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Comment by bandrami | Hacker News Reader

The fun part of these articles is reading all the comments that literally post proximate causes for the gender wage gap and somehow conclude from that that the gap (which they just validated) does not exist.

This whole process infuriates me. The gender wage gap is an empirical question. It exists. If we believe it's a problem (I do; you may not), it has the easiest solution in the world: give women more money. Seriously, I just solved the gender pay gap, right there: give women more money.

There's all kind of ways you could do that (wage mandates, tax credits, etc.) and they all have pros and cons, but searching for proximate and ultimate causes here is kind of stupid. It exists; if you think it's a problem, the solution is breathtakingly obvious.

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The confusion here is between "women get paid less on average" and "women get paid less on average because of sexist treatment/assumptions". If the latter, more specific statement is true, then we have a problem. However, if women are paid less because of less career-oriented personal life choices, maybe making an issue out of it is an overreaction.

Left-handed people earn less on average than righties. Tall people earn more. With a sufficiently large sample you'll probably find a correlation between salary and hair color, hand size, skin pigmentation, freckle density and a million other arbitrary factors that we've long decided are not worth fighting about.

Why are the motivations of the people paying women important to you? The gap is an outcome of a complex system, and the outcome is what is problematic.

Mandating equality in outcome is probably a stance on fairness that the vast majority of Western society disagrees with. It cuts to the core of what we see as fairness. It's entirely unsurprising that this gets people riled up, though most of it is as the GP said about whether the cause is discrimination or women's own choices.

Personally I think the left in general need to grapple with the fact that we're not all equal, rather than saying that idea is tabboo because it has lead to horrible places before. The fact that the left has largely focussed on suppressing this idea that many people believe (and on an individual level is self evident) rather than tackling it head on is what leads to the backlash against political correctness because people feel like the emperor has no clothes, but they can't say so.

Not to discriminate isn't to treat everyone equally, but based on merit. If I hire/fire an employee because they're black/male/straight/christian, I'm discriminating. If I hire/fire a person because of their work performance, I'm being fair.

I don't care about the motivations of the people paying women. I care about their employee utility function, in which gender shouldn't be a factor.

Because discrimination is bad. Fighting discrimination is fighting for equality of opportunity. This makes sense and we all basically agree it's the right thing to do.

Unequal outcomes are okay. Fighting unequal outcomes is fighting for equality of outcome and it's unfair and makes no goddamn sense in a society where there is free will or any variation at all between the members.

There are plenty of data-driven studies that demonstrate empirically that there is no gender gap in pay. For example, in Google's case, they take many precautions to ensure that compensation decisions are made without knowledge of an individual's gender: https://www.blog.google/topics/diversity/our-focus-pay-equit...

They even remove names from resumes for hiring decisions to avoid unconscious bias from the decision makers.

This is about as close as you can get to a completely fair system and is far above and beyond what can be reasonably expected from a business.

It seems that your solution is to simply increase bias in the labor market rather than try to make it more efficient. Over time, marketplaces tend to abhor inefficiencies and seek equilibrium, so not only would "give women more money" inevitably have unforeseen adverse side effects, but it also runs counter to our fundamental social and economic principles.

Seriously, the fact that otherwise intelligent people claim this with a straight face is kind of crazy. The "data" here are looking at numbers and seeing which one is smaller and which one is larger, and the wages of women are smaller.

I should have tried this when I took Regression Analysis.

Welp, that's the whole field of statistics down the drain! Who needs complex analysis and accounting for confounding variables when the answer is simply "Big number good, small number not good!"

What does a confounding variable have to do with anything here?

The question is "do women make lower wages than men"?

You are adding confounding variables I assume because you are uncomfortable with the fact that the answer is "yes", but are less uncomfortable if there's some reason that it's yes other than "people deliberately pay women less".

Of course there are reasons women make lower wages than men. That doesn't really matter, though: if the gap is itself a problem as an outcome, the fix is very simple, and the reasons don't particularly matter.

If I asked which of the two of us is taller, all that takes is a measuring tape. The fact that one of us might have gotten better nutrition as a child, while possibly interesting, doesn't actually do much about the fact that one of us is really taller than the other.

Why do you think the gap itself is a problem as an outcome?

Because in every economy we've looked at, gender income parity is strongly correlated with overall economic growth. In addition, research on microlending suggests that this link is statistically co-causal (improving either one improves the other).

If you prefer a more intuitive take, most of the attempts to dismiss the gender wage gap say things like "women take more time off for families" and "women choose lower-paying occupational fields". But there's no a priori reason those activities and fields should not be more remunerative than they are, and there is evidence that making them more remunerative is beneficial to the economy as a whole.

>evidence that making them more remunerative is beneficial to the economy as a whole.

How so? What difference economically does it make whether a male or female fills a position

Could you please cite the studies you're referencing?

Suppose women get paid less because they work less hours (this is actually part of the reason); Do you suggest women should get paid more per hour simply on account of being born with a vagina?

What if women get paid less because they tend to pick professions that happen to be lower paying? (This is also true.) Do you suggest we just give them raises? What if the reason the profession is lower paying is because businesses in the field have lower margins? Where are they supposed to get the money for these raises, take it out of the men's paychecks? Speaking of, do you give raises to everyone working in the lower-paying field, or just the women?

See, I think the bone of contention here is that you assume the problem is women being paid less. Most people have no problem with women being paid less; Their problem is with women being paid less SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY'RE WOMEN. This is why very few people are comfortable with the solution of "just pay all women more." Paying someone more because of their gender is literally the definition of sexism.

I don't understand how just giving a group of people more money will solve the problem. That's is an artificial way of addressing it, it's just a band aid.

Let's look at the causes , and address those.

I think that's how you solve it. It is pretty sexist to say , "give someone more money because they are a women"

Ummm... you realize band-aids solve the problem of bleeding, right?

Similarly, giving women more money solves the problem of women getting paid less money.

why isn't everyone paid exactly the same? because that would suck for all of us here and be great for everyone that doesn't work as hard. I was messing with strange *nix distros for years and teaching myself programming before I got a tech job. I would be seriously pissed if someone that didn't know as much got my same job and pay just because they were a _____

I could understand getting mad if your pay was lowered, but how are you harmed if the other person's pay is increased?

We make all sorts of incredibly bizarre (from an outside perspective) decisions about who gets paid what; the fact that we've fooled ourselves into thinking that it's because of supply and demand curves may be comforting but is completely unfounded in any data.

Where does all this "equalizing" money come from? Does it just pop into existence because you want it to?

Yes, in fact, for some value of "you"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money

You can't create the amount of money you are talking about without severe economic consequences. That should be obvious.

The same logic would mandate that everyone gets paid the same amount of money, which I personally would be sort of OK with, depending on the details, but it is generally considered such a radical idea that it suggests there's something missing from your argument.

Giving preferential treatment to anyone based on their skin color, gender or sexual orientation instead of the value they provide or the skills they posses is exactly how not to address diversity issues. This line of thinking only fuels more outrage from other minority groups.

A band aid is a temporary solution to a problem that fixes itself. Do you expect this problem to fix itself?

Actually I do imagine that more gender parity in management and boardrooms would probably organically fix the problem, eventually. This is, ultimately, an outcome of culture(s), and cultural problems are situations where you can fake it until you make it (though it can take a generation).

But isn't the context here "women in tech"? As in, SWE/STEM positions, as opposed to upper management?

> it has the easiest solution in the world: give women more money

I don't understand why this is so difficult to understand or controversial - especially in an industry with such a skills shortage.

If you want more and better employees start hiring more women and paying them.

That is a market solution - consider it an investment. Pay them now, pay them more, have a larger hiring pool later.

Jesus christ, no. Scroll up.

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