Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Say a fair price for a specific job at age 30, with your experience (after taking off 2 years to raise a child) is 86k. But because you are a woman, you get paid only 72k, and a man doing the same job gets paid 100k.
But you are married to a 40 year man. Because he is older, and never took time off to raise the children, he is making 150k. If was female, he would have only earned 108k. A fair price salary would be 129k (half way between 108 and 150). But being male, he makes 150k.
Your combined salary is now 150+72=222k.
Now compare that if you both got a fair salary of 86k+129k = 215k.
That is, a married couple living in a society where women take time off to raise a child, and women marry older men, but everyone gets paid a fair salary regardless of gender, end up making $7,000 less, than if they live in a discriminatory society where men make more than women do.
Gay women get screwed the most as they both get the 14% discount to their value. Gay men make out like bandits because they both get the 14% upgrade. But married couples - and that includes the brides as well as the grooms - are still CLEAR winners in our current system.
As long as the majority of women in our culture expect to get married to an older man, expect to take time off to raise their kids (while their husband keeps working), then they can also expect to benefit from getting a lower salary.
This is despite the fact that the system is clearly and obviously biased and unfair.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
sad news for you, women have a kind of "stealth penis" that develops from the same tissues as your dong during gestation. They can even discretely masturbate it with thigh movements while typing code, while you have to work one-handed!
Programmers make $0.75 US dollar for every Canadian dollar they earn.