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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.
No wonder it was submitted by anonymous.
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.
So they're overpaid?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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?
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.
and the HB1 makes 0.60 + 60-80 hours a week
And that's being generous.
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
"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.
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.
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.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Yeah, things would be so very much simpler if wifey just stayed home, barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.
I guess the 'barefoot' part is optional for you progressives.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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?
This is a terrible summary, though in this case the fault lies with Glassdoor's summary of their own data, rather than slashdot.
If you look at the details in the appendix, you'll see that their sample size for the "Computer Programmer" title was only 138, as compared to 2330 "Software Architects", 3525 "Front-end Engineers", 13461 "Software Engineers", 2199 "Programmer Developers", etc. All of those other job categories had much lower gender pay gaps in the 4-6% range. That's still too large, but it's much better than 28%.
So what really happened here was that the report analyzed based on self-reported job titles and it so happened that a very rarely-used title, computer programmer, with a small sample size, just happened to have an extreme gender pay difference. Personally, I wonder what kind of company calls their people "computer programmers". In my 25 year career I've had a variety of titles, including "Software developer", "Software engineer", "Software architect", "I/T specialist", "I/T architect", "Software team lead", etc. with various other tags attached like "junior", "senior", "consulting" and so on. I have never, ever had "computer programmer" as my official title, and never known anyone else with that title either.
Speaking from personal experience, my penis makes me a MUCH more productive programmer. I can count to 11, while female programmers can only count to 10!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It isn't one of these 77 cents on the dollar studies. They did factor for all of that, it even says so in the summary. That's why over all professions, they concluded 94 cents on the dollar. But the study found specifically that female computer programmers get 72 cents on male programmers' dollar.
Programmers make $0.75 US dollar for every Canadian dollar they earn.
I wager, if you look at "hours worked", it all changes.
I wager men do far more overtime hours on salary than women do. I rarely see women work overtime or stay until 9pm or later at night. When I do, it is almost exclusively men.
0.72 out of every dollar a male makes goes to a female.
That's a huge improvement! My father gave 100% of his paycheck to my mother each week. If he didn't, all hell would break loose and he would have to sleep in the truck.
statistical disingenuousness abounds these days. i had to dig to find this number. those publishing this sort of study should include accuracy information up front.
Wasn't this topic already settled? Generally speaking men are risk takers and will walk away if the offer is not good enough whereas women are more interested in longer term stability. Also if you don't compare men and women who refused offers you are just getting half the picture and counting different types of people, those who settled for the first offer and those who risked everything and got a better offer. You are not even counting the ones who walked away so the males that you do count are the more highly paid ones. i.e. As others have pointed out, better negotiators get better rewards by risking everything.
In this age of "positive discrimination" (ugh how I dislike that concept!) women should not be grateful for job offers, they should count on that role being held for a female anyway and take more risks when negotiating.