Comment by mmt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmt | Hacker News Reader

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Despite the guideline-flouting/flame-attracting wording, I think there's a kernel of a point here: it's important to consider two seperate pay-gap issues (be it for gender, race, or any other class):

1) equal pay for equal work

2) equal represenatation among (higher paying) jobs

I routinely see these two issues conflated, and occasionally the purported resolution of #1 for gender being trotted as evidence of no more "gap".

Although I can see how that could be characterized as "cherry-picking" a statistic, it doesn't make the statistic any less valid, and it detracts from the real problem of conflation. If it's true, then additional effort at #1 would, indeed, be wasted. It would be better to criticize the notion of just one "gap" rather than any cherry-picking.

How does this relate to the topic at hand? The original commentor suggested a problem of conflation, between "unemployed" and "jobless".

Elsewhere in the thread, it's been discussed whether workforce participation is a more meaningful metric.

Even that risks conflating "employed" with "fully employed" (as opposed to "underemployed", such as part time or working for a lower wage). Real wage growth comes up repeatedly, presumably because of that confounding factor.

not every post has to be completely on topic, it was topical to the issue of unreliable figures skewing economic data which was what the subtopic was about. I admit he was bringing up an inflammatory topic, but really I expect a place like hacker news to have a user base that can handle that objectively

As for equal pay for equal work - I'd be very surprised if women aren't getting that, because that's illegal and you'd expect that to show up in the form of many many lawsuits.

Yes there does seem to be an issue of some workplaces that have a boys club type environment and fail to promote women - but I don't know if that's big enough to explain the dramatic wage gaps that are touted by some people.

If there is a pay gap, I suspect it's at least partially determined by a person's tendency to negotiate salary. There are many articles about how salary negotiation is crucial when applying for a job, yet many women and men often accept the first offer a company makes to them (which is usually a low ball offer).

Negotiating a higher salary requires a bit more drive/aggressiveness than the average person has. Making up numbers here, if you say that only 20% of the population has that personality trait, men seem more likely to have that trait (perhaps 15% of men have it and 5% of women), which would contribute to the equal pay for equal work gap.

To rephrase my above statement, the current job market rewards certain personality types with higher positions & salaries, and men seem to have a higher chance of having that personality.

A completely separate question is: Is the above an acceptable situation? I would say no.

For example, more men are three times more likely to be psychopaths than women [1], and CEOs have a much higher chance of being psychopaths than the general population [2]. There's a strong chance that certain psychopathic tendencies are rewarded in the current corporate structure.

Similarly, there are other stories you hear of there being a lot of backstabbing in certain companies at the higher levels. Personality types that are disinclined to engage in that will be unlikely to climb the corporate ladder there.

It's probably in the best interest of all companies and society in general that these kind of personality traits are not rewarded unless they are actually beneficial.

By fixing the problem at this level we'll not only be solving the gender/pay gap between men and women but also the gender pay/gap between differing personalities within a given gender as well.

[1](https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/mental-disord...) [2](http://www.businessinsider.com/ceos-often-have-psychopathic-...)

> It's probably in the best interest of all companies and society in general that these kind of personality traits are not rewarded unless they are actually beneficial.

I have another theory. Some people are so incompetent that they end up as C-level execs. Incompetent people tend to promote equally or more incompetent people.

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