In Tech, Wage Gender Gap Worsens For Women Over Time, and It's Worst For Black Women (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader shares a TechCrunch report: According to a new study involving more than 120,000 job offers transacted on Hired, a jobs marketplace for tech workers, the average female candidate is still making less than her male peers for the same work, and sometimes far less. Hired's data shows that 63 percent of the time women receive lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company, with white women offered 4 percent less on average, and women more broadly offered up to 50 percent less in the most extreme examples. Along the same vein, for one out of every 10 job openings that Hired analyzed, companies offered white men salaries that were at least 20 percent higher than those offered to women. According to the American Association of University Women, it might take another 136 years for the pay gap to disappear entirely. Perhaps more illuminating in this new report is what happens to women's salaries over time, and who is receiving the lowest pay of all for the same jobs at the same companies: Latina and black women. [...] It found that white women with four years or less of experience actually ask for more money than their male counterparts -- possibly because they're armed with information about what the market is paying for more entry-level jobs. A gap in the other direction begins to appear in candidates with six or more years of experience, however, with white women in tech both asking for less than their white male counterparts and receiving it. Indeed, over time and across the country, white women in tech earn an average of .90 cents for every dollar made by their male peers for the same work.

Comments

The takeaway

[grasshoppa]

So women ask for less...and they get it.

Newsflash; that isn't discrimination. That's not sexism. That's individuals undervaluing they're worth, and not anyone's fault but the person that does it.

Re:The takeaway

[grasshoppa]

Speaking of reading skills:

A gap in the other direction begins to appear in candidates with six or more years of experience, however, with white women in tech both asking for less than their white male counterparts and receiving it. Indeed, over time and across the country, white women in tech earn an average of .90 cents for every dollar made by their male peers for the same work.

The trick is you have to read more than the summary.

Re:The takeaway

[JoeMerchant]

Did the analysis take into account time off for childbirth and care?

If they say they did, did they do it correctly?

Re:The takeaway

[Jhon]

Correlation != causation. Lets think this through. If a fully qualified black woman who is a perfect match for a given job will get paid 75% of a while male why the hell aren't all businesses hiring black woman and telling white men to pound sand?

It's more likely, as the article indicates, women short changing themselves in part -- and likely that they make different career choices than men. There aren't many IT jobs where you don't find your self working god-awful numbers of hours a week at least SOME times and quite a few where ~50 a low average. Not many woman who also want (or already have) families would willingly enter that type of work environment. With regards to race playing a factor, the single parent household rate is higher with black women than white -- again -- signifying different career choices and motivations.

You also don't see a lot of woman working on oil rigs, in the logging industry or commercial fishing. Long hours, long time away from home will usually equal fewer woman.

Re:The takeaway

[chihowa]

But you're right about the short-changing themselves. I was talking with a female colleague who holds a PhD about getting hired, and she said "well, our wages are fixed anyway. They said you have this degree and x years of experience so that's the salary". We work in the private sector, so no, our wages aren't "fixed". You can definitely discuss your salary. You just accepted the first offer they gave you, instead of bargaining. They would have at least offered you a stock-plan if you didn't agree right away.

I've heard this in academia, too, and they're not really fixed here either. It's just a shitty and abusive negotiation tactic that is used to try to cut the salary negotiation short and it often works. Women are apparently less likely to call the bluff and press for what they think they're worth.

Re:The takeaway

[swillden]

So women ask for less...and they get it.

Newsflash; that isn't discrimination. That's not sexism. That's individuals undervaluing they're worth, and not anyone's fault but the person that does it.

So... women do worse in a system designed decades ago when there were no women in the professional workforce. That is, a system designed around male behavioral norms. Is anyone surprised by that?

The HR organization in my employer did an analysis a few years ago and found that while female engineers and male engineers of the same rank on the career ladder got paid the same (because the HR organization had previously worked hard to make it so), female engineers tended to be of lower rank. Looking more closely, they found that this was mostly caused by the fact that women nominated themselves for promotion at a lower rate. Promotion in my company is initiated by the employee seeking promotion, not by management. Promotion success rates for those who applied were equal or slightly higher for women, as were subsequent job performance ratings. In a followup study they interviewed randomly-selected high-performing engineers of both genders and found that the women were less assertive in all sorts of ways that seem clearly related to societal gender stereotypes -- and remember that this was a set of women working in a male-dominated field, and at the highest level of that field, so they were no shrinking violets.

The HR team attempted to counter this problem with a campaign to both encourage female engineers directly and -- what turned out to be more important -- to educate their managers to be more sensitive to the fact that women are often less assertive, and to actively counter that by regularly encouraging high-performing women to seek promotion. Within a year of initiating this program, they found that promotion application rates had equalized across the genders, with no effect on promotion success rates or subsequent job performance. In addition, they found that promotion application rates for both genders had risen (though women rose more). Subsequent analysis attributed that to managers also putting more effort into encouraging high-performing but non-assertive men.

The promo self-nomination process was designed with typical high-performing male behavioral patterns in mind, which turn out to be slightly different than typical high-performing female behavioral patterns. Nature or nurture, I don't know and don't care. The point is that the system was designed for men and that made it difficult for women to keep up. A slight alteration of the system fixed the problem and women are no longer at a disadvantage (not in that area, at least).

Required ShoeOnHead Video

[GWXerog]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Did you know it's illegal to pay one sex/race/gender/anything less than another?

I know how this turns out

[computational super]

How much do you want to bet the solution is going to be to start paying male programmers less?

you think that's bad?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eskimo woman here. We get $0.00 for every $1.00 that our white male peers make. We can't get a job. we can't even get a job interview. I can club a baby seal just as well as a man but nobody will hire me as a front-end engineer. Totally bullshit.

Stop the Sexism

[togoshigekata]

Male Nurses: ~8%, Male Teachers: ~20%, Male on the job deaths: ~90%+

Large statistical basis & perfomance

[supercell]

Since compensation in the private sector is more or less based on performance and since we are talking large statistical samples, might it be that males generally excel at IT functions?

Also for career paths in general, on a large statistical basis, women are much more likely to leave the work for some period of time to raise children or in some cases they marry have a partner that allows them to not work or work part time. This is highly disruptive to their career growth and their compensation. This I suspect, is the majority or any pay discrepancy between males an females on a large statistical scale.

Otherwise, I think the whole this is a political wedge to gain votes. I am a business owner and I suspect all business owners are going to hire the lowest cost, yet most productive employees they can. If women were willing to work for less and were such great deals, all companies would hire women exclusively. This argument falls flat.

Re:Hire only women and minorities!

[religionofpeas]

For some reason, corporations prefer to hire expensive white men, rather than cheap black women.

Lies, Damn Lies, & Statistics

[ArhcAngel]

The actual statistic from reputable sources is 4-7% And even those sources can't explain the reasoning because there are so many variables.
If your interested, a good breakdown of why the gender gap statistic is specious.

Look to Social Justice for the Answer

[NaCh0]

There is a really easy answer. I hire all men but on the EO report I write that half are identified as women. 13% identify as black and 12% hispanic.

This keeps the Rachel Dolezal types happy and we move on to more important issues, like getting shit done.

Source of the data?

[GWXerog]

I was curious where the data for this report was being sourced, and we can see it's from hired.com. Under their methodology section we see "This report is based on proprietary data gathered and analyzed by Hired’s research and strategy data scientist, Dr. Jessica Kirkpatrick. The analysis in this study was done using a combination of voluntary, self-reported demographic data and a classifier that identified the gender of the candidate based on their first name."

Searching for Jessica Kirkpatrick in Google returns a few articles about her where the highlight is.... that she is in fact a woman. Her own public social media is nothing but a torrent of women's rights and equal pay stories and articles. So we have a clearly opinionated data scientist working with a set of "proprietary data" gathered by a private recruiting organization which focuses on diversity. Was there some other conclusion that anybody expected other then "MUH WAGE GAP IS REAL?"

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

[Baloroth]

Hired's data shows that 63 percent of the time women receive lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company,

That sounds awful, till you realize that from simple statistical fluctuation you'd expect that number to be 50 percent, in which light 63 percent seems to indicate some trend, but not nearly as big a one as the writer clearly intends to signify. How large is the average fluctuation? What's the probability women could have gotten such offers by chance (which would require knowing for e.g. the sample size, which, speaking of, that doesn't seem to be given in the report)? You know, anything that might reveal the statistical significance of the findings, which seem to be entirely absent from the report and without which raw numbers are almost entirely meaningless.

with white women offered 4 percent less on average, and women more broadly offered up to 50 percent less in the most extreme examples.

The report (linked in the article and here) says the average is 4% for all women. Also, "up to 50% in the most extreme examples" means "we found 1 case where that happened", which, again, you'd expect (in fact, you could probably find some extreme examples where a man was offered that much less than a woman), or at least, you'd *probably* expect (can't say for sure without knowing the variance of the job offers, which I supposed you could extract from the chart, but doesn't seem to be given in numerical form). 4% also just happens to be the average amount less women ask for than men. They also don't (AFAICT) look into issues like time taken off career for maternal leave (which, sorry, means you're going to be worth less due to not having been able to keep up with current developments, it sucks, but life choices have consequences), hours worked (statistically, men tend to work slightly longer hours than women: IIRC it's something like 8.4 vs 7.8 per day, but no clue if that is true in tech or not), etc. etc.

I should be clear: I'm not saying there isn't sexism in tech. There sure as shit is, for a lot of reasons, just like there's ageism, racism, religious discrimination, and a bunch of other -isms and -tions. But biased, politically motivated, and downright misleading articles like this one really aren't the way forward.

Re: The reality

[Anonymous Coward]

It's always the same articles on /dot. It goes like this.

1. Trump did this....
2. Trump did that
3. Not enough women in STEM
4. Women don't get paid enough
5. Transgender people want their own bathrooms
6. Not enough women in STEM

Take your SJW sh*t over to Twitter where the rest of your unemployed friends hang out.

Re:Guilty

[sycodon]

There is no wage gap.

Economists have debunked this time and again.

Discounted labour!

[Anonymous Coward]

You hear that corporations? There's a discount on labour! Save, save, save! Apparently if you hire black women they have identical skills, experience, and work just as hard as the average person in your company. Why are you hiring anyone but them? DISCOUNT!!!

Everyone says companies are willing to do anything to save a buck, but apparently, when it comes to labour, they won't. Weird, eh? I wonder if there could be another reason...

Perhaps its the interview process?

[jediborg]

This article http://blog.interviewing.io/we... discusses an interesting experiment where males and females had their voices masked for technical interviews so they could analyze the differences in how women perform while controlling for gender discrimination. Some fascinating results that show how women react differently to tech interviews than men, possibly resulting in them getting less employment offers and/or lower salary. I wonder how much this effect can be attributed to the results mentioned in this slashdot article. Like most problems with women's performance/success compared to men, this is mostly a cultural issue. There are things we can all do to pitch in and improve the situation but its not really something the government can legislate away.

On the other hand, i wouldn't be surprised to find the tech industry is actually more discriminating toward women than other industries, given that we already know there is rampant agism (reluctance to hire older programmers) and a culture that encourages workers to forgo family and other commitments in favor of longer hours and 'crunch time'

So what if there is a gap?

[Anonymous Coward]

The feminist movement has made it abundantly clear that women are competent and capable of success, and that they do not need men to provide for them or protect them.

So....there is nothing for me to do in response to this information. The women can take care of this problem themselves, without my help.

Re:Verizon math?

[NotQuiteReal]

probably a government handout - that .9 we pay for every gallon of gas is going to women in IT!

Re:Guilty

[istartedi]

Economists don't know jack. The real world has debunked them time and time again.

Re:A woman and I were paid the same

[Frobnicator]

There are many books on that, like "Women Don't Ask" and "Nice Girls Don't Get The Corner Office", where economists and business researches study why it happens. Several books on the topic propose that nearly all of the gender gap comes from women not asking for wages or negotiating for themselves.

Simply, men ask for bonuses, promotions, and raises about 4x more than women do. Men ask for more with each request, about 2x more than women do.

(Obviously there are exceptions to the groups. Some men don't ask, and some women do ask, but overall the trends are quite clear.)

Men are more likely to negotiate their wages at hire, nearly 8x more likely to negotiate. Some women will negotiate, but few do. Of those who do negotiate, most women will ask for less; perhaps for one job a man may initially ask for $10,000 more, the fewer women who ask for the same role are more likely to start at $6,000 or $4,000 or less. Men are more likely to ask for raises and promotions out of cycle, roughly 6x more likely to ask for a raise or bonus or promotion after completing an assignment or project. It is quite common for men to quietly approach their boss with: "I finished the project, I'd like a raise", or "That contract is complete, I'd like a bonus", or "I just landed this deal for the company worth $x, I'd like a bonus for that." Women almost never do that. (The stats come from several studies in the books mentioned above.)

When performance reviews come around, men usually write more self-praise, take credit for accomplishments, and ask firmly for a large raise and bonus; women tend to deflect praise to the team and ask for minimal rewards, often even asking less than COLA (effectively taking a pay cut). In reviews, I've seen that women are also more likely to list their faults and problems and areas for improvement instead of listing their accomplishments.

Men usually take an active role in talking with their bosses to get the raises and promotions and bonuses. Women will often talk to their peers, particularly to their female co-workers, but will usually assume that their actions speak for themselves and not mention it to the boss. Of course, the boss sees a team where everything is working well, hears no complaints, hears no requests for more money and promotions, and lets the team carry on.

The various authors point out that it isn't due to a lack of negotiating skill, it applies even to fields in marketing and law where persuasive negotiation is critical and the women are well-trained, yet for many reasons women tend not to negotiate on their own behalf.

Re:Thirst?

[negRo_slim]

Friendly reminder that /. has degraded to sociopolitical bullshit.

Re:Guilty

[jareth-0205]

And yet... no links? Just a statement, and that merits modding up?

There is a wage gap, it comes up again and again, but the *reasons* are disputed.

Re:Guilty

[blindseer]

"There is a wage gap, it comes up again and again, but the *reasons* are disputed."

Define "wage gap". If we take the wages of all women and average them and then take the wages of all men and average them then we can see a "wage gap". This alone is not a problem since women typically choose jobs that don't pay as much. For example, there's a lot of women working as school teachers and a lot of men working as lumberjacks. We don't fault the men for the higher pay because dealing with chainsaws that can rip off your arm is much more dangerous than a classroom of kindergarteners. Women usually choose the lower pay, and safer job, over the higher pay, and more dangerous, job. But that's not how the "wage gap" is typically defined, and it's not how this article defines it either.

The claim is that if we see women and men doing the exact same job, with the exact same experience and education, that somehow this "wage gap" still appears. But to anyone that has done an honest evaluation of this "wage gap" has seen is that in reality there is no "wage gap". It turns out that long ago we've made it illegal to pay people differently based on gender, age, race, and on and on. If there actually was a real and honest wage gap in America then a lot of employers would be in court over it right now.

There is no wage gap. People that claim there is one will try to shoehorn *reasons* to make the case. Once people see the supposed *reasons* for this gap it all goes away.