Comment by maaaats
7 years ago
> to see what kind of difference there is between the sexes when comparing like-for-like jobs.
What if the pay is equal for like-for-like jobs, but for the higher paying jobs one sex is vastly underrepresented? Not saying it is, just that discrimination and bias often runs deeper than some simple comparison.
What if one gender has a higher variance than another gender? Just don't say that to Google or you may get fired.
The measured difference in distributions is very small.
And if we believed that this was the cause, you'd need to think that Googlers were wildly off the norm in terms of ability. They've got like 90000 employees. They aren't exclusively hiring mega geniuses.
90k out of a population of 7 billion. There's plenty of room for differences in distribution to take effect.
or to Harvard
Then that would be the point of the data. At the moment people are acting on claims of differences in pay across a number of sectors and roles and it's way too vague to pinpoint what the actual issue is.
If the data found an actual issue like this, the it would need to be addressed, but at the moment simply claiming that women are paid less doesn't offer any solution apart from paying women an extra 20% across every single job.
What if one sex is statistcally proven to work more overtime than another sex?
What if one sex takes more paternal leave than another so the other sex spends more time in the office improving skills?
Both of those can be seen as a cultural problem.
A cultural issue perhaps, and one mediated by biology at that. I very much doubt that you go around telling the women in your life that the time they spend outside the office, and lack of vocational ambition, are a social problem that need a political solution.
Then that's not the same problem at all and it needs to be addressed as such.