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Comment by kemayo | Hacker News Reader

It does make sense to not control for that, mind you, since you're trying to compare a broad set of societal factors. You can imagine a society in which people with the same occupation+education receive exactly equal pay, and yet one gender (or race, or whatever else) is widely discouraged from entering certain lucrative occupations or receiving certain levels of education in certain fields, for instance.

For what it's worth, my understanding is that the gender pay gap still exists even if you do control for these things, albeit it becomes smaller.

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> one gender (or race, or whatever else) is widely discouraged from entering certain lucrative occupations or receiving certain levels of education in certain fields, for instance.

Has that ever been true? I have heard people say "Men push women out of engineering" but in my experience it's been the opposite--it's been men trying to get women interested in engineering.

There are uncountably many WISE, SWE, girls who code, etc. groups that try to encourage women to go into STEM. Women get STEM scholarships that are only available to them.

"I have heard people say "Men push women out of engineering" but in my experience it's been the opposite--it's been men trying to get women interested in engineering."

Of course it's not true. If you majored in CS at a decent university probably 1 or 2 out of 100 students were girls, and in the "labs" the TAs spend the ENTIRE TIME talking to the girls/helping the girls. "Men push women out of engineering" is just a performative statement that means nothing. You will find this in any field where men generally are better at something, like chess. There are plenty of people who whine that "women are pushed out" of chess and so on, and if you ask people to explain that, they can't. It's just pathetic and of course predictable that the same people who can't understand the logical reasons why the demographics of certain groups are the what they are, happen to be bad at activities that require the ability to perform logical operations in their head, like chess, or engineering, etc. All they can do is whine about it emotionally which is the same reason why they can't do engineering or play chess.

Not only that, but women have pervasive support structures from early education to hiring (at the FAANG I work at we essentially positively discriminate in favor of women and minorities).

Still, the numbers don't lie. Nobody's "pushing women away", it's been the complete, deliberate opposite for many, many years now.

An environment where the "TAs spend the ENTIRE TIME talking to the girls" might not be as positive as you are imagining it to be. When I work, I want to focus in a quiet environment and only consult someone once I have a firm idea of what is wrong and what I don't know.

Here is some nuanced data. It has closed quite a bit

https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/the-gende...

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