the private sector there is something called supply and demand?
Tell me more of this new age concept!
Not everyone can mandate their wages via government fiat no matter how many people are qualified to enter the field.
Actually no.
The early computer programs were to solve differential equations and required far more maths than most programmers today could muster. Several of those women were mathematicians. And programming the Eniac (say) was non-trivial. Highly parallel, lots of weird timing considerations, that all had to be literally wired together.
Whereas any idiot can write a program on a modern IDE. Which is why most Slash dotters insist on using vi.
Most of the women you see in the early photos were operators, not programmers.
I don't know who could have replaced Linus and his project at the time, but it wouldn't have been the BSD folks. I think it was much more a social phenomena than a technical one. Linus somehow made people feel welcome to participate and catalyzed a rate of community growth that just wasn't happening in BSD-land. It was a very easy to transition from learning about his project to learning about ours.
I was a CS student at UC Berkeley when Linux announced the kernel, and it was remarkable how quickly it became the obvious choice for anyone just trying to adopt a free, unix-style os for home use. We downloaded and passed around the SLS two-floppy set, and later the growing Slackware distribution. We found help and guidance to get stuff running on our commodity PC hardware, dealing with disk and graphics drivers since the very beginning.
Ironically, I found a student posting from Finland and his rag-tag band of international collaborators to be more welcoming and helpful than the BSD acolytes I could find by going down the hall and knocking on doors on campus. The BSD folks acted like a closed priesthood, not interested in a popular movement. Many of them sneered at using PCs, as if there should only be as many hobbyists as could be supported by the surplus and hand-me-down server and workstation hardware that passed through their old-boy networks.