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Comment by Hokusai | Hacker News Reader

> President Biden’s controversial pick to be the Treasury Department’s comptroller of the currency is a USSR-born and educated professor who has praised the former Soviet Union’s lack of a gender pay gap while recently advocating for ending banking “as we know it” by moving Americans’ finances from private banks to the Federal Reserve.

It is related the praise of lack of pay gap and the suggested changes? The article seems to link both not explicitly but letting the reader to get to that conclusion.

I hope that pay gap between genders is reduced and everybody gets a fair opportunity.

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You have to like such blatant partiality in the coverage: “USSR-born and educated”, the insistence on “ending banking as we know it” while waiting five paragraphs to actually explain it’s about splitting the lending activity from the management of people accounts and has nothing to do with the Soviet Union, the completely irrelevant quotation on the gender pay gap. I really like American media. They are so bad they make even the terrible ones in my country look half decent.

The idea that women are treated better in the USSR is insane. Please go visit Russia and tell me that. It's the most sexist developed society I've dealt with.

They're not, but often, the wealthier the country, the more the difference in pay between men and women because women can simply get whatever job they're interested in without regard to the money.

If you are in India or Russia, the difference between being a programmer vs local laborer is extreme, so anyone who can become a programmer (or similar high paying job for multi-national company) will. Thus, Russia and India have more female programmers (and similar) than the US.

It’s better to check statistic data. Gender pay gap existed in USSR, was comparable to the Western countries and didn’t go anywhere after 1991. Russia leaned to the right and became more socially conservative since then. It is indeed a very sexist society now.

The point isn't the pay gap part, it's the USSR part. They're trying to paint her as a communist.

Which is silly without evidence I agree. So, with no experience what value does she have? There's nothing in her academic work that shows some outstanding quality. Is she in ideologue? If so, of what type?

Well, she’s not a communist but her ideas about the federal government taking over and centrally directing all fiscal activities would make Hugo Chavez blush.

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