If not, then that's also an equity problem. If the "dog jobs" are mostly offered to women and minorities, that should also be called out as a problem for employers to solve.
This presupposes a lot of pretty nasty things. It reads like you apply to the NYT and then you get offered a job based on your gender or race which is obviously not the case. That lack of equity (which is equality of outcome, not opportunity) is itself a problem and not simply a byproduct of different people being different. That when your entire sample size is 622, you can make broad generalizations based on the pay of ~37 of them. Even if you can, it also assumes that your salary in your job is based on objective set criteria and not a) whether you negotiate, b) how hard you negotiate, c) whether you have a BATNA that makes you need the job less, d) whether you had breakfast that morning or were more tired than normal or were coming down with a cold or any number of a myriad of other things that could affect a high-stakes negotiation.
The pay gap as a systemic issue (for equal work for equal hours with equal qualifications) has been debunked a thousand times over. But while it's certainly possible (likely?) that some individual companies have a racially or gender-driven pay gap, it's a far stretch to assume that the NYT is one of them.
Equality of opportunity is good, giving people a leg up early in their lives when they've been disadvantaged, regardless of their race or gender, is good. "Equity" for the sake of it is racist.
> It reads like you apply to the NYT and then you get offered a job based on your gender or race which is obviously not the case.
Obviously? A newspaper is exactly the kind of business to hire based on your personal narrative (including 100% of protected class intersections). That's the entire point of the opinion column. Granted, I don't think that the folks being discussed here are publishing any personal opinions, and I doubt the times is doing anything legally actionable or we would have heard about it, but the idea that they don't consider these factors just because it's illegal is laughable.
Yeah I didn't phrase it very well, what I meant was that you're not applying for any old job on the tech team. You apply for a specific job, presumably one you're qualified for that would be a step up in your career.
If you look at a very small sample of people and one racial minority or gender has all the "lower" jobs, that doesn't tell you what jobs they were "offered" it just tells you what jobs they applied for.
I'm pretty conflicted answering this. On one hand reporting is miserable; on the other hand it's virtually impossible to exclude bias in hiring, especially if the hiring requires skills that people pay to learn.
man the downvotes on this thread are all over the place-- people need to take a long, hard look in the mirror about what discourse they actually tolerate, vs what they tell themselves... it's absurd. at best this comment is mildly combative, but it doesn't seem like OP took it personally, as they shouldn't have, but yet... downvote city. it's especially bizarre because i couldn't even tell you what ideological trigger shibboleth is being triggered here, even...
I try not to talk about voting on here per the guidelines, but it is pretty interesting to me the cross-section of completely legitimate, valid viewpoints that will get obliterated if they're mentioned on the wrong thread. Like everyone else I'm predisposed to think my particular ideology is slightly more persecuted than the other one but it doesn't even seem to be liberal v. conservative, authoritarian v. libertarian, or Democrat vs. Republican. I'm sure the initial thread topic has something to do with it and I do recall dang saying they keep an eye a little more closely on threads that are particularly political.
I'd be curious to see an analysis of downvoted comments in political threads and what their general ideological bent was.
- african americans are statistically more likely to originate from lower on socio economic ladder than, say, asian americans
Thus when you get a bunch of job applicants, you might get an asian american with a Yale degree (James) and an african american with a community college degree (John). Affirmative action or other DEI pressures might force you to hire both James and John, but James will probably be able to outperform John due to higher initial degree of education. Furthermore, James may have had parents who networked and ensured he got good internships and experience growing up while John didn't have that opportunity.
So it's not that the company is offering John a "dog job", it's just, James's capacity to perform in current role and take on new responsibilities is at a higher initial state than John's, so it's not unthinkable he would climb corporate ladder faster than John given those initial advantages. Pay gap is a natural consequence that follows.
I don't really think a Yale degree makes you better than someone with a community college degree. There's no magic at Yale. The education you get everywhere is pretty good now because of all the resources universally available to all students.
But Yale basically applies a filter function and attracts the top 0.01% of high school graduates every year (plus some less elite legacy students and DEI admits). When you hire a Yale graduate, that's what you are paying for. Not the Yale education. If you could find a similar filter function some other way, you'd hire that 0.01% of high school graduates via that filter function.
And in fact companies are always trying to get ahead of their competitors and find other, less well-known, filter functions to get high performers who others don't know about. In the 1980s and 1990s Microsoft was among the first to discover that Indian IIT graduates were products of an extreme filter function applied to Indian high school students (IIT grads are like top 0.0001% of Indian high school grads). For a long time Microsoft hired those engineers for cents on the dollar. By the 2000s though, the word was out ... hiring IIT grads is as difficult as getting any other high performing grads.
There was also a brief period of time when Google had an edge in recruiting by identifying high school kids who were good at programming competitions online and via contributors to projects in Google's open source projects. But now, that signal is well-known too.
So John's community college degree doesn't matter if John is an elite performer.
As someone who has studied at both kinds of schools I can tell you there is a WORLD of difference.
In a middling school the professor was constantly providing remedial education to the students and had to cut down the curriculum breadth and depth.
When we are talking about the elite 0.01% of students the professor is irrelevant for regular coursework. They are almost uniformly autodidacts. A mentor is of course useful at the very boundaries of knowledge that textbooks and papers don't cover. But by the time you are in that range of work, you will be recognized through your performance, and you can find mentors by reaching out to them with links to your work.
Generally, people are completely unaware of what top 0.01% of performance looks like because we are so rarely around these people unless we are in some very elite institution or working on some project which attracts such people.
Employers are not responsible for forcing people to do the work required to be qualified for a position the employers are trying to fill.
Among the people who are qualified for the position, they are prohibited by law from considering race or gender or other protected characteristics when making a hiring decision.
Not really. Imagine if it takes 20 years to acquire some senior status, and the world was 100% sexist/racist/whatever 20 years ago(so only white men were allowed) but 0% now, you would have a bunch of white men as senior rank even though the world isn't sexist/racist/whatever any more.
