> Women, who make up 41% of the Tech Guild, earn 12% less on average than men
Such statistics are meaningless without more context. For example, are women over-represented in entry level positions? Do they work the same hours? the same overtime? And so forth.
Articles that present such statistics are pushing propaganda.
I've always wondered why companies don't overhire women to save on labor costs.
The only explanations I can rationalize is that management isnt aware of the pay difference, or they are aware but they're more sexist than they are greedy.
> In the United States, for example, the non-adjusted average woman's annual salary is 79–83% of the average man's salary, compared to 95–99% for the adjusted average salary
It's the same in essentially every western developed country. Discrimination on the basis of gender is no longer accepted, the disparities that persist are due to different choices.
If women were paid less for the same work companies would benefit from staffing mostly women.
One explanation I've heard is that companies don't extract the same value from women as they do from men because society's sexism causes managers and peers to assign "low value tasks" disproportionately to women even when they have the same job description as their male counterparts.
I think that today is very interesting in that a lot of the R neocons of yesteryear have shifted to D neolibs today. It's really weird in a lot of ways.
Note: I've been pretty heavily libertarian minded for a long time, so this observation has mostly been an outside perspective even though I'm currently more inclined to move R as a secondary/pragmatic position. There are some aspects of R and D I'm inclined to support.
It’s not meaningless if you want to see women making at least as much as men regardless of the job and their skills. That’s the obvious implication of such statistics.
But is that really a valuable goal? The market determines wages, and usually it's willing to favor sacrifices like a 24 hour oncall rotation. Don't those people deserve for the value of those sacrifices to be reflected in compensation?
"Equal pay for equal work" is a much more compelling goal in my view than "equal pay for unequal work".
Not to mention it's incentivize companies to cut the roles with artificially inflated wages. Imagine a government mandated that some component or material cost 15% more than market rate. You'd refactor your design with that new cost in mind, and reduce usage of that component. Similar deal with labor.
I'd counter it's more likely that you'd see even more corruption and revolving doors between civilian and govt roles. It's very easy to spend other people's money (govt spending from taxes).
It's not a straw man. In the UK, the government has stepped in and mandate that two different jobs be paid the same, in the pursuit of pay equity.
Specifically, they forced Next to pay their warehouse workers and retail workers the same. When the retail workers were asked why they wouldn't just take jobs in the warehouse, they responded to the effect of "it's a less pleasant job, you'd have to pay me a lot more money to do it." Yet the UK mandated equal wages on account of the fact that more retail workers were women, and market rate wages created a net pay disparity (though women and men in the same roles were paid the same).
The intended implication of the presented statistic is obvious, but the actual disparity is impossible to realize without context on the types of positions being included in the statistic.
The above commenter is asking for relevant facts. If Job A pays more than Job B and there's a larger proportion of men in Job A then men's average pay will be higher, but both genders are receiving equal pay for equal work.
If anything, your allegations of sealioning are violating HN's guideline "Assume good faith."
did they commit thought crime or something? any even semi-competent statistician would have these questions, and any semi-competent journalist would question numbers being produced by an organization that are being used to promulgate that organization's agenda. and, moreover, we both know that the likelihood that these numbers actually properly control for these things is essentially 0. the sad thing is that if they did actually do the right thing, the numbers would be not as fair, but much more heinous and actionable. as it is there is absolutely no conclusion to draw for anyone involved-- how is the NYT supposed to fix the policy when they cannot even divine whether it's an underpromotion problem vs a recruiting problem vs an outright racism problem? isn't the goal to get them to fix things? the fixes for those three things are DRAMATICALLY different from one another.
Such statistics are meaningless without more context. For example, are women over-represented in entry level positions? Do they work the same hours? the same overtime? And so forth.
Articles that present such statistics are pushing propaganda.