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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?
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.
To add to that an individual decrease for some. A net increase for all. What's not to get?
We're going to automate 50% of the workforce right out of their jobs anyway, so I'd rather have lower pay then people on the streets.
It's been my experience that when you get great software developers together it creates demand for more software developers. I don't think a simple supply and demand model works.
Think about how many software jobs wouldn't exists without the Linux Kernel. Enabling technology creates more jobs than congress could ever hope to.
It's not just women. I find that developers who lack the passion to continuously learn and play with technology (not necessarily directly related to their day job....just technology in general) tend to be the ones that are middle of the pack in large companies. They aren't necessarily bad at their job, but they are never the ones that leap ahead of the pack. For them it's just a "job".
The question becomes: how many "average" developers can you get away with and still be a successful company? The "rock stars" are expensive, so you want to have as few of them as you can and have them cover for the rest of the team......and they'll do it willingly because they love what they do. It's the reason that I left my last job......I was tired of covering for everyone else.
It's even worse when the "average" developers are in a different country.
"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
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.
You don't need a pack of alpha sleigh dogs. That only ensures that you have everyone pulling into a different direction and everyone's wasting everyone else's energy. You need one, maybe two, to give the whole thing a direction and a bunch of others who're going to do the pulling.
Just like our society needs the movers and shakers to break open barriers, but we need far more conformists and followers to keep the structure together. Have you ever seen those "passionate" types try to meet project deadlines and stay in budget without someone reigning them in? In this time and age of IT, driven by cost sheets and milestones rather than the will and ability to innovate the next big thing, the question is rather how many of those special snowflakes you can get away with and still be successful.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
+5 for this misogynist crap?
Sounds like a simple fact of his life. And now that I think of it, it's also been true in my career.
Reality is rarely politically correct.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Nah, because all of this "everyone learns to code" thing is more or less crap.
We also teach everyone how to do math, if you recall. And the vast majority of population /still/ can't do it, despite such a huge educational focus. And despite the efforts of Common Core and other initiatives to improve math literacy, the actual number of people who will end up doing math professionally probably won't change.
The number of competent programmers may increase slightly, but comparing a career in programming to a career of "recreation", it's bullshit. This study is nothing more than some SJW spewed crap and Cornell should be ashamed to even ever put their name on it. It manipulates figures to make itself sound meaningful. Consider:
TFA:
"Consider the discrepancies in jobs requiring similar education and responsibility, or similar skills, but divided by gender. The median earnings of information technology managers (mostly men) are 27 percent higher than human resources managers (mostly women)"
Wow so they compared two different fields with supposedly "similar" education and responsibility and then concluded that because one of female dominated, wages are higher for one than the other. I guess logic isn't something they did well with.
TFA:
"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."
I'm sure this had nothing to do with the apparent increase and demand in computer programming, not to mention how the field has evolved over the past five or six decades at an incredible rate. The focus has shifted from menially making punch cards to writing OOP in a high level language. The actual job changed so dramatically and the skills required to do it increased quite dramatically.
TFA:
"While the pay gap has been closing, it remains wide. Over all, in fields where men are the majority, the median pay is $962 a week — 21 percent higher than in occupations with a majority of women, according to another new study, published Friday by Third Way, a research group that aims to advance centrist policy ideas."
Another failure to do basic statistics. Maybe women simply choose lower-paying jobs due to social expectations of them to choose said jobs. Other factors also play into it, but this statistic is completely meaningless. They even mention this themselves: "Yes, women sometimes voluntarily choose lower-paying occupations because they are drawn to work that happens to pay less, like caregiving or nonprofit jobs, or because they want less demanding jobs because they have more family responsibilities outside of work."
TFA:
"But many social scientists say there are other factors that are often hard to quantify, like gender bias and social pressure, that bring down wages for women’s work."
Then don't fucking try to quantify it until you can.
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And that's all I can handle of this supposedly "scientific" study. Cornell is shit for publishing it, and so is the author.
I consider my hobbies at home to be my real work. My job just funds it.
Good-bye
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.
"I've never found a woman coworker to be even half as passionate about technology and computers as I am."
+5 for this misogynist crap?
While it does seem like he is implying a sweeping generalization based on his personal experience, he does stop short of actually making such a generalization. So his response is less knee-jerk than yours.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.