Female Computer Programmers Make $0.72 For Every Dollar Made By Male: Study (siliconbeat.com) 455
An anonymous reader cites an article on The Mercury News' Silicon Beat tech blog: Female computer programmers make 72 cents for every dollar earned by male programmers. That difference is after researchers adjust for factors such as age, education, years of experience, job title, employer and location, according to a new study by Glassdoor (PDF), the jobs and recruiting marketplace, which looked at salary data of more than 500,000 people over 140 professions. The well-known U.S. wage gender gap is 76 cents for every dollar men earn. But women earn 94.6 cents for every man's dollar after adjusting for all factors other than gender. In other words, the wage gap in the U.S. is about 5.4 percent.
Bullshit (Score:5, Funny)
No wonder it was submitted by anonymous.
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Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Even in the summary they state the real number: ~ 5%. This is one of those massive myths that keeps going and going. For the same positions, men and women get paid the same amount.
Women do have trouble with confidence. There's a great Salon article called The Confidence Gap that addresses this. Women have to walk the line between assertive and "bitchy." Oddly enough, women in focus groups are more likely to label an assertive woman as bitchy than men!. A lot of this comes from their own gender!
Women also tend to take jobs that are more fulfilling, even if it's at a lower pay. In some respect I think men could learn a lot from this. That's really the smarter move.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Even in the summary they state the real number: ~ 5%. This is one of those massive myths that keeps going and going. For the same positions, men and women get paid the same amount.
The summary also states that the gap is 28% for programmers, after adjusting for all of the same factors that give the 5% gap overall. So the point of this article is, why is the gap so much worse for programmers than it is for other fields?
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
The field is dominated by young adults. Women are far more likely during this period to be out for lower paid or completely unpaid maternity leave which will skew your numbers even if they are otherwise equally paid.
Women are far more likely to be family focused putting family needs ahead of work needs. Even if the workplace puts no obstacles or prejudice against this and supports it that is going to translate into lower productivity and performance and that is going to be reflected in salary over time.
Last but not least programming and tech in general is a difficult field to get valid data on. It is very difficult to control for how well qualified someone is in tech since the most important factors is the impression of past and current achievement and not degrees or paint by numbers corporate assessment at least beyond entry level or academia which obviously has to value the paper credentials they are selling.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
Something vague and hard to measure, like your idea that women are putting family needs ahead of work needs, could account for a portion of the difference. But it would have to be unique to tech - are women in programming putting a greater emphasis on family than women in other fields? Of course not. So that doesn't explain the 5% to 28% disparity.
Even if you could come up with something like that, it's not going to account for the full difference. 23% is a big number, and some portion of that must come down to bias. Not necessarily discrimination (though that's certainly in their somewhere) but somewhere in the back of some HR manager's head is the expectation that men are going to be better than women in a male-dominated field, and this will influence their decisions in subtle ways.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't say specifically that they adjusted for hours worked, but that's one of the standard ones, so I'd expect it.
How would they adjust for it? My company doesn't keep a database of who is working late at night, and even if we did, these researchers wouldn't have access to it.
are women in programming putting a greater emphasis on family than women in other fields? Of course not.
I don't think women in tech spend more time with their families. But I do think that men in tech spend less time with their families, or don't have families.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
Not rewarding a poor work/life balance is one of the issues we need to fix, for everyone. It's bad for men too, it creates a perverse incentive to harm yourself.
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IT is slaver^D^D^D^D&D salary. Work your 40 get paid $X, work 100 hours in crunch, get paid $X. Most young people in the field haven't learned the whole work/life balance yet.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
My guess is that women don't tend to self-identify as programmers or aim for careers as programmers. The ones who do end up in the field do so with relatively low seniority compared to their experience because they start out in QA or tech support instead of as an "associate software engineer" or whatever.
The female QA specialist I work with could easily be a software engineer -- she's become our de-facto Python guru -- but nevertheless, her job title is still "QA specialist" and (I assume) she gets paid accordingly. Now, if she did make the transition to be a developer officially, do you think they'd start her off as a mid-level one, or call her entry-level? The latter, probably. And if that happened, would she fight for the more senior title/pay? Probably not.
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Because 'Computer Programmer' in this instance is 'Mainframe Programmer', one of the older 'types' of computer programmer.
More recent job titles that gap is much closer to the national average, it's not a statement on 'everybody who writes code'.
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WTF are they using mainframe programmer stats for? Hell, the people in that field probably started in it when women were expected to stay at home and clean the house. Of course, they will have fewer and lower paid women in that field. Are they going to next point at the wide earnings gap between men and women in the 1950's and call that a new development?
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
You need to read the article linked.
"Part of the explanation for the large computer programmer wage gap, said Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at Glassdoor, is that these are the scientific programmers, “people who would do coding with mainframe computing or other scientific related computing. It’s one of the older profession.”"
That's straight from glassdoor, who also did the actual study.
If you're going to break out TFA, actually read TFA.
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The page I linked to and the PDF linked to in the summary do not contain that sentence. Where did you find it?
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I don't think the Silicon Beat article correctly conveys the results of the study. By using the phrase "well known U.S. gender wage gap" in the second paragraph it sounds like they are talking about all fields, not programming. (I would not characterize the gender gap specifically for programming jobs as being "well known".) But in fact the figures they cite are for programming jobs in that paragraph. If you click through to the glassdoor site, there is a table showing "Unadjusted" pay gap of 24.1% and
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
5% is a problem but far less of one because the average amount gained by someone who negotiates their salary and someone who doesn't is 7%, and men are twice as likely to negotiate for a salary increase as women. Factoring that in the pay gap shrinks to within a pretty comfortable margin of error.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
5% is statistical noise. It's not being an "asshole", it's being numerate.
I've made my own compromises that have impacted my salary. So I don't buy into the SJW nonsense. Girls are indoctrinated differently. Depending on the size or type of company that will work for or against a female programmer.
Neither is the fault of tech companies or male tech workers.
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The "problem" is it's a personal decision. I'm earning 72% of my peers (and that number is just going to go down the longer I'm out of the work force) because I voluntarily chose to leave the workforce to raise a family while my wife works. It's not a massive conspiracy it's math. http://dadatho.me/notebooks/pe... [dadatho.me] I will be at pay parity with my peers at time = infinity.
The problem isn't that women are earning less it's that America (and most companies in it) don't have policies in place to accommodate them
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1%>0, .5% >0 are THESE 'problematic'? And even if you think anything OTHER than '0%' is 'problematic' how much effort & tracking, rules, laws etc. are YOU willing to engage in to make sure that there is 0 'statistically determined wage gap' that can't be explained by choice at any given point in time when doing the sampling?
Seriously, this is why no feminist wants to use the ACTUAL gap number as 5% is 'statistically insignificant' and is very likely due to 'personal choices' (where they live, what
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Society pushes it, but girls are also hard wired to prefer it. .
Then explain why 150 years ago pink was a boy's colour (close to red, exciting) and blue was a girl's colour (pale and soft).
Around 1900 it began to flip around.
Lack of diversity among the Rust contributors? (Score:3, Interesting)
While the submission focuses on salaries and compensation within the corporate sector, what about the total lack of diversity we see within some notable open source projects?
Take the Rust programming language, for example. Despite its community having an intense focus on diversity and tolerance, and despite the project having one of the most stringent code of conducts around [rust-lang.org], and despite the project even having a Moderation Team to stamp out perceived injustice [rust-lang.org], why do we see so little diversity among Rust' [github.com]
Negotiating (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe men are better at negotiating salary. Negotiating makes a huge difference. When I was promoted at my last job, I did not negotiating because I was afraid I wouldn't be given the job. The person (a lady) who was promoted next did negotiate and started about 5 thousand more than me.
I'd be interested to see what the starting offer was for men and woman and what disparity was there.
Re:Negotiating (Score:4, Interesting)
"A 2005 study by Linda Babcock, Hannah Riley Bowles and Lei Lai supports this explanation for why women may be less likely to negotiate their starting salaries. The study found a substantial social backlash towards women who negotiated. Women who negotiated were penalised, with both men and women evaluators expressing less desire to work with or hire them":
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/cfawis/bowles.pdf
"Four experiments show that gender diVerences in the propensity to initiate negotiations may be explained by diVerential treatment
of men and women when they attempt to negotiate. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants evaluated written accounts of candidates
who did or did not initiate negotiations for higher compensation. Evaluators penalized female candidates more than male
candidates for initiating negotiations. In Experiment 3, participants evaluated videotapes of candidates who accepted compensation
oVers or initiated negotiations. Male evaluators penalized female candidates more than male candidates for initiating negotiations;
female evaluators penalized all candidates for initiating negotiations. Perceptions of niceness and demandingness explained resistance
to female negotiators. In Experiment 4, participants adopted the candidate’s perspective and assessed whether to initiate negotiations
in same scenario used in Experiment 3. With male evaluators, women were less inclined than men to negotiate, and
nervousness explained this eVect. There was no gender diVerence when evaluator was female."
https://hbr.org/2014/06/why-women-dont-negotiate-their-job-offers/
"However, in most published studies, the social cost of negotiating for pay is not significant for men, while it is significant for women... Women get a nervous feeling about negotiating for higher pay because they are intuiting — correctly — that self-advocating for higher pay would present a socially difficult situation for them — more so than for men."
https://www.wgea.gov.au/sites/default/files/20131206_PP_womennegotiation_1.pdf
"Studies have shown that women’s reluctance to enter negotiations is partly because they are penalised more than men for doing so.15 Because negotiation involves agentic behaviours, women who negotiate must operate outside prescribed gender norms, and can experience backlash for doing so in the form of economic and social penalties (e.g., they can be viewed as hostile, selfish, devious and quarrelsome).16 Women who negotiate agentically can bedisliked and some colleagues may not want to work with them.17 This loss of social capital has economic implications for these women who may not be hired or offered promotions, despite being competent, because they are perceived as lacking in social skills.18 Women are aware of this backlash and try to avoid it.19 The more women anticipate backlash, the less inclined they are to initiate negotiations.20"
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074959781400048X
"As expected, negotiators deceived women more so than men, thus leading women into more deals under false pretenses than men."
http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/34/2/186
"Women experience social and economic penalties (i.e., backlash) for self-promotion, a behavior that violates female gender stereotypes yet is necessary for professional success. However, it is unknown whether and how the threat of backlash interferes with women's ability to self-promote."
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00306.x/pdf
" We review research demonstrating the Catch-22 that female leaders face, such that they are required to display agency to overcome the lack of fit between their gender and leadership yet when they do so, they risk prejudice and hiring discrimination (i.e., backlash)."
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Maybe men are better at negotiating salary. Negotiating makes a huge difference. When I was promoted at my last job, I did not negotiating because I was afraid I wouldn't be given the job. The person (a lady) who was promoted next did negotiate and started about 5 thousand more than me.
I'd be interested to see what the starting offer was for men and woman and what disparity was there.
A strong negotiator needs a high degree of self-confidence. The ablity to maintaining high self-confidence in situations where that confidence is questioned is often correlated with sales ability. This issue is always framed as a gender issue, but I am not sure it is. There are plenty of men with no self confidence who negotiate like overcooked spagetti, and many women who are very strong negotiators. My theory is that the testosterone/estrogen balance is more important than simply gender in this situ
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Reading the actual article (sorry...) the actual reason is that 'computer programmer' in this case means (more or less) 'mainframe programmer'.
The study also includes the titles we would normally be including in 'computer programmer', and they have slightly different statistics...:
Software Engineer – $0.94
Mobile Developer – $0.97
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I'd be interested to see what the starting offer was for men and woman and what disparity was there.
Starting pay (as in, right out of college) it's exactly the same [aauw.org] (look on page 17).
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When I was promoted at my last job, I did not negotiating because I was afraid I wouldn't be given the job.
It's a matter of timing. Negotiate at the proper time, after they have declared that they want to hire you, and have given you an offer (giving you an offer is a declaration that they want to hire you).
Secondly, it's a matter of attitude. When they give you the offer, be enthusiastic, "Wow, this is great! This job offer is the best, I would love to accept it and want to work with you! The only problem is (reasons: my dog has expensive grooming, my commute is long and I need extra to pay for that, I want t
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I think there’s no doubt that [bargaining abilities] contribute to some degree. But let me tell you why I don’t think that they go the real distance. Some of the best studies that we have of the gender pay gap, following individuals longitudinally, show that when they show up right out of college, or out of law school, or after they get their M.B.A. — all the studies that we have indicate that wages are pretty similar then. So if men were better bargainers, they would have been better right then. And it doesn’t look as if they’re better bargainers to a degree that shows up as a very large number. But further down the pike in their lives, by 10-15 years out, we see very large differences in their pay. But we also see large differences in where they are, in their job titles, and a lot of that occurs a year or two after a kid is born, and it occurs for women and not for men. If anything, men tend to work somewhat harder. And I know that there are many who have done many experiments on the fact that women don’t necessarily like competition as much as men do — they value temporal flexibility, men value income growth — that there are various differences. But in terms of bargaining and competition it doesn’t look like it’s showing up that much at the very beginning.
Their interpretation of the data suggests that we see much of the remaining unexplained portion of the pay gap as a result of different preferences between the sexes. Men typically prefer to earn more money, whereas women typically prefer to have a more flexible work arrangement. Men tend to
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The biggest factor in the general economy seems to be work flexibility requirements. For reasons I won't go into here, women tend to demand a greater amount of flexibility from employers regarding things like working hours, travel, and the duration and intensity of high-demand projects. The ability and willingness to prioritize company demands over personal demands tends to pay a premium in the marketplace and is often reflected in who applies for and gets chosen for different positions. In the general mark
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That irrelevant.
Regardless of the reasons, if women are as productive as men, then their cheaper labor would pemean they would drive men out of the industry. That's not happening, though...
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It is reality that demands you put food in your gullet. Capitalism far and away is the best way to productle abundant cheap quality food. And other stuff, as measured time and again.
What a clownlike worldview you have. Perhaps you confuse it with a safety net to smoothe the rough edges, said safety net can only be afforded by the surplus taxes generated by capitalism's dynamic energies.
The alternative is actual slavery with a command and control economy, and that struggles to provide sufficient food, at
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CS has been dumbed down, maybe women are too smart for it now? It's really hard to get enthusiastic about an academic discipline that is being driven by corporate hiring desires.
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Being more aggressive doesn't necessarily give you an advantage at negotiating higher pay.
If you mean being more willing to take a risk then sure, I can see that.
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Men are bigger risk takers. It's the same reason men make up almost all of the Darwin Awards.
Pretty much this, it's the tail end pulling the average up because the $100k+ positions are dominated by males. I suspect if you took median pay instead of mean pay, the difference would be significantly less than 5%. Also they're usually the kind of jobs women don't take because they're hard to combine with having a family (travel, on call, people expecting you to show up 24x7 in an emergency etc.) so the more factors you correct for, usually the gap narrows until you realize that for really equal jobs the
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And yet women have to be above average to get hired, whereas the idiot male coworkers are everywhere. There is more equality when you're a genius, but when you're looking at the average so-so workers then it's skewed much more male. I think it's because when you're undecided about whether or not to hire someone that hidden biases will come to the surface.
Ob (Score:5, Funny)
So they're overpaid?
More f'ing advocacy research... (Score:4, Insightful)
When the first line of the "report" is:
'It is a well established fact that men and women are paid unequally.'
Is it any wonder that their "research" finds that men and women are paid equally?
Garbage (Score:2)
Are you saying women earn less than a quarter of what mean earn?
Let me put it another way: that is what you're saying, but is it what you meant?
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The solution seems clear (Score:5, Insightful)
If I, as a business owner, can save 28% salary costs on my employees by exclusively hiring women, why would I *ever* hire a man? If women are equal in performance and skill, there is no reason for me to hire men.
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And if you really want to slash labor costs then hire women H1-Bs?
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If I, as a business owner, can save 28% salary costs on my employees by exclusively hiring women, why would I *ever* hire a man? If women are equal in performance and skill, there is no reason for me to hire men.
Quoted for truth...
I have a job posting out right now, looking to hire someone in the next few weeks.
Man, woman, whatever... I'll hire whoever will do the job for the least money. If a woman will do it for 28% less than a man, sold!
Except, they won't. In my experience of having hundreds of people work for me for the past 20 years, it just isn't true. Pay is about equal between the two genders.
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Because it doesn't work that way. You can't openly discriminate, and many employers are clueless about how to attract women in the first place.
What happens is that women get penalized for being female over the years. As the report points out, a year after graduation wages are pretty much equal, but then diverge. You could play the long game I suppose, hire more women on the expectation that on average they won't fight as hard for raises or be less likely to switch to another company that pays more. You coul
Adjusted for every factor (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Adjusted for every factor (Score:4, Insightful)
Competence and productivity are immeasurable, especially at the point hiring decisions are made.
Look at my career: I have a CV that's impressive in some respects, but lagging in others. My employment history, achievements, and adaptability are clear; yet my CV doesn't carry the incredible weight of high-power, specialized technicians in computer security or systems management. In practice, there are trivialities I simply stall on because of gaps in my knowledge and a poor work ethic in specific situations; there are also insanely complex problems nobody else can solve as efficiently or effectively as I can, simply because I can effectively use analogical thinking and draw from an enormous source of broad and deep knowledge on a variety of topics to immediately comprehend complex systems made up of familiar or vaguely-familiar parts. I fall down when I hit a black box with unknown inputs and outputs.
That means not only does my CV not adequately describe my competence or productivity, but you can't adequately predict my competence and productivity in practice. I can perform poorly, average, or extremely well on any given problem; and most of the problems that come my way are new, which means I have to use old knowledge to shape out a new machine made of rearranged parts. I'm constantly grinding open black boxes, and also just flat-out failing on them. I figured out Puppet, Docker, and C# MVC; I can't get my head around OpenStack, Foreman, or all the front-end stuff in a Web application. I need someone to show me where the seams are so I can pry the black boxes open.
At hiring, I tend to get low-to-middling salaries, currently in the 50-percentile median as per Payscale. It's only by luck that it's worth it; and even then, I tend to replace all my job duties with heavy amounts of scripting and automation, systems that maintain themselves, and other labor-reducing solutions. I spend a lot of time getting paid to do nothing.
Is that competence? I have deep flaws in my competence in any practice. Is it productive? As long as you're not unlucky.
The rabbit hole gets deeper when you start factoring in things like ADHD (maybe that went away?), manic episodes, and other severe psychiatric problems. Good luck measuring the competency of someone who's crazy.
and the HB1 makes 0.60 + 60-80 hours a week (Score:5, Interesting)
and the HB1 makes 0.60 + 60-80 hours a week
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and the HB1 makes 0.60 + 60-80 hours a week
So do women H1-Bs make .72*.6*(men) ?
Biased sample (Score:2)
When employees encounter Glassdoor, they are given a limited preview of the site’s full content. To gain complete access, users are encouraged to contribute to the Glassdoor community by submitting an anonymous salary, company review, interview review, benefits review or company photo. In this way, users “give” content to the online community to “get” access to job information provided by others.
Studies are worth $0.10 for every dollar spent (Score:4, Funny)
Women get paid less. (Score:3, Interesting)
That is true. But these kind of reports always fail to explain WHY this continues to happen.
The quiet truth is that a large number of women benefit TREMEDOUSLY from the current set up.
If you area straight woman who follow the traditional cultural model - who takes years off her career to raise a child, while married to an older man, than those woman benefit HUGELY from the current system. (x-14% salary at age 30, after 5 year's off to raise a kid is WELL worth it if you are married to a man that that makes x+14% at age 40, no time off)
The prevalence of this tradition - and the constant admiration of it by our cultural - is why women still get paid less.
Gay women suffer the most from out system, and gay men benefit the most. Never married women come out the 2nd worst, never married men come out the 2nd best.
If you want to end the pay difference, you have to encourage woman to marry YOUNGER men then them. Once that happens, boom, the pay gap will vanish.
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u wot m8?
Like seriously, you what?
Gay women do worse and unmarried women do precisely second worst? Gay men do best? Unmarried men do second best?
I'm kind of wondering which arse you pulled those numbers from, because it sounds like you're just making it up as you go.
Re:Women get paid less. (Score:4, Informative)
Say a fair price for a specific job at age 30, with your experience (after taking off 2 years to raise a child) is 86k. But because you are a woman, you get paid only 72k, and a man doing the same job gets paid 100k.
But you are married to a 40 year man. Because he is older, and never took time off to raise the children, he is making 150k. If was female, he would have only earned 108k. A fair price salary would be 129k (half way between 108 and 150). But being male, he makes 150k.
Your combined salary is now 150+72=222k.
Now compare that if you both got a fair salary of 86k+129k = 215k.
That is, a married couple living in a society where women take time off to raise a child, and women marry older men, but everyone gets paid a fair salary regardless of gender, end up making $7,000 less, than if they live in a discriminatory society where men make more than women do.
Gay women get screwed the most as they both get the 14% discount to their value. Gay men make out like bandits because they both get the 14% upgrade. But married couples - and that includes the brides as well as the grooms - are still CLEAR winners in our current system.
As long as the majority of women in our culture expect to get married to an older man, expect to take time off to raise their kids (while their husband keeps working), then they can also expect to benefit from getting a lower salary.
This is despite the fact that the system is clearly and obviously biased and unfair.
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Actually, maternal time off work is covered by short- and long-term disability in the US. In the best setup, you get insurance that pays 66% of your salary, and you get your employer to make you pay for it from after-tax funds. If you use post-tax money, then claims come out of a conceptual taxed insurance pool: the people who pay with pre-tax or with employer money have to file claims as income and pay taxes, while the people who pay post-tax don't file claims as income.
That means if your employer pa
Bullshit. (Score:3, Insightful)
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The article is self-contradictory (Score:5, Interesting)
The first 2 sentences of the article are:
Female computer programmers make 72 cents for every dollar earned by male programmers. That difference is after researchers adjust for factors such as age, education, years of experience, job title, employer and location
But then the rest of the article disagrees completely:
For every dollar a man in this role earns, this is how much a woman makes:
Game Artist – $0.84
Information Security Specialist – $0.85
Data Specialist – $0.76
Software Architect – $0.89
SEO Strategist – $0.90
Front End Engineer – $0.90
Database Engineer – $0.90
Sharepoint Developer – $0.91
SAP Developer – $0.92
On the upside, two professions in great demand show women doing at or better than the national average:
Software Engineer – $0.94
Mobile Developer – $0.97
I suspect the first sentence should say "That difference is before researchers adjust..." Going further, and reading the linked GlassDoor PDF, I can't even find a 72 cent number in there. So I'm totally confused as to how they got that introduction. Can anyone else make sense of this?
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The .72 cents number seems to be directly related to the actual literal job title of 'Computer Programmer' at least from what I was reading. I don't think it's an aggregated total of 'Computer Programmer Jobs'.
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Can anyone else make sense of this?
See the appendix [glassdoor.com], and my post [slashdot.org] explaining what went wrong with their analysis of their data.
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That's because you didn't actually read the report. The report itself lists the gaps, and for a specific job (computer programmer) women earn less than men by an adjusted 72%. Other jobs, like those you listed, the difference is less.
Missed the important part (Score:5, Interesting)
"Further, comparing workers with the same job title, employer and location, the gender pay gap in the U.S. falls to 5.4 percent (94.6 cents per dollar)."
Oddly enough, while they adjust for "everything," they don't mention things like:
Maternity leave
Taking time off to pick up kids after school
(Men often do these sorts of things, but be realistic - women take more time off to handle their families)
They also include "years of experience," but they don't allow for "years of experience with gaps due to taking time off for family."
The study compares a lot of different things, and boils it down to "amount paid in base salary." But they leave out the most important part: "hours actually worked." While this doesn't directly affect base pay, it affects small pay differences because the employer knows that the male employee will end up working more - and more consistent - hours. Thus the less-than six-percent difference.
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Most importantly, anyone who quotes the $0.76 number is intentionally trying to deceive people. Whenever you hear it, you should know that nothing else you hear from that person is likely to be truthful either.
(not so) Hidden Agenda by Glassdoor (Score:2)
counterpoints (Score:2)
Women make more than men in some tech jobs [fortune.com].
Overall in tech, men make as much as women [forbes.com].
Another study, women are paid as much as men after graduation, and tech is one of the most equal fields to go into (see page 17) [aauw.org]. And I believe it. You want to see sexual harassment? Look at the sales team, not the programm
Terrible summary (Score:5, Informative)
This is a terrible summary, though in this case the fault lies with Glassdoor's summary of their own data, rather than slashdot.
If you look at the details in the appendix [glassdoor.com], you'll see that their sample size for the "Computer Programmer" title was only 138, as compared to 2330 "Software Architects", 3525 "Front-end Engineers", 13461 "Software Engineers", 2199 "Programmer Developers", etc. All of those other job categories had much lower gender pay gaps in the 4-6% range. That's still too large, but it's much better than 28%.
So what really happened here was that the report analyzed based on self-reported job titles and it so happened that a very rarely-used title, computer programmer, with a small sample size, just happened to have an extreme gender pay difference. Personally, I wonder what kind of company calls their people "computer programmers". In my 25 year career I've had a variety of titles, including "Software developer", "Software engineer", "Software architect", "I/T specialist", "I/T architect", "Software team lead", etc. with various other tags attached like "junior", "senior", "consulting" and so on. I have never, ever had "computer programmer" as my official title, and never known anyone else with that title either.
Re:Terrible summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Terrible summary (Score:5, Interesting)
Statistical cherry-picking is a great concise explanation of the problem. I wish I'd used it. What happened here is almost worse than cherry-picking, though, since it seems to have been more clueless than targeted. It appears that what Glassdoor did was run the numbers, sort by gender gap (ignoring questions of sample size) and then shout about the one that came out on top. It would actually be very surprising if none of the small categories turned out to show some extreme behavior.
Really, what's more interesting is some of the other high-disparity jobs that do have a sufficiently-large sample size to make you think there's a chance that the data is good. Such as "C Suite" (870 reports, 27.7%), "Pharmacist" (904 reports, 21.8%) and "CAD Designer" (1044 reports, 21.5%). A gender gap among pharmacists seems particularly surprising to me.
Though you still have to keep in mind that this is all subject to really significant bias, since the data is all self-reported by self-selected people.
Right (Score:3)
Re:Right (Score:5, Funny)
sad news for you, women have a kind of "stealth penis" that develops from the same tissues as your dong during gestation. They can even discretely masturbate it with thigh movements while typing code, while you have to work one-handed!
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Well so long as they're not continuously masturbating, just discretely masturbating, that's OK with me.
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They can do that and modifer keys with erect nipples, in stark contrast to moobing the keyboard which has no such accuracy.
Two Thoughts... (Score:2)
Most developers agree that older workers are discriminated against, so why is it so hard to believe that females are discriminated against.
On the other hand, if women choose jobs that are less demanding to have a better work/life balance, is there anything wrong with them getting paid less? If I was told I could make 20% more by working at a job that made me work 30% longer hours or with an increased commute (my current commute is from my bed to my home office). I would turn it down.
Suggestion (Score:2)
Learn to negotiate.
Meanwhile, in Canada (Score:5, Funny)
Programmers make $0.75 US dollar for every Canadian dollar they earn.
Overtime (Score:3)
I wager, if you look at "hours worked", it all changes.
I wager men do far more overtime hours on salary than women do. I rarely see women work overtime or stay until 9pm or later at night. When I do, it is almost exclusively men.
Bigger risk greater reward, men will say no more. (Score:3)
In this age of "positive discrimination" (ugh how I dislike that concept!) women should not be grateful for job offers, they should count on that role being held for a female anyway and take more risks when negotiating.
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ake time off to have babies, spend a couple of years raising them, then come back to work expecting to be paid as if you never left
Actually if they get paid as if they never left, in most companies their salaries would be between 4-10% behind their peers for a couple years alone, depending on their performance level. Everyone else was getting yearly raises.
So what they should do is take a couple years off, come back to their current employer at the same pay, and find a new one at a higher pay, then either
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Yeah, things would be so very much simpler if wifey just stayed home, barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.
I guess the 'barefoot' part is optional for you progressives.
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The risks of giving a woman of child bearing age range an important role in a software project are huge. It's not like you can just hire a temp. A 25% pay cut to compensate for that risk seems generous.
It's not like women give their employers two weeks' notice as soon as they find out that they're pregnant. If the employer knows six months in advance, and they still can't figure out how to handle the situation, then they're a disorganized mess that most people would probably hate to work for anyway.
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Re:Oh No... Not Again! (Score:4, Informative)
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Hot? If the A/C failed her face would melt.
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Only a moron works 100 hours a week.
Even 55 of _actual work_ is too much. Don't count hours zoning out in meetings, just get sunglasses and learn to sleep sitting up.
You will end up crispy at 55. At 100 they are certainly net negative workers on week 2.
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0.72 out of every dollar a male makes goes to a female.
That's a huge improvement! My father gave 100% of his paycheck to my mother each week. If he didn't, all hell would break loose and he would have to sleep in the truck.