Female Computer Programmers Make $0.72 For Every Dollar Made By Male: Study (siliconbeat.com)

An anonymous reader cites an article on The Mercury News' Silicon Beat tech blog: Female computer programmers make 72 cents for every dollar earned by male programmers. That difference is after researchers adjust for factors such as age, education, years of experience, job title, employer and location, according to a new study by Glassdoor (PDF), the jobs and recruiting marketplace, which looked at salary data of more than 500,000 people over 140 professions. The well-known U.S. wage gender gap is 76 cents for every dollar men earn. But women earn 94.6 cents for every man's dollar after adjusting for all factors other than gender. In other words, the wage gap in the U.S. is about 5.4 percent.

Comments

Negotiating

[JackieBrown]

Maybe men are better at negotiating salary. Negotiating makes a huge difference. When I was promoted at my last job, I did not negotiating because I was afraid I wouldn't be given the job. The person (a lady) who was promoted next did negotiate and started about 5 thousand more than me.

I'd be interested to see what the starting offer was for men and woman and what disparity was there.

Re:Negotiating

[Anonymous Coward]

That irrelevant.

Regardless of the reasons, if women are as productive as men, then their cheaper labor would pemean they would drive men out of the industry. That's not happening, though...

Re:Negotiating

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe men are better at negotiating salary.

They're just more aggressive.

Bullshit. You must be gay or live with your parents if you think women aren't more aggressive than men.

More f'ing advocacy research...

[Anonymous Coward]

When the first line of the "report" is:

'It is a well established fact that men and women are paid unequally.'

Is it any wonder that their "research" finds that men and women are paid equally?

The solution seems clear

[Anonymous Coward]

If I, as a business owner, can save 28% salary costs on my employees by exclusively hiring women, why would I *ever* hire a man? If women are equal in performance and skill, there is no reason for me to hire men.

Adjusted for every factor

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Except competence and productivity.

Re:Adjusted for every factor

[bluefoxlucid]

Competence and productivity are immeasurable, especially at the point hiring decisions are made.

Look at my career: I have a CV that's impressive in some respects, but lagging in others. My employment history, achievements, and adaptability are clear; yet my CV doesn't carry the incredible weight of high-power, specialized technicians in computer security or systems management. In practice, there are trivialities I simply stall on because of gaps in my knowledge and a poor work ethic in specific situations; there are also insanely complex problems nobody else can solve as efficiently or effectively as I can, simply because I can effectively use analogical thinking and draw from an enormous source of broad and deep knowledge on a variety of topics to immediately comprehend complex systems made up of familiar or vaguely-familiar parts. I fall down when I hit a black box with unknown inputs and outputs.

That means not only does my CV not adequately describe my competence or productivity, but you can't adequately predict my competence and productivity in practice. I can perform poorly, average, or extremely well on any given problem; and most of the problems that come my way are new, which means I have to use old knowledge to shape out a new machine made of rearranged parts. I'm constantly grinding open black boxes, and also just flat-out failing on them. I figured out Puppet, Docker, and C# MVC; I can't get my head around OpenStack, Foreman, or all the front-end stuff in a Web application. I need someone to show me where the seams are so I can pry the black boxes open.

At hiring, I tend to get low-to-middling salaries, currently in the 50-percentile median as per Payscale. It's only by luck that it's worth it; and even then, I tend to replace all my job duties with heavy amounts of scripting and automation, systems that maintain themselves, and other labor-reducing solutions. I spend a lot of time getting paid to do nothing.

Is that competence? I have deep flaws in my competence in any practice. Is it productive? As long as you're not unlucky.

The rabbit hole gets deeper when you start factoring in things like ADHD (maybe that went away?), manic episodes, and other severe psychiatric problems. Good luck measuring the competency of someone who's crazy.

Bullshit.

[Darron_Wyke]

"The well-known U.S. wage gender gap is 76 cents for every dollar men earn." No, it's been disproven. Over and over again. Stop posting this incorrect crap.

Re:Terrible summary

[jasnw]

Mod+2 if I had mod points. This summary is statistical cherry-picking at its worst. Gives those who want to rant about misleading gender-bias studies something to rant about rather than helping sort out a fix for the remaining 5% or so pay offset.

Re:Bullshit

[jedidiah]

5% is statistical noise. It's not being an "asshole", it's being numerate.

I've made my own compromises that have impacted my salary. So I don't buy into the SJW nonsense. Girls are indoctrinated differently. Depending on the size or type of company that will work for or against a female programmer.

Neither is the fault of tech companies or male tech workers.

Re:Bullshit

[ShanghaiBill]

It doesn't say specifically that they adjusted for hours worked, but that's one of the standard ones, so I'd expect it.

How would they adjust for it? My company doesn't keep a database of who is working late at night, and even if we did, these researchers wouldn't have access to it.

are women in programming putting a greater emphasis on family than women in other fields? Of course not.

I don't think women in tech spend more time with their families. But I do think that men in tech spend less time with their families, or don't have families.

Re:Bullshit

[AmiMoJo]

Not rewarding a poor work/life balance is one of the issues we need to fix, for everyone. It's bad for men too, it creates a perverse incentive to harm yourself.

Re:Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

1%>0, .5% >0 are THESE 'problematic'? And even if you think anything OTHER than '0%' is 'problematic' how much effort & tracking, rules, laws etc. are YOU willing to engage in to make sure that there is 0 'statistically determined wage gap' that can't be explained by choice at any given point in time when doing the sampling?

Seriously, this is why no feminist wants to use the ACTUAL gap number as 5% is 'statistically insignificant' and is very likely due to 'personal choices' (where they live, what type of car they drive, material desires, personality etc., etc.).

The point being that 5% isn't a number worth even chasing the details around...there is certainly 0 way to label such a trivial difference as 'gender discrimination', to do that you'd actually have to ask individual hiring managers 'did you pay this woman less because she's a woman' to actually know that there is a 'gender issue'.

So..who's the actual 'asshole' here?