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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.
and the HB1 makes 0.60 + 60-80 hours a week
That is true. But these kind of reports always fail to explain WHY this continues to happen.
The quiet truth is that a large number of women benefit TREMEDOUSLY from the current set up.
If you area straight woman who follow the traditional cultural model - who takes years off her career to raise a child, while married to an older man, than those woman benefit HUGELY from the current system. (x-14% salary at age 30, after 5 year's off to raise a kid is WELL worth it if you are married to a man that that makes x+14% at age 40, no time off)
The prevalence of this tradition - and the constant admiration of it by our cultural - is why women still get paid less.
Gay women suffer the most from out system, and gay men benefit the most. Never married women come out the 2nd worst, never married men come out the 2nd best.
If you want to end the pay difference, you have to encourage woman to marry YOUNGER men then them. Once that happens, boom, the pay gap will vanish.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If this is really true, and I suspect it is not, why would anyone hire male programmers? It makes no sense economically to pay ~25% more for labor if all else is equal.
"A 2005 study by Linda Babcock, Hannah Riley Bowles and Lei Lai supports this explanation for why women may be less likely to negotiate their starting salaries. The study found a substantial social backlash towards women who negotiated. Women who negotiated were penalised, with both men and women evaluators expressing less desire to work with or hire them":
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/cfawis/bowles.pdf
"Four experiments show that gender diVerences in the propensity to initiate negotiations may be explained by diVerential treatment
of men and women when they attempt to negotiate. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants evaluated written accounts of candidates
who did or did not initiate negotiations for higher compensation. Evaluators penalized female candidates more than male
candidates for initiating negotiations. In Experiment 3, participants evaluated videotapes of candidates who accepted compensation
oVers or initiated negotiations. Male evaluators penalized female candidates more than male candidates for initiating negotiations;
female evaluators penalized all candidates for initiating negotiations. Perceptions of niceness and demandingness explained resistance
to female negotiators. In Experiment 4, participants adopted the candidate’s perspective and assessed whether to initiate negotiations
in same scenario used in Experiment 3. With male evaluators, women were less inclined than men to negotiate, and
nervousness explained this eVect. There was no gender diVerence when evaluator was female."
https://hbr.org/2014/06/why-women-dont-negotiate-their-job-offers/
"However, in most published studies, the social cost of negotiating for pay is not significant for men, while it is significant for women... Women get a nervous feeling about negotiating for higher pay because they are intuiting — correctly — that self-advocating for higher pay would present a socially difficult situation for them — more so than for men."
https://www.wgea.gov.au/sites/default/files/20131206_PP_womennegotiation_1.pdf
"Studies have shown that women’s reluctance to enter negotiations is partly because they are penalised more than men for doing so.15 Because negotiation involves agentic behaviours, women who negotiate must operate outside prescribed gender norms, and can experience backlash for doing so in the form of economic and social penalties (e.g., they can be viewed as hostile, selfish, devious and quarrelsome).16 Women who negotiate agentically can bedisliked and some colleagues may not want to work with them.17 This loss of social capital has economic implications for these women who may not be hired or offered promotions, despite being competent, because they are perceived as lacking in social skills.18 Women are aware of this backlash and try to avoid it.19 The more women anticipate backlash, the less inclined they are to initiate negotiations.20"
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074959781400048X
"As expected, negotiators deceived women more so than men, thus leading women into more deals under false pretenses than men."
http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/34/2/186
"Women experience social and economic penalties (i.e., backlash) for self-promotion, a behavior that violates female gender stereotypes yet is necessary for professional success. However, it is unknown whether and how the threat of backlash interferes with women's ability to self-promote."
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00306.x/pdf
" We review research demonstrating the Catch-22 that female leaders face, such that they are required to display agency to overcome the lack of fit between their gender and leadership yet when they do so, they risk prejudice and hiring discrimination (i.e., backlash)."
The first 2 sentences of the article are:
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
But then the rest of the article disagrees completely:
For every dollar a man in this role earns, this is how much a woman makes:
Game Artist – $0.84
Information Security Specialist – $0.85
Data Specialist – $0.76
Software Architect – $0.89
SEO Strategist – $0.90
Front End Engineer – $0.90
Database Engineer – $0.90
Sharepoint Developer – $0.91
SAP Developer – $0.92
On the upside, two professions in great demand show women doing at or better than the national average:
Software Engineer – $0.94
Mobile Developer – $0.97
I suspect the first sentence should say "That difference is before researchers adjust..." Going further, and reading the linked GlassDoor PDF, I can't even find a 72 cent number in there. So I'm totally confused as to how they got that introduction. Can anyone else make sense of this?
"Further, comparing workers with the same job title, employer and location, the gender pay gap in the U.S. falls to 5.4 percent (94.6 cents per dollar)."
Oddly enough, while they adjust for "everything," they don't mention things like:
Maternity leave
Taking time off to pick up kids after school
(Men often do these sorts of things, but be realistic - women take more time off to handle their families)
They also include "years of experience," but they don't allow for "years of experience with gaps due to taking time off for family."
The study compares a lot of different things, and boils it down to "amount paid in base salary." But they leave out the most important part: "hours actually worked." While this doesn't directly affect base pay, it affects small pay differences because the employer knows that the male employee will end up working more - and more consistent - hours. Thus the less-than six-percent difference.
Mod parent up. The risks of giving a woman of child bearing age range an important role in a software project are huge. It's not like you can just hire a temp. A 25% pay cut to compensate for that risk seems generous.
Even in the summary they state the real number: ~ 5%. This is one of those massive myths that keeps going and going. For the same positions, men and women get paid the same amount.
Women do have trouble with confidence. There's a great Salon article called The Confidence Gap that addresses this. Women have to walk the line between assertive and "bitchy." Oddly enough, women in focus groups are more likely to label an assertive woman as bitchy than men!. A lot of this comes from their own gender!
Women also tend to take jobs that are more fulfilling, even if it's at a lower pay. In some respect I think men could learn a lot from this. That's really the smarter move.
While the submission focuses on salaries and compensation within the corporate sector, what about the total lack of diversity we see within some notable open source projects?
Take the Rust programming language, for example. Despite its community having an intense focus on diversity and tolerance, and despite the project having one of the most stringent code of conducts around, and despite the project even having a Moderation Team to stamp out perceived injustice, why do we see so little diversity among Rust's contributors?
The extreme homogeneity of the Rust community is the exact opposite of what we'd expect, given how much effort and focus they put on diversity. We'd expect to see around half of the participants being women. We'd expect to see much more racial diversity. Yet we don't see any of that, and instead see severe uniformity.
Why do we see so little diversity among the Rust contributors?
even the summary points out that it's only ~5% after those factors are taken into consideration. And guess what well-known statistic points to 5% wage discrimination and is also highly correlated to sex ?
Height.
Go home, SJW's.
It really isn't hard to figure out. There is a massive pay disparity among programmers. Silicon Valley programmers can make ten to twenty fold what a coder in Nebraska is making. There are a far far larger number of male programmers so they are statistically far more likely to be qualified for those positions.
The field is dominated by young adults. Women are far more likely during this period to be out for lower paid or completely unpaid maternity leave which will skew your numbers even if they are otherwise equally paid.
Women are far more likely to be family focused putting family needs ahead of work needs. Even if the workplace puts no obstacles or prejudice against this and supports it that is going to translate into lower productivity and performance and that is going to be reflected in salary over time.
Last but not least programming and tech in general is a difficult field to get valid data on. It is very difficult to control for how well qualified someone is in tech since the most important factors is the impression of past and current achievement and not degrees or paint by numbers corporate assessment at least beyond entry level or academia which obviously has to value the paper credentials they are selling.
My guess is that women don't tend to self-identify as programmers or aim for careers as programmers. The ones who do end up in the field do so with relatively low seniority compared to their experience because they start out in QA or tech support instead of as an "associate software engineer" or whatever.
The female QA specialist I work with could easily be a software engineer -- she's become our de-facto Python guru -- but nevertheless, her job title is still "QA specialist" and (I assume) she gets paid accordingly. Now, if she did make the transition to be a developer officially, do you think they'd start her off as a mid-level one, or call her entry-level? The latter, probably. And if that happened, would she fight for the more senior title/pay? Probably not.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It does say that they adjusted for location. It doesn't say specifically that they adjusted for hours worked, but that's one of the standard ones, so I'd expect it.
Something vague and hard to measure, like your idea that women are putting family needs ahead of work needs, could account for a portion of the difference. But it would have to be unique to tech - are women in programming putting a greater emphasis on family than women in other fields? Of course not. So that doesn't explain the 5% to 28% disparity.
Even if you could come up with something like that, it's not going to account for the full difference. 23% is a big number, and some portion of that must come down to bias. Not necessarily discrimination (though that's certainly in their somewhere) but somewhere in the back of some HR manager's head is the expectation that men are going to be better than women in a male-dominated field, and this will influence their decisions in subtle ways.
5% is a problem but far less of one because the average amount gained by someone who negotiates their salary and someone who doesn't is 7%, and men are twice as likely to negotiate for a salary increase as women. Factoring that in the pay gap shrinks to within a pretty comfortable margin of error.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
Statistical cherry-picking is a great concise explanation of the problem. I wish I'd used it. What happened here is almost worse than cherry-picking, though, since it seems to have been more clueless than targeted. It appears that what Glassdoor did was run the numbers, sort by gender gap (ignoring questions of sample size) and then shout about the one that came out on top. It would actually be very surprising if none of the small categories turned out to show some extreme behavior.
Really, what's more interesting is some of the other high-disparity jobs that do have a sufficiently-large sample size to make you think there's a chance that the data is good. Such as "C Suite" (870 reports, 27.7%), "Pharmacist" (904 reports, 21.8%) and "CAD Designer" (1044 reports, 21.5%). A gender gap among pharmacists seems particularly surprising to me.
Though you still have to keep in mind that this is all subject to really significant bias, since the data is all self-reported by self-selected people.