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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?
Ya think!
You mean when there is a larger supply of something, and demand stays even, the price of that thing goes down? That's crazy talk, it's almost as if this were a field of study or something. It may even involve charts.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
and start submitting stories to /.? No kidding. That's the _point_. If you haven't figured that out by now you haven't been paying attention.
The more interesting question is will people ever notice that the 1% does stuff like this? Every time the rich target an industry for lower wages I'm baffled that folks pretend like it's not happening. They tell me I'm a conspiracy loon because the idea that somebody might think 10 or 20 years down the line is nuts because well, they don't think that far down the line so why should anybody else?
This is kinda why workers formed Unions folks. The 1% are _always_ looking for ways to stop paying you. You know how you look for ways to save money on your day-to-day expenses? You clip coupons, they depress wages. Basically the same thing.
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I've never found a woman coworker to be even half as passionate about technology and computers as I am.
I'm coding at home on the weekend, coded for hours last night, will code for a few more hours today. During my breaks I'll read more about crypto or learn about a new fad language to see how it's gone off course.
When I am at work, I only go to lunch with other passionate types mainly so we can talk about our little "side" projects at home. I'm writing a few opengl games, a friend is writing a CMS, another is writing an order management system for healthcare, another is writing a tabletop boardgame application.
The women we work with however talented they may be, lack passion. They will go to lunch and get mad at us for "still talking about work". Then they wonder why they don't get invited next time around.
I've worked with a few that are that passionate, and they end up being published and respected like other men. They would be a welcome addition to our lunch crew but women like that tend to have other priorities which don't involve eating lunch with a bunch of men.
My passion is what makes me better at what I do. The fact that I don't stop should mean I get paid more than someone else "who only does it as a job". That's the black and white issue at play here.
Soon you'll be like like...
You: computer make me a game
Computer: OK. What kind?
You: something like doom
Computer: what do you want the environment and computer opponents to look like
You: lava caves and evil
Computer: what do you want your character to look like
You: Hillary
Computer: Wait... You said you want your opponents to look evil so I'm using Hillary already
"But even if such efforts achieve pay parity, will CS for All result in lower pay for all?"
Yes. Not because women depress pay scales, but because when more and more people get into a field, competition inevitably causes lower prices. Lowe prices for the things we buy - like groceries or electronics - is good. Competition in the stuff we sell - like our labor - is bad.
lower wages, faster turnover, more offshoring.
Ask anyone who used to work in gate array / fpga in non-military work in this country
First the move to standardized HLL such as Verilog, SystemC, VHDL and a few proprietaries.
Result of standardized code?
Lower speed, higher prices, longer time to market, cheaper labor
Cheap labor is the sine qua non of high stock prices.
But does it really create more product to export?
Ask the several ten thousand unemployed / former engineers replaced by Chinese and Indian H1-B and offshored labor
Wrong. In high tech, higher supply has always resulted in rising offshoring and H1-B wage cutting
As pay drops, women take over male-dominated fields.
Heck, what do I know. I'm just a middle aged heterosexual white guy.
Since when does "become less dominantly male" become "taken over by women"? Or is it the submitter's contention that men will start fleeing the field as more women enter it?
The group I'm in is all guys, and all of the people who were here when I got hired were guys. Any time we have an opening, the applicant pool is 95% male (and for Unix positions I think it's been 100% male). I like my coworkers, but sometimes it'd be nice if the place were a little less of a nerd sausage-fest.
#DeleteChrome
... to push women into IT.
Honestly, do we think we're going to need the same number of programmers or more in the next twenty years?
Yes. Baby boomers are retiring and the workforce will shrink over the next 20 years. While most young people will probably go into health care for the money, we will still need programmers and technicians.
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).
You really won't get any work as a coder unless you've done college. College however requires Calculus/Physics, and places little or no value on high school CS experiences. So... What was the point of CS for all again? There's also the observation that, particularly in year one, college CS seems to be a desperate attempt to get butts on seats as opposed to having any end goal.
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.
While most young people will probably go into health care for the money
Were you trying to be funny?
Did you ever consider the population had increased by 100,000,000 since the 1980s?
Please educate yourself.
IN THE 20th century the planet's population doubled twice. It will not double even once in the current century, because birth rates in much of the world have declined steeply. But the number of people over 65 is set to double within just 25 years. This shift in the structure of the population is not as momentous as the expansion that came before. But it is more than enough to reshape the world economy.
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21601248-generation-old-people-about-change-global-economy-they-will-not-all-do-so
I'm not really sure why we're assuming more people are going to go into CS because they took it earlier in school. Computers have been in school for a long time. I am not young, and I remember programming logo in school. There was enough exposure for the kids to find out that it was what they wanted to do. A MUCH bigger motivator is the QUALITY OF LIFE you have when you go in the field. It is up to hiring companies collectively to make it a good and solid career with good earning and a good quality of life if they want people to go into the field. That is really all there is to it, and from what I see today they're totally failing. I don't care what my kids learn in school, I don't see good jobs in tech, and everyone I know in tech is leaving the field or getting let go, so I'm not going to encourage my kids to go into tech at all. If they love it then fine, they can go in as long as they understand what the future will hold for them. But will I encourage them? No way.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Did you ever consider the population had increased by 100,000,000 since the 1980s? There will be less workers... Ya right.
You can have a bigger population and less workers, especially talented ones. Kids these days are wasting a lot of time with games and social media.
I wish more women pushed themselves into the intellectually hard jobs that they are capable of. Childcare sometimes takes them away from the workplace (my career suffered when I was at home looking after the offspring). We need to remind our employers that even if noone is indispensible, it is hard to find people who can make your product any good.
college for all = a big loan mess.
What happens when you have masses defaulting and filling for a undue hardship
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.
Fuck you.
CS needs to form a union to push back at these assholes hard. Electricians all across the country get really good pay and their job is 80X simpler than CS. Yes. it is, I was an electrical journeyman I got my card but I prefer working at a desk writing code and programming lighting systems for whole buildings than pulling wire in unfinished building and wiring panels.
It is time CS and IT formed a Trade union and started fucking business owners hard with the biggest stick we can find.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
The lady that does preventive teeth cleaning at my dentist's office charges $145 per hour. That's quite a bit of money for a job that's not much more complicated than cutting somebody's hair.
Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women.
When was this ever the case? The first programmers were mostly engineers, the designers of the systems, and mightily male.
and more to do with maintaining a decent standard of living for 99% of the population.
Yes, any large organization can be abused. The Army Core of Engineers does great things. They prevent floods, bring water into disaster areas. Build bridges. They also gave smallpox blankets to Native Americans.
The solution is not to throw up your hands and declare defeat. It's to keep an eye on them. If you think you and your little lonesome stand a snowballs chance in hell of maintaining a middle class lifestyle without some sort of unified front to protect your interests then again, you're not paying attention. Go read the summary again for a good reason why you want/need this.
Put another way, there's a Grover Norquist Quote about a gov't small enough to down in a bathtub that sums up why you need large, powerful organizations to protect your interests. Sooner or later anything that's on your side and doesn't have some weight behind it is going to get the bathtub treatment from 'ole Grover.
What the US needs is a 20-30 hour work week, mandatory voting (ala Jury Duty), parliaments and the end of Electoral Colleges and in general we need to drag everybody into managing their long term well being. This is the sorta thing the Investor Class does with their time, and we need everybody to do it.
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...is that all the jobs they compare to are not professions.
I keep coming back to this point on slashdot, across multiple topics - H1B competition? Wouldn't be as easy to displace you if you were a profession.
Women also jumped big into accounting in the 70s, medicine and law in the 80's and now engineering in the 21st century; wages in exactly none of those professions went down.
Professional organizations like the AMA act a little bit like unions, if not exactly like them - they don't negotiate money or conditions, but they do negotiate required education and skill levels, which prevents employers from constantly undercutting wages by threatening to switch to employees that are a little cheaper, then a little cheaper again.
Women entering a mere "job category" lower salary expectations because they've been discriminated against, and are hungrier, the way H1B immigrants are hungrier. But in a profession, there's a basement put on how much effect that has.
IT badly needs to be a profession like accounting, medicine, law, engineering. On a societal basis, I don't think it would even cost anything. Sure, programming would get more expensive - but how much money is wasted right now by bad programming?
It actually goes like this:
Extremely simplistic computer programming done in the earliest days of trivial computer architectures and largely trivial computing tasks, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by anyone possessed of a week's familiarization and two wet brain cells to rub together. But as computer architectures became more sophisticated, and the programs written under them were both more aggressively complex and able to utilize considerably broader and deeper resources in terms of both hardware and data, the job began paying more and gained prestige. A process that continues to this day.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yes, the programmer bandwagon initiative has just created an oversupply of wannabe script kiddies playing around in HLL sandboxes while having mega-angst attacks about utterly insignificant UX issues. While mostly making a huge bloody mess. And inflicting travesties like roll-over activated menus and pop-ups on everyone they can. They're so busy appity-apping their grossly overweight, minimally functional apps they haven't had time to learn how computers work or build deep algorithmic competencies. Nor do I ever expect they will.
FTFY. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
...pay in industries in decline goes down as the industries decline, and pay goes up in growth industries as they grow. Who possibly could have imagined this happening?
Citation?
Teachers complain about their gross pay, but they forget to mention it's for five hours a day, 9 months of the year.
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.
Retail Management. Haven't wages dropped in that area since more and more women started working in retail management, which once, albeit some time ago, was largely a male preserve? Public Transportation. Wages have dropped in the bus industry since women started driving buses in larger numbers.
Onwards & Upwards!
Teachers complain about their gross pay, but they forget to mention it's for five hours a day, 9 months of the year.
Exactly right. These weaseling teachers somehow always seem to neglect that fact.. it's time to make them go to Law School, not High School, to learn something about honesty and the consequences of gross negligence.
"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".
As soon as you read those two sentences you are done. Nothing this person writes can be taken seriously, because she is hopelessly ignorant about the subject she is supposed to be explaining. And one can guess that she is also hopelessly ignorant of her hopeless ignorance.
Computer programming started as an extremely difficult and challenging job mostly done by people with advanced qualifications in mathematics, science or engineering. Early programmers wrote their own operating systems, device drivers, and primitive libraries. Most of their programs were algorithmic, so they had to be experts on algorithms too. And pay was (on the whole) very low indeed.
Gradually, as first assemblers and then compilers were introduced, more and more people began to be able to write adequate programs. Then languages like Cobol appeared, which were supposed to allow ordinary business people and accountants to program (they didn't really though). Followed by 4GLs, which promised the same (and still didn't deliver). And then Visual Basic and its horde of imitations, which lowered the bar a good deal by delegating all the difficult stuff to libraries and reducing many decisions to menu-driven choices. And now we have the Web, which once again makes programming dramatically easier by dint of vastly reducing its scope. Today, a few programmers (and designers and analysts and architects) command very high salaries; but mostly because of their ability to combine programming dexterity with excellent understanding of the problem domain (such as trading).
None of which has anything to do with men or women, as Admiral Grace Hopper could tell you if she were still alive.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
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.
at least until you reach a complexity of programming where the two are indistinguishable, and the "Teach everyone to code" movement recognizes that at that level you're not going to be able to depress wages (which is the real goal) because you're basically dealing with genetic freaks that we don't yet know how to create.
It's got nothing to do with SJWs and everything to do with a longstanding economic pattern, namely that when capital notices labor prices going up it takes measures to increase supply. You remember Supply and Demand, right? That's what this is. Pay is good and programmers have middle class lives because supply is low. Middle Class lives don't come cheap, and somebody is actively looking to make it cheaper. This is how things work.
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Symptom not cause - isn't it obvious?
Only 10% of my fellow freshmen computer science majors, actually made it to a degree (most changed majors). Of those, only a fraction actually became software engineers. Teaching computer science to "everyone" might net a few more software engineers, but most everyone who has the ability and desire to be one, already becomes one. If the pay isn't enough to attract more people to the profession, then throwing more people into classes surely isn't going to attract them!
Pay will go down, but not because women are coming into the field. (Although, I would take a cut in pay to get to work next to a smart woman instead of yet another egotistical techno-jock.) Pay will come down because it will be even easier to round up a bunch of resumes that almost but don't quite meet a set of precicely overinflated requirements. Then they will hire an H1-B-er.
I am now convinced that all those Indian "recruiters" are actually H1-B candidates, and their first task is to gather up a bunch of resumes of Americans that don't quite meet the requirements. Once they have enough to satisfy the labor dept. (or whoever) then the employer can justify hiring them. This is why I won't even reply to or talk to any recruiters with Indian names or accents any more. Sorry if that smacks of racism. It's just the little bit that I can do to throw a wrench in the H1-B grist mill.
Those problems have been around since.. well, forever. Ya see, we like to hold this fantasy of Utopia. In fact since we have written things down we see that type of story. Many of us _want_ peace and harmony but forget that human nature means that other people lack that same morality. History is this long chain of events where the higher morals revolt and squash the immoral leaders, and since human nature is to be trusting pretty soon we find ourselves back in the same position again.
So yeah, Povery is a problem. We have had the know-how to fix poverty and starvation for at least a century. There will always be an excuse for war, power grabs, land grabs, punishing those other guys for what they did, etc...
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
These pushes are the same thing as H1B pushes. It's a competative race to the bottom.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Or for the simplest reason of all: minimum wage has not kept up with inflation (and TFA's numbers are, as you'd hope, inflation-adjusted). Obviously if you go far enough back, minimum wage didn't exist. However, if you look at historical, inflation-adjusted minimum wages, they trend downward nationally... because for some reason, the minimum wage wasn't indexed to inflation and requires an act of congress to update it.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
In other words, the glass ceiling doesn't only affect women, and abolition of the glass ceiling would actually help male wages too.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Kids these days [...]
Heard every generation for at least twelve millenia.
Of course not, because feminists don't care about equality.
As a life-long feminist, who also happens to be a man, I can say this is ignorant bullshit. Move along, nothing to see here but self-congratulatory preconceptions.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Also; health care, especially geriatric care, is unlikely to be so thoroughly automated as other professions. Carl Karcher Enterprises, the parent company of Carl's Junior and Hardee's, is said to be working on a restaurant with no employees at all. This is likely unattainable; SOMEBODY will be needed to fix the machinery when it breaks, but I've seen video of the hamburger-cooking robot, and more and more fast food places have self-service order kiosks. It will be a while before a robot can properly change a bedpan or a dressing.
It's easy to call someone else's job simple and easy, I've noticed.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes