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Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this hypothesis explains why ie: black men, unfairly stereotyped as aggressive & etc, earn lower salaries than white men.

I would say it's maybe a tiny bit biology, a tiny bit conditioning, and a large part racist/sexist/etc politics of exclusion.

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Remember that even women discriminate against other women, e.g.:

In a randomized double-blind study, science faculty from research-intensive universities rated the application materials of a student — who was randomly assigned either a male or female name — for a laboratory manager position. Faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student.

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full.pdf

I'd say conditioning is more than just a tiny bit.

I never said these were the only reasons, and I didn't mention race at all.

@geofft was wondering whether the "intrinsic" differences were due to biology or social conditioning. The answer is: both.

Of course there are extrinsic factors as well.

"Politics" implies a deliberate, concerted behavior, which may exist, but this kind of bias is often subconscious, and present regardless of the gender/race of the evaluator.

A minor point but maybe an important one: I wasn't actually wondering, because it doesn't matter, I think. There's enough reason to believe that this phenomenon exists, in aggregate, between most men and most women. There's been no explanation for it offered that holds that the effects are just (e.g., something that claims that men's work output is correspondingly greater, or their need for income is). So whether it is nature or nurture, unless we think Google can fix the root cause, the right thing for Google to do is accept that the phenomenon exists and work around it. They don't need to track the phenomenon down.

It's like how Google focuses heavily on technical interviews over college GPA or even college degree. They've found that having a degree and a good GPA is not well-correlated with what they're hiring people to do. They could put a bunch of work into fixing the college system, but instead they design their hiring process to take it into account as little as possible.

Racism, sexism and politics play a far smaller role than you might imagine. It's a matter of skills, for example, in 2001 there were more than 16,000 Asian Americans who scored more than 700 on the math SAT. While there was less than 700 black Americans who scored more than 700 on the math SAT. So sure, in aggregate black males earn less than asian American males and white Americans (asian Americans also earn more on average than white Americans, are whites being discriminated against?), but if you compare apples to apples (similar education, experience, test scores, etc) then there is virtually no gap. The dogma is that statistical disparities demonstrate some form of discrimination, this assumes that there is an equality of performance which is virtually impossible to find in the real world.

> but if you compare apples to apples (similar education, experience, test scores, etc) then there is virtually no gap

Wasn't there literally a recent study that sent the same resume to employers and only changed the name and the white names got significantly more attention than stereotypically black names?

> (asian Americans also earn more on average than white Americans, are whites being discriminated against?)

Really? Seems like an unnecessary thing to say.

If you take a closer look at the numbers, this isn't really the case. Asian households are larger, so median incomes are larger, and Asian-Americans tend to live in about 5 states, which have on average higher costs of living (and as a result higher median incomes).

Source: http://reappropriate.co/2014/10/how-both-bill-oreilly-and-jo...

If we're looking at SAT scores: in 2013, about 50,000 white students scored 700 or above in the math SAT, as did about 49,000 Asian students. Google's statistics at http://www.google.com/diversity/ indicate they have about twice as many white employees as Asian employees overall, and about three times as many in leadership. What gives?

You can say that 650+ math SAT score is more realistica assesment of average Google talent. There are 78400 Asians with 650+ score and 133440 whites with 650+ score in math. There are only 4200 blacks with 650+ score. Numbers pretty much align with Google diversity report.

In this case the argument claims that women aren't merely stereotyped to negotiate less often/less forcefully, but might do so empirically.

Regardless of stereotypes, you would have to look at the actual statistics of how black men negotiate to make such a claim.

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