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Comment by smokeyj | Hacker News Reader

I'd be more interested in quantifying productivity and seeing if there's a systematic discrepancy between productivity and gender. Either the market is accurately pricing talent or there's a delta to be exploited.

I think if a paper was released tomorrow that said "female programmers 30% undervalued as observed by double blind coding challenge" head hunters would fix that problem overnight.

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This was studied among lawyers. Female lawyers were significantly less productive.

https://www.upf.edu/rs/_pdf/jornadesGenere/GenderGaps_Ferrer...

While interesting, that's a very particular definition of "productive" - male lawyers billed more hours. That doesn't necessarily correspond to more actual work done.

Depends what you mean by "productive" - if the law firm makes more money off of male lawyers, that would mean they are more "productive"

Directly, perhaps. What if the women were doing non-billable work that enabled their colleagues to bill more combined total hours than they would have had she done billable work instead?

Are you referring to something, or just asking "what if"?

I'm challenging the parent's assumption that an individual's billable hours are an accurate representation of that person's contribution to a firm's top line, let alone bottom line.

Accurately and consistently measuring performance of professionals has been all but impossible for the better part of the last century.

I don't know why we keep trying. This is what peer reviews are for.

If I were to start a company today, I'd definitely be tempted to only hire women, and pay my entire workforce 80 cents on the dollar, instead of 70 cents on the dollar.

I couldn't be sued for pay discrimination if ALL of my underpaid engineers are women, since there is no benchmark for a lawsuit to compare the discrimination too!

I jest, but it really does surprise me that more companies aren't trying to aggressively poach underpaid women from other companies.

If I were to start a company today, I'd definitely be tempted to only hire women, and pay my entire workforce 80 cents on the dollar, instead of 70 cents on the dollar.

Except that correcting for experience, the pay gap shrinks to about 94 cents on the dollar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it0EYBBl5LI

I'm with John Green here: Much of the strong negative feeling around the gender pay gap comes from women as a whole feeling "squeezed" because they still do an out-sized amount of the unpaid work in our society. This also contributes to the absolute numbers pay gap, because women need to ask for more flexibility to be able to accomplish that unpaid work.

I wish discussions around that issue were more nuanced and fact based. The answer is more complicated than the simplistic notion that one gender is being crappy to the other, in either direction.

What is the outsized unpaid work? Any studies and do the studies account for different cohorts by age range?

We already know there is a disparity in the amount of housekeeping between men and women, even in couples where both men and women are working.

Housekeeping tends to be something only the woman cares about, though. Do I deserve sympathy for all the unpaid work I put in managing our fantasy football team?

I don't think that's true in the general case, maybe in your experience. Someone needs to cook, clean, do laundry, do dishes, take care of babies, etc, and this tends to fall more heavily on women (don't have studies offhand, but this has been researched).

Not to mention that taking care of babies, in some senses, has to be done by women, as men can't breastfeed. (I'm of course only talking about breastfeeding, but it is a significant amount of work that only a woman can do, unless you prefer to feed your baby from bottles, but this has been proven to be less healthy and therefore less preferred for the baby).

I would be willing to bet that men do more of the DIY and fixing things type stuff in most couples.

I keep on encountering social situations where men are relaxing/socializing and women are running around preparing food. I'm not so sure the gender roles automatically come with an equitable distribution of work, now that technology has eliminated much of the need for the heavier forms of manual labor.

Also, in terms of fixing things, that's supposed to be something you do once, and it stays fixed. Much of traditional "women's work" is recurring.

This is deceptive because it's an opinion piece on Youtube.

The BLS study that controlled for occupation, industry, part-time vs. full-time, education levels, and other factors found that there is still a gender pay wage gap of 94 cents to the dollar [1].

It's not-fact-based to keep touting the 77% number, but it's just as much not-fact-based to claim there isn't a gender wage gap because women feel "squeezed".

[1] https://www.shrm.org/Advocacy/Issues/CivilRights/Documents/G...

This is deceptive because it's an opinion piece on Youtube.

The BLS study that controlled for occupation, industry, part-time vs. full-time, education levels, and other factors found that there is still a gender pay wage gap of 94 cents to the dollar [1].

It's not-fact-based to keep touting the 77% number, but it's just as much not-fact-based to claim there isn't a gender wage gap because women feel "squeezed".

Wow. Congrats on an incredible spin job! I'm saying there is a gender disparity, and that this is apparent in the sentiments of women! (Feeling "squeezed") Yet somehow you are spinning it as if I'm saying the opposite! I also assert that there is still a gender pay wage gap of 94 cents to the dollar -- right there in black and white in my gp comment. Are you somehow suggesting you are disagreeing with me by restating it in your comment?

It's not-fact-based to keep touting the 77% number, but it's just as much not-fact-based to claim there isn't a gender wage gap because women feel "squeezed".

Please re-read my comment. I am asserting that a) 70% or 80% is not factual. b) The factual number is more like 94%. c) The issue extends beyond that 94% number, involving the actual demands on women's time through societal expectations around essential but unpaid work done by women -- Women are effectively working more for less renumeration, but the issue is more nuanced than just one number can relate.

But he brought that up in the video with the "unexplained pay gap" that still remains when you control for known discrepancy causing variables.

I don't think people are being deceptive arguing for the non-existence of a gender pay gap since controlling for reasonable variables wiped away 80% of the discrepancy. There's no strong explanation for the remaining 20% so it's really just an argument over whether or not the speaker believes that remaining pay gap is the result of hiring or wage discrimination.

I don't think people are being deceptive arguing for the non-existence of a gender pay gap since controlling for reasonable variables wiped away 80% of the discrepancy.

I would say that the numbers very strongly show there is a 6% pay gap. If we assume the job market is efficient, then either there is some bias against women or women slightly under-perform men or women are worse at negotiating salaries or they are receiving some renumeration in the form of greater flexibility.

There's no strong explanation for the remaining 20%

Yet. I don't find it intellectually satisfying to say something doesn't exist just because we don't have a theory that covers it well. The disparity is smaller, but it does exist. I also observe how hectic the schedules of professional women with children appear to be. I'm not sure we completely understand what's going on there, but I don't think the sentiments of women around this issue are entirely disconnected from objective reality. From what I can see, women are "squeezed" in terms of the resource of time.

I know that's what is being passed around (by Hillary Clinton for instance), that there is this huge bias against woman and that they earn 70% of what men do.

But it doesn't work like that, woman doing the same job with the same experience as men have a pay gap difference as low as 1.6%.

So, good luck finding someone willing to work for 20% less than what the industry is paying.

It's because we all know the 70c number is a lie when you actually compare experience, education, job role, and more stuff like that. I mean, don't try to bring it up with an SJW, but we all know the flaws of the study. the 70/77c number only compares all men to all women -- this includes part-time workers, moms who work easier jobs for more time flexibility (with accompanying pay decrease/stagnation), etc. Given the societal norm of women staying at home with kids, and being the ones to sacrifice for family life, this shouldn't be surprising.

If we want to fix that number, we need to give Dads more leeway, more flexibility, and importantly, no gruff, about taking care of their families. This will likely result in a net productivity drop of men as a whole across all industries. But it'll probably fix the perceived pay gap.

If women were universally paid 20-30% less than men for the exact same job, and possess exactly the same qualifications, quality of work, time put in, education, experience, etc., there would literally be swaths of companies only hiring women. It's a no-brainer decision. The fact that we don't see these companies is proof that the gap is a myth.

I think that the problem with your theory is that it relies on the idea that success on a coding challenge translates directly to value as an employee.

I have managed many developers...... some of the ones that are the best coders are NOT the most productive nor the most valuable employees. There are a lot of skills that are needed besides ability to code.

Are you sure that a single data point like this would overthrow the "Intuition" of recruiters? If I understand [1] correct, thats fairly unlikely.

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1754-9434.2008....

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