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Comment by bb111 | Hacker News Reader

Actually, the discussion around nurses/teachers being overly female and how it impacts the salaries in the field is widely discussed in sociology and feminist theory. The idea that professions dedicated to "care" (healthcare, childcare, or even human ressources which demand "people skills") are overwhelmingly female and underrated is a staple of a lot of conversations around gender, workforce and income gaps between men and women.

edit : corrected a typo

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The idea that those professions are lower-paid because they are mostly female is pretty strange. It would require a vast and secret conspiracy. The scandal would dwarf the secret Silicon Valley agreement (involving Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel) by many orders of magnitude.

You can make a reasonable argument that the causation goes the other way, with men giving higher priority to money when choosing a career. This makes sense, because a male's career has a huge impact on dating success.

I would bet that male nurses do pretty well with dating.

> It would require a vast and secret conspiracy.

This conspiracy theory has been given a name, which is widely use in feminist circles: the Patriarchy.

It used to be routine to openly pay women less than men merely because they were women. No vast conspiracy was required then, so why would it be now?

Things have changed in the last few decades. Every company would just hire women to save money if it was so simple.

The reality is that there are many factors that determine how much you are individually paid. Two people of the same gender, role and title can have vastly different compensation because of negotiations.

> Not only did competition not end discrimination, there was enough discrimination that the act of not discriminating provided a significant competitive advantage for Townsend-Greenspan. And this is in finance, which is known for being cutthroat. And not just any part of finance, but one where it's PhD economists hiring other PhD economists. This is one of the industries where the people doing the hiring are the most likely to be familiar with both the theoretical models and the empirical research showing that discrimination opens up market opportunities by suppressing wages of some groups. But even that wasn't enough to equalize wages between men and women when Greenspan took over Townsend-Greenspan in 1958 and it still wasn't enough when Greenspan left to become chairman of the Fed in 1987. That's the thing about discrimination. When it's part of a deep-seated belief, it's hard for people to tell that they're discriminating.

> In tech, some people are concerned that increasing diversity will "lower the bar", but in sports, which has a more competitive hiring market than tech, we saw the opposite, increasing diversity raised the level instead of lowering it because it means hiring people on their qualifications instead of on what they look like. I don't disagree with people who say that it would be absurd for tech companies to leave money on the table by not hiring qualified minorities. But this is exactly what we saw in the sports we looked at, where that's even more absurd due to the relative ease of quantifying performance. And yet, for decades, teams left huge amounts of money on the table by favoring white players (and, in the case of hockey, non-French Canadian players) who were, quite simply, less qualified than their peers. The world is an absurd place.

https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/

"diversity raised the level instead of lowering it because it means hiring people on their qualifications instead of on what they look like"

It would be absolutely wonderful if everything was a meritocracy like this, and it's what most people ask for.

Unfortunately in the tech industries and modern media, "diversity" initiatives are the exact opposite and only want people based on what they look like.

Why didn't every company in every industry hire women to save money 50 years ago? You seem to be begging the question at issue by simply assuming that sexism doesn't still exist now.

There weren't that many qualified. Education and career pipelines were different, training was different, expectations were different. Are you saying nothing has changed in 50 years?

Sexism exists (and perhaps it would be more productive if you stopped only believing in binary extremes) but it's not a widespread conspiracy. Did you skip the line about the same gender/title/role still being paid differently?

It's clearly illegal now, so that would be a good reason to keep it on the down low. I'm not saying there is a conspiracy, just that one might be useful here.

Hypercapitalism would make it unprofitable to not hire women if they consistently ask for lower wages the same way it is unprofitable to not hire chinese labor. People are just fungible resources, the cheaper the better.

It's important not to forget there's alot of self-selection going on too.

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