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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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
The first programmers were mostly engineers, the designers of the systems, and mightily male.
The first computers were women in World War II, who calculated artillery tables for gunners.
Before the invention of electronic computers, âoecomputerâ was a job description, not a machine. Both men and women were employed as computers, but women were more prominent in the field. This was a matter of practicality more than equality. Women were hired because there was a large pool of women with training in mathematics, but they could be hired for much less money than men with comparable training. Despite this bias, some women overcame their inferior status and contributed to the invention of the first electronic computers.
http://ethw.org/Women_Computers_in_World_War_II
...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.
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.
"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.
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.
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