Thank you so much! That is a vastly more informative article. It seems like it's not so much the NYT is opposed to the contract's specifics -- they're opposed to having a contract at all because the union is new. The NYT has been stringing the union along without ever actually signing anything, so now the union has to strike to get the NYT to take them seriously.
Key parts:
> The Tech Guild won its unionization vote in March of 2022, but has yet to agree upon a final contract with management. In September of this year, the Guild voted to authorize a strike with an overwhelming 95 percent (or over 500 members) in favor. The vote marked two and a half years of bargaining with no result. As Harnett puts it, “At some point, you need a deadline.”
> The first key demand is a protection that Times editorial staff already have: just-cause job protections, which would ensure that members cannot be fired without good reason and due process. The editorial staff won this protection in their 2023 News Guild contract, and just weeks ago, 750 Times journalists penned a letter to management urging them to reach a contract with the Tech Guild before Election day.
> The second demand stems from a pay study the union released in June of this year, which found numerous pay discrepancies for women and people of color. According to the study, Black tech workers at the newspaper make 26 percent less than white workers. The study also found that women, who make up over 40 percent of the Tech Guild, earn 12 percent less on average than men, while Black and Hispanic or Latina women earn 33 percent less than white men.
> The third demand in dispute is a frequent source of anxiety for Hoehne in particular: return to office. Currently, many in the Tech Guild work remotely full-time.... Hoehne has been living and working remotely three hours away from the Times office, in upstate New York, since the pandemic began. “I would lose my job. I can’t sell my house. My kid is in daycare. I can’t. All we’re asking is for them to put in writing that we won’t do that to you.”
> But both Hoehne and Harnett don’t think management’s reluctance to settle these demands stems from the particulars of any of the demands themselves; none of them would spark radical changes. The negotiation process has lagged for years, which Times editorial staff experienced en route to their contract as well. Rather, Hoehne said, staring down the barrel of the Election Day strike, management’s immovability feels like it’s more about preventing the union from stabilizing at all.
> “They could easily end all of this with a single phone call or e-mail,” Harnett said. “But they’re making the decision not to. Maybe they don’t believe that we are resolved [to strike]. I don’t know how else to convince them.”
>>According to the study, Black tech workers at the newspaper make 26 percent less than white workers
>>women, who make up over 40 percent of the Tech Guild, earn 12 percent less on average than men
claims like these always irk me, like did you just compare averages by race/gender? Whoever made this claim, did they control for other factors, like job title/level or productivity?
its like the famous "gender pay gap" claimed by all the people who majored in Gender Studies instead of Statistics. Turns out "gender pay gap" magically disappears as soon as you start controlling for relevant variables like hours worked, job seniority, experience, etc (https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/there-really-is-no-gender-wag...)
That is, there is almost no evidence that men and women working in the same position with the same background, education and qualifications are paid differently. Whether it’s the Target Corporation, Facebook, the University of Virginia, the United Way, the White House or McDonald’s, there is almost no evidence that any of those organizations have two pay scales: one for men (at a higher wage) and one for women (at a lower wage). Of course, that would be illegal, and if that practice existed, organizations would be exposed to legal action and “half the legal profession would be taking such cases on contingency fees”
I am all for fairness in pay and equality, but lets not insult the intelligence of your readers by making some absurd claims without doing proper econometric study and controlling for confound variables
> claims like these always irk me, like did you just compare averages by race/gender?
Probably not, the striking union is the one that contains all the data analysts at the NYTimes, so they have some experience with sociology data.
> Whoever made this claim, did they control for other factors, like job title/level or productivity?
As explained in the article, the data analysts union mad this claim, it's even explicitly linked!
> Turns out "gender pay gap" magically disappears as soon as you start controlling for relevant variables like hours worked, job seniority, experience, etc
No, that's just something you read on a blog written by a guy who would go on to write that women shouldn't get wage equality because they would have to work more dangerous jobs and thus die more, because apparently saving the lives of man by making those jobs safer is impossible.
Anyway, here's a big stats heavy quote about how there is solid evidence for a pay gap, from the stats nerds at the census bureau (I link only the executive summary https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WB/media/An%20Evaluat..., link to the full thing can be found in the summary)
"""In both decomposition models, the portion of the gender wage gap that could not be explained by differences in men’s and women’s work histories, work hours, industry and occupation distribution, and job characteristics was between 68 and 70 percent, yielding an unexplained wage gap of 14 to 15 percent. That is, of an estimated wage gap of 21 percent, statistical models explain between 6 and 7 percentage points of the gap, leaving 14 to 15 percentage points unexplained, similar to other major studies on this topic.
Differences in the sorting of men and women between occupations do not fully explain the gender wage gap; men and women are paid differently within occupations as well. The size of the gender wage gap varies significantly by occupation even as men earn more than women in nearly all occupations. While wages are at parity in some occupations, gaps are as large as 45 percent in others. Across the 316 occupations in this study, occupations in finance and sales had the largest gender wage gaps""
>a guy who would go on to write that women shouldn't get wage equality because they would have to work more dangerous jobs and thus die more, because apparently saving the lives of man by making those jobs safer is impossible.
I think it can be true that we should make those jobs safer and that it makes sense to pay dangerous jobs more.
I really am curious what the people that disagree with me think. Do you think that danger shouldn’t be compensated?
Of course someone did. The clear and obvious interpretation is saying that “making the jobs safer” is an alternative to “a group does more dangerous jobs and dangerous jobs should be paid more”
I had a friend who worked on the ramp at SFO. Saw him real shook up after work, said he saw a coworker drive one of their carts under a plane while looking elsewhere- and got his head cut off.
It's a very physical job with a lot of powerful machines.
The fallacy (...ish) in these conversations is that men and women always work the same types of jobs. Which you pretty much just admit isn't really the case, which your "teaching and nursing" comment.
Ultimately, it turns out, men have a combination of typically choosing higher-paid careers and also being more demanding in terms of compensation. At the end of the day I can't hold a gun to women's heads and make them become engineers. If they want to be teachers, then so be it.
But wait! That doesn't mean that there isn't discrimination at play. Because typically jobs that are predominantly women are lower paid. It's complex, because:
1. Typically, there ARE some value/toughness differences in the job. Being a nurse is "easier" than being a doctor. But how much? Are we certain we're dividing the pay equitably?
2. While men have these higher paying jobs more, men aren't more educated. At least, not anymore. What could be the factors leading women to receive education in fields that are less economically viable?
Also, while there is a pay gap, this isn't the only gender gap. Clearly, job distribution across gender is very complicated. For example, men make up 97% of workplace deaths. Why do men choose these jobs more? Is it biological, social, economic, or all three?
> No, that's just something you read on a blog written by a guy who would go on to write that women shouldn't get wage equality because they would have to work more dangerous jobs and thus die more, because apparently saving the lives of man by making those jobs safer is impossible.
What am I missing here? Is it possible to make the workplace injury rate among linemen comparable to the rate among social workers?
That the full argument amounted had this weird structure where women should be excluded from some jobs without complaint because of the danger, but simultaneously there was no interest in making the jobs safer!
So that men work more in dangerous jobs wasn't a problem, instead that was a proper, "of course men should die more" sort of thing because it motivated the pay gap.
So the argument becomes that men should die so the pay gap is sustained, which doesn't seem like a great thing to declare triumphantly?
Weird that jobs with performance bonuses are the largest gap — but that perhaps suggests that the cause isnt sexism in the workplace, but yet more confounders they didn’t account for.
Who gets handed the best leads to the biggest fish? The people perceived as the best deal closers. Perceived. This is where you can hide the most sexism, along with other confounders, yes.
sales is literally you-eat-what-you-kill. you get paid % commission on sales regardless of your gender.
There are so many sales people nobody would actually bother creating a separate pay grade for women and separate for men (and it would be highly unethical and illegal ofc)
I think the orthodox Left response to this would be that the unseen hand of the patriarchy and general internalised gender roles cause women to hustle less/advocate for recognition of their performance less than men, or for men to overlook their contributions.
because it DOES NOT control for hours worked nor experience, and lumps up narrow specialties with wide specialties together in a single "finance".
There is a huge difference in finance as a "bank teller" and finance as a "investment banker at Wall St".
This is a problem of large scale population level wage research, it misses very important confounding variables and lumps up everything they failed to explain as some magical gender pay gap.
This is the epitome of how low replicability social sciences research is done: download dataset from JSTOR, load it in Stata/Matlab, run some regressions and call it a day.
I agree about the diversity of finance as a sector. I know many people that work ”in finance” and that varies from glorified interior decorating for corporate real estate to running macros on spreadsheets to check loans to defining investment portfolios
It is a quote from a summary, they don't write out the full list of jobs that fall under the heading to keep it short.
Examples of jobs in that category given in full report reads: "securities, commodities, and financial services
sales agents (0.55), financial managers (0.66), and personal financial advisors (0.68)."
> the striking union is the one that contains all the data analysts
You seem to believe a union in a negotiation would care about carefully drawing conclusions from data analysis.
The goal is to construct a political wedge which makes their employer look bad for not giving into their demands. The only mindset about data is “how can we use this to argue for what we want”.
Employers generally would prefer to pay people less. If you don't ask for a raise you often don't get one. If you ask for a raise, you generally need to consider quitting if you don't get so kind of raise. Men are generally more aggressive about asking for raises. From a certain perspective when one sees a "pay gap" you could think, "Women need to risk more and fight for higher pay. They are bringing wages down for everyone. Let's encourage them to fight for higher pay at the same rate men do." Your mileage may vary.
Some recruitment firms had some reports that corroborated that. HIRED’s annual report showed that too.
In person, I’ve seen many women colleagues do things at odds with the competition
For example, being worried about how to move up in their organization without coming across as “too bitchy”, as if it was a unique phenomenon to their gender
When the competition is:
- losing opportunities for being too cocky, and they keep trying until they find a different organization “looking for someone to make the hard decisions”
- emphasis on a different organization. the competition is coming in at a higher level by bluffing and trying, not focusing on going up the corporate ladder, or worried about being married to a company
its a widely replicated experience that changing jobs will get you 30% pay bump and the same level of responsibilities, while trying to move up gets you a ton more responsibility and single digit percent compensation increases
if many women are adverse to doing that, it would be a significant factor in some industries
Have you honestly heard any male colleague described as “too bitchy”? How did you listen to your female colleagues’ genuine experience of being unfairly labeled and come away from it thinking it was their fault? And the solution is “don’t be loyal and lie”? Sure you can probably get ahead doing that but yikes maybe it’s the system that’s the problem.
I’ve worked with a bunch of men who were considered ‘assholes’. Mean or difficult women are sometimes called bitches, mean or difficult men are sometimes called assholes. There is no practical difference between the two.
well one is allowed in a corporate setting and the other isn’t. that’s the main practical difference. i have literally sat in meetings where women are complaining about “old white assholes” in the industry (im not white) while my white male colleagues just look around uncomfortably.
amusing, as the competition doesn’t have the privilege of defining whose fault their circumstance is. adapt or exist in mediocre compensation, mediocre abilities to provide security to partners.
act like the competition. you aren’t going to get the satisfaction of an argument about the validity of everyone’s lived experiences.
figure it tf out and don’t worry about how it’s articulated in internet comments. otherwise, you’re probably not pulling your weight on the wage gap for your gender, yikes, because other people are.
The gender pay gap disappears when you control for hours worked, job seniority, and experience.
So, why do women work less hours than men and have less experience? That's still an issue even if it's not directly sexist. If we read some bullet points from your post:
> Men are more likely than women to have more years of continuous experience in their current occupation.
What crawls on four legs and causes women to drop out of the labour force?
> What crawls on four legs and causes women to drop out of the labour force?
"Women earn less due to sexist discrimination" and "women earn less due to bearing the brunt of raising children" are two distinct claims. The first one is contentious and widely disputed (disproved?).
If we, as a society, want to encourage more kids, we should to allocate those funds as a society, much like roads or anything else (we do, tax benefits, ..., maybe we should do more). If we want to offer welfare for people regardless of their life constraints, that's again a societal decision (and one I'm mostly in favor of).
Pushing that to each individual employer sets up a cat and mouse game where the shadiest organizations barely not getting audited are able to leverage that inequality (supposing we did fix the wage gap at an employer level without addressing underlying factors) to achieve higher profits and outperform the competition.
And that's one of the _better_ outcomes. Switching gears only slightly, suppose (using round numbers for simplicity) the average cost to the employer of maternity leave is 6 months salary and you have a 10% chance of incurring that cost. An organization like the NYT can absolutely self-insure, but at the level of only a few employees you cannot.
Something kind of like the unemployment insurance situation works much better in those kinds of scenarios. The government acts as an insurer to provide the service we as a society have decided is worthwhile, and each employer only has to send in a check for their average liability instead of dealing with a different mountain of paperwork and existential risks.
We can't even do something simple that I would like to see happen — make WIC universal with no conditions. It already covers about half of all children so it basically only doubles the budget. We can afford it and it saves so much time and energy trying to police the system.
Another one is free of cost universal pre-K. A lot of women can't go to work because there is nobody at home to take care of their children. But really the easiest lowest hanging fruit is universal WIC. Make it available to everyone so it is easier for us to tell people to get it.
progenity penalty is a societal issue, not issue between worker-corp. It is individual choice of a household to pro-create, and each mother's gender penalty is offset by father's gender penalty.
one may argue that America should provide more incentives to working families, but I see it as a society level issue, not the issue between a particular worker union and NYT.
I would love American society to unite once and for all, and ignore all artificial wedge lines created by MSM and uniparty (state, party, rural/urban, region, identity, ideology) and demand better laws that provide longer PFL and affordable childcare.
Curious what you mean by father's gender penalty as the link you provide states "Men's wages are either unaffected or even increase after having a child."
Doesn't sound like a penalty to me? also it assumes parents stay together if one offsets the other
We have a free labour market, if it was true that NYT underpaid Black workers for the same productivity, they could easily jump ship to other company and make more $$.
What is stopping “black people” from escaping the supposed inequality at NYT and making more money elsewhere ????
You've attempted to explain away pay gaps by saying it's because of lower roles and/or lower productivity, but that's just the same problem with an extra step. Why are they in lower roles? Why are they assessed as less productive? Are they inherently dumb/lazy/bad, or are we just back to "the pay gap exists because of biases" again?
> What is stopping “black people” from escaping the supposed inequality at NYT and making more money elsewhere ????
Black NYT employees are likely very well aware that the biases they encounter are not unique to the NYT.
>but that's just the same problem with an extra step
I think it’s a totally different problem. The problem no longer is about how group X is compensated for doing job Y, but why group X is doing job Y in the first place.
you can do a little scientific experiment yourself: Change your linkedin location to San Francisco, add the buzz words and $big_tech_company to your profile, make sure you are of under-represented minority in profile, and watch recruiters banging your door and offering to apply and headhunt you for pay raise
See, I look at what you wrote and draw the mirror-image conclusion: "Here is a person who would prefer to shame others for being 'impolite' than let them say out loud what is obvious to literally anyone."
The fact that the situation is as GP described is undeniable. But there can be reasons why things are this way that extend beyond what the racists of yore believed about genetics. Most obviously: Not all subgroups of white people are equally represented in tech either. (When was the last time you were in a team where the majority hailed from Appalachia?)
But actual investigation and remediation can't begin until we can first point at reality and describe it as it currently is.
In practice, we use the term “labor market” because those words tend to go together, but if we take a moment to stop and imagine it was an actual “market” it would be a pretty crappy one. Imagine walking into a grocery store and milk was priced as “between $5 and $15”. You need to haggle on the final number. And that’s if you’re lucky to live in a state where prices have to be posted at all! You also don’t really know what’s in it. There is also considerable investment whether or not you end up liking the price. (Imagine you have to stand in line for an hour before you can even begin haggling.)
Anyone who has applied for a job knows that switching companies isn’t free, as it would be in a “free market”. There’s any number of outside factors that could prevent it. And switching too often is also viewed negatively, which is not true of e.g. shares of Amazon.
I think this image hits the nail on the head. Only thing missing is that markets will only sell to you if you live within an hours commute so you may need to move having to a different city, leaving friends/family behind to even try if the milk at another market is worth it. And sometimes the milk turns out to be orange juice...
could not disagree more. Switching jobs in tech is literally free pay raise. top tier tech worker can jump jobs every 2 years and get ~30% bump every time. You are actually leaving money on the table if you dont switch jobs (in tech specifically) - because jobs are comparable to each other.
I think it is interesting that people are so quick to understand that measuring productivity is difficult when it comes to software engineering metrics or how promotions can be scuttled by things like internal politics but when it comes to macro scale things suddenly we assume that populations are being accurately evaluated for productivity.
Exactly. A few years ago everyone outside of tech was excited about a study from Google showing that “soft skills” were more important for career advancement for engineers within Google.
And it’s almost tautological: people who are good at playing organizational games succeed in the organization. Actually measuring engineering productivity isn’t solved at all.
to me, this is actually an argument in favor of becoming a spherical object, so that you can easily switch job in case your boss is horrible.
You don't want to be stuck under a bad boss, do you? or do you want to take a gamble that each manager will be perfect (manager can change without your control as well due to restructuring)?
if Corporation treats employees as a perfectly replaceable unit of a Human Resource, then I will treat them as a fungible unit of a Job Description
Do we? Your spelling suggests you're not from the US, so I wonder how familiar you are with market conditions. Gotta say your arguments here and above come off as a little shallow.
My argument is we have at-will employment which means you are free to work at any company willing to hire you, and free to leave and join elsewhere if you find a better place. I certainly benefited myself from at-will employment and free labour market.
Do you have a reason to believe the labor market is not free? Like do tech workers in NYT experience slavery/involuntary labor or industry gatekeeping of some sort?
Jesus christ thank you, folks on the internet are so quick to dismiss pay gaps just because we know what causes them as if that magically makes it not a problem.
Take one factor, women earn less because of mid-career halts due to having children, like the father didn't also have a child. Women bear the brunt because we're expected to be the primary caregivers, and this hurts men too due to the "father babysitting his kids" problem of considering the father's involvement as secondary.
You can say this isn't a problem for her employer to solve but as long as we
have no intention of upsetting the standard nuclear family gender roles men and women taking the default life path shouldn't consistently make one worse off than the other.
What if Women, on average, prefer to take more time away from work due to having a child than their male partners? And what if "Black" people are, on average, younger than other groups and so are more likely to be in early-career roles?
More broadly, once we start dividing "People" up into groups like "Black" "White" "Man" "Woman"; isn't a bit silly to think the groups won't expect and want and do different things? Like even if we assign people literally at random (and 'Race' isn't much different than this); wouldn't differences emerge?
Now, imagine you enslave one of those groups for ~400 years, prevent them from voting or getting an equal education for another ~100+. Might differences emerge in how society treats that population?
Yes. Do you agree that my point is also correct? Different groups want different things, and have different demographics, and excel in different areas.
If we defined the "groups" in a less historically informed way, we'd still have differences.
> Different groups want different things, and have different demographics, and excel in different areas.
I think it's very easy to overstate how much those things are genuine differences in preference/ability. Allowing no-fault divorce dropped female suicide rates by 20%; were they happy in those marriages, or enduring them? Would they choose differently if offered the same opportunity?
Eye color, unlike Race or Gender, is pretty evenly distributed over the obvious confounding variables like "Age" or "Preference of staying home with children". I'd expect it to be +/- 10%, though probably not "equal" enough to keep "disparate impact" folks from calling it out.
Any individual woman has far more control over how she and her husband split childcare responsibilities than her employer who was not involved in who she decided to marry or how they decided to split up childcare and financially providing for the family.
And I don't think it's crazy for individuals who dedicate more of their life to work to make more money those who don't.
Just from my casual observation, it seems like these days, lots of women complain about having to do a lot more household work than their husbands, while also holding a full-time job just like the husbands. But no one ever seems to ask these women: "why did you marry this guy then?"
Of course, I've been in a bad marriage myself, so I understand how someone can make a really poor decision about their marriage partner (esp. when young!), but it seems to me that a lot of people are in lousy marriages, and are only still in them because it's easier to put up with a crappy partner, especially when you have kids, than to divorce and try to deal with the huge challenges that life as a divorced parent presents. I suspect many, many people (primarily women) are just waiting until the kids are out of the house until they finally end their marriages.
All in all, this makes me wonder how viable traditional marriage as an institution really is any more.
This is patently false. The USA does not have any regulations around equal parental leave for example. Very few companies allow employees to split their leave however they want, like some other countries do.
each family makes their own decision how to split responsibilities at home. Its possible that men take care of children, while women work more.
my position is each wife's gender gap is compensated by husband's gender gap, and on balance it all comes down to individual choices, division of labor at household level.
Using motherhood as a wedge issue between genders is an artificial issue that ignores incomes and choices at the household level.
It seems logical that if either partner has to stop working for childcare, whichever partner earns the most keeps their job, unfortunately that just creates a feedback loop where gender gap means women are more likely to tale on child care, which in turn is used to justify the gender gap.
I don't think there is any real agency there.
That said I also don't think parenthood is the root of the issue.
this is not an issue between union and corporation, but more like societal issue. Other countries provide prolonged maternity leave (Sweden has 16 months leave) and free/cheap childcare.
Its just that American lawmakers don't value traditional American family, they'd rather woman have an abortion, instead of subsidized childcare and 12+ months of paid family leave.
This is not a gender issue, this is the issue of American elites refusing to provide incentives to working American families.
Remember, most of the American societal "struggles" across artificial wedge lines (straight vs gay, male vs female, democrat vs republican, pro-choice vs pro-life, coastal vs rural, etc etc) => are artificially created by the mainstream media and Uniparty in the DC to leech taxes from working families and selectively prop up one side of the struggle, so that another side is outraged and fought the other.
There is only one struggle in America: rich rentiers on Investment income/Trust funds vs Working class on W2 income.
I broadly agree, but would draw this out a little:
> Its just that American lawmakers don't value traditional American family, they'd rather woman have an abortion, instead of subsidized childcare and 12+ months of paid family leave.
I'd be surprised if any federal elected official was on record with a position as ghoulish as this. I think the diversity of opinion on "what do we do about childbearing" is broader than "American lawmakers... would rather women have an abortion". At least the right is pushing a lot of incentives to make women staying home to raise children economically feasible again, and the left is really trying to figure out the care economy. There's a lot of hot button cultural stuff entwined with all of this, but also a rich policy discussion happening underneath.
> You can say this isn't a problem for her employer to solve but as long as we have no intention of upsetting the standard nuclear family gender roles men and women taking the default life path shouldn't consistently make one worse off than the other.
Yes it should — if they’re making choices at a different rate.
That is, if men who take similar time off experience similar hardship and it simply happens to be that women prefer to stay home with the kids more often, there is literally no problem.
We don’t need to “fix” biology to fit our ideology: that’s backwards.
What annoys me about the left is exactly things like this. Someone points out that an ideologically-motivated claim is baseless, and the talking heads on the left just repeat, over and over, in various ways, that bad-faith actors on the right are disputing the claim, but they’re wrong (and evil). They just do this until people get tired of arguing, and they refuse to give up the claim.
With the right, a lot of it is based on religion or irreducible moral sentiment, and you just accept that some people on the right believe crazy things and can’t be swayed. On balance their beliefs are more harmful (though not by as much as in the past), but they don’t bother me in the same way because they’re admittedly irrational. Many on the left start with a set of beliefs similarly rooted in feeling and then rationalize the hell out of them, and will (often literally) scream at you if you dare to point out that their evidence is ex post facto and just poor besides.
> Turns out "gender pay gap" magically disappears as soon as you start controlling for relevant variables
I think this is false?
The gap certainly becomes smaller when you control for those factors, but it does not disappear.
But don't take my word for it; search for "unadjusted gap" (or "uncontrolled") vs "adjusted gap" (or "controlled") to see various reports. Your quoted source does not cite much data that I can see.
(and of course, aside from this, the question of why women would tend to have less experience and lower titles than men, is a valid topic on its own, and adjusting for it doesn't make it unimportant)
isn't it on the border of measurement error ? Would it be fair to say, after controlling for some variables the gender gap narrows down to 1% (which is a fairly small number if you ask me).
At least going by that payscale.com link, I don't think so. That is compiled from 600K+ responses, so they have enough data to measure small differences with some confidence, I think. I didn't sign up to download the full dataset though, so I'm mostly going by their claims.
Quoting from the article:
Although $0.99 may seem very close to $1, the red line in the chart
below has never crossed the dotted $1 line in blue representing men’s
pay. Even when women are doing the same jobs, the gender pay gap is
not zero.
If it were a "lost in measurement error" thing, I would expect that chart to have a lot more noise in it — some years women would be above men, other years below (that said, I do wish the charts had error bars). Instead, it's showing a small-but-consistent difference repeated across the years.
Claims that there is no gender pay gap based on clearly biased sources irks me.
So firstly, you don’t know what the NYT tech guild analysis looked like, so why assume they didn’t control for other factors? It is plausible they could have, given their access to competent statisticians, but we don’t know either way. It seems like you may just want this story to fit your pre-existing narrative.
Secondly, there are so many high-quality studies out there better than an a blog post about a Forbes article about an interview from a conservative think tank that show the very real existence of a gender pay gap that _is not accounted for_ by fewer hours worked, experience, or job type (yes these do contribute but are far from the entire picture). Here’s a couple (read their citations for more):
Lastly, _even if_ womens’ “lifestyle choices” were to explain entirely the pay gap (which they don’t, see above), think about what kind of career choices you’d make if you had to constantly debate about your right to equal pay with your supposed peers.
It’s not really plausible that the NYT tech guild would have controlled for factors that would make the pay gap appear smaller, because their incentive isn’t to be truth-seeking, but to attain a superior negotiating position.
I am economist and former quant. I wrote a report on the gender pay gap for a candidate for Congress. There is evidence of a gap.
Glassdoor has a great report showing that salaries for the same company and same job title are about 7% lower for women. An academic paper on MBA grads showed that hiring salaries for women were lower. So there is evidence for it.
For the MBA grads, the paper show that with training on negotiation, women got salaries similar to men. So, there are policies that help.
Surely, every other time you've raised this argument, people have pointed out that job seniority is a desirable and highly contested variable? Saying that it makes sense, because fewer women and minorities are promoted, does not actually support your point. Don't control for job title.
I think it helps to isolate the issue and prescribe better targeted intervention measures.
If we can say that for the same level, gender pay gap does not exist, but there is discrepancy in promoting women to senior/executive levels: and there could be many legitimate reasons.
and the issue of gender gap becomes an issue of promoting women to senior levels from the inside, or more diverse hiring for senior job roles from outside.
If you have the time, could you explain what you think "gender studies" entails? Not to step on your broader point at all, but I think you might need to pick a better strawman here.
I can only speak anecdotally with my many years in the "liberal arts", but feel pretty confident you would be laughed out of the classroom for bringing such a thing up, whatever side of it you are on. Its just more of a thing people like us argue about on message boards, not really something academics would care about beyond a fraught data point! For I hope obvious reasons.
And no I cant speak for the annoying guy you met one time who was a gender studies major. I'm sure they were very annoying though.
"Gender studies" is usually used as a dog whistle for low rigor Liberal Arts programs like Psychology (as opposed to high rigor STEM programs like Physics).
Colleges aggressively enroll low-SAT high schoolers in these low rigor fields, because they want their federal student loan money at overinflated tuition. Colleges have only incentive to overproduce students and hand out diplomas like candy in exchange for student loan money.
The problem with over-enrollment of low-SAT students in low rigor fields is Replication crisis[1]. A lot of "research papers" are being produced every year due to sheer over-production of graduate students in these fields, and with pressure to "publish-or-perish" a lot of research ends up bogus, fake, non-replicated or p-hacked.
This NYT claim caught my attention because they used words "average wage per gender/race" - which is telling sign they used simple Excel's AVERAGE() to get their "insights".
In a more rigorous field like econometrics/statistics, you would be laughed at if you make such claim because average numbers hide a lot of nuance, required to understand the field. If one were to control for certain confounding variables, one would get a much better understanding of a "wage gap" or "racial gap" issue and understand each individual components of the gap, rather than blaming everything on strawman "institutional racism" or "institutional misogyny" or whatever
Ah gotcha. Well thanks for responding thoughtfully, reading what I actually said! Good luck with all that, you are fighting a good fight. One day those rigor-less Academia scum are gonna get whats coming to them, I'm sure.
I don’t think it’s really relevant? It would be a very easy promise to make if no such thing were happening in the first place.
I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re smart enough to not just straight up compare the average of all men vs the average of all women.
Given that I've got a rather nice chunk of cash (buy-a-really-nice-car nice) from a settlement in a pay gap lawsuit, there's at least existence proof that a pay gap exists occasionally to the extent a judge will believe it does. I'd consider looking at the actual data instead of blanket-dismissing via generic questions.
Further, given that the AEI has a very strong incentive to lie a pay gap away, I'd at least suggest consulting additional resources.
I don't know that the American Enterprise Institute is the most unbiased source of this information.
The author of this particular article you linked to (which itself doesn't really link out to much, other than an interview given by Sheryl Sandberg and references to her commentary from The Guardian, so where is the data coming from exactly?) is also a concurrent fellow at The Federalist Society[0] which has a notoriously right wing bent to its interpretation of law and policy research, which does bring up some questions of bias here, given this and the fact there isn't anything in the linked article that really supports their position, rather its a snippet of interpretation for a Sheryl Sandberg interview and a book titled Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap -- and What Women Can Do About It by Warren Farrell. To which, he uses both snippets outside of their broader context, which both argue that pay remediation is a core component to having gender equality in the workplace, but isn't the only thing
I'm coming up empty here, as to what supports this assertion as any semblance of reality?
Prove me wrong with facts and studies, I’m all ears. I would life to be wrong about this
> claims like these always irk me, like did you just compare averages by race/gender? Whoever made this claim, did they control for other factors, like job title/level or productivity
Their methodology and third party checks are explained here:
> claims like these always irk me, like did you just compare averages by race/gender? Whoever made this claim, did they control for other factors, like job title/level or productivity?
I can’t speak for these numbers, but when we do them we account for these things. Obviously pay isn’t going to be fair, but it should be less unfair than it is at many places.
Part of the reason women get paid less where I currently work is because they ask less. That doesn’t mean every white man is paid much better, because not all men ask either. In general, however, you can generalise across experience, productivity, seniority and so on and say that some groups are paid less. There are a lot of factors which play into this beyond people not asking. Our metrics also show that employees who ask less frequently or are in general less assertive are also much less likely to leave their jobs. As such it becomes less of a risk to not give them raises. Risk of employees leaving is a factor you consider when balancing your budget, and I’m sure you can imagine other things which may play into this, some of which, shouldn’t.
> Part of the reason women get paid less where I currently work is because they ask less.
Yes, and that’s because as study after study has shown they’re less likely to successfully get more and not have it held against them.
> New research by Berkeley Haas Professor Laura Kray shows the belief that women don’t ask for higher pay is not only outdated, but it may be hurting pay equity efforts. Contrary to popular belief, professional women now report negotiating their salaries more often than men, but they get turned down more often, Kray found.
If you notice I spoke about my place of work. Not on the national or global norm. I’m sure times are changing, but it’s not what our internal metrics currently show at our company.
Do you have internal metrics showing that women who ask are treated the same way? That women are convincingly told that it won’t jeopardize their offers as it likely has at other employees? This stuff is insidious and it doesn’t need to happen every time, everywhere to shape people’s decisions.
We don’t have any sort of metrics which are that personalised.
I’m not sure you’re arguing against who you think you’re arguing against. I’m not defending it, I’m simply sharing how it is at our place. There are a lot of issues, if you took a wild guess at the demography of our manager staff I'm fairly certain you would get it right.
Yeah, supporting anecdote: only thing I got for trying to negociate my salary and benefits last time I tried, was my contract started over a month later so I technically lost that much pay, with zero changes to my contract. It just doesn't feel worth trying. Sure, you can blame me for poor negotiation skills maybe, or for not walking away from this job but contrast that to my partner's salary doubling without having to even ask... So it deeply irritates me when people say women don't get things because they don't ask. It is just a catch 22 situation.
I just don't know, all these points sound so weirdly out of touch with reality, it feels like we live in a world of children and there are no parents anymore.
Point 1: Only getting fired for a good reason? Who decides what a good reason is? The boss right? So what are we even doing here, what's the hidden implication? They want a foot in the door to be able to argue that X wasn't really a good reason and they'll strike over it. If I were a company owner/boss I would want to be able to fire people who are terrible to be around, argumentative for no good reason. Is that a good reason? They would think no because it's a personal fit issue. And yet it's totally legitimate, people don't get hired all the time over "fit" but then you can't fire over "fit". Everytime I have to deal with such colleagues I always think "man if I were a boss, I'd just fire such people, it's so obviously poison for the work environment". Arguing effectively is important but because it's so important it's a great duty to not use it as a tool for personal benefits.
Point 2: Pay discrepancies for "women or people of color" could easily have real world reasons, maybe they really are just worse at their job, less engaged, less ambitious, whatever it is that causes less pay. It's not impossible for this to be the case, no matter how uncomfortable that may be for everyone. Yes really. Yes really really. It can absolutely be true. You might even have a situation where every worker from Russia is just worse at their job. Or the majority of workers that are e.g hindu are just worse for whatever reason that a company can't fathom. It may even be the case that everyone who is white is worse for whatever reason, maybe they are too comfortable, who knows, none of this is impossible and none of this is the job of the company to figure out. I need to have the legal power to pay worse people less money or we are in a situation where you just levied a massive hidden tax on my company. You want me to subsidize worse performers in some strange hope that this is going to help the country as a whole to be nicer. Well having a nicer country would be fantastic, I just want you to be clear that you are issuing massive, gigantic new taxes with these so called anti-racist, anti-sexist rules and it's not just a tax on the company, it also hurts the psychology of all the better workers, so you are hurting society in general. Who is going to count the cost at the end? Why work harder after all if you can just have a certain genetic profile or protected political class and then you'll get free money. What such people who push for this are always implying is that the company is hurting itself in sexist, racist confusion, the implication is that these people are underpaid for the value they provide and the company is too incompetent to see it. The union or government in their infinite wisdom is going to force the company's racists/sexists/homophobes to finally pay according to the real value of these workers and the only metric that they will use to determine the real value is genetics and political class. Absurd isn't even a strong enough word to describe it. Even in the theoretical best case scenario for such a rule where you truly have identical value from two different people, why reward the person that doesn't want to negotiate for more pay? What we should actually do is maybe look at workers' family situation and give people who can't negotiate effectively due to raising kids that they get a government tax bonus. But wait, that is already the case! People who have kids can already get a tax bonus.
Point 3: Yes it would be nice if we could all work how we want but how is that a legitimate negotiable thing for the union to involve itself in? If the company thinks that home office doesn't work for them then who is the union to say otherwise?!
The entire mindset here is so utterly divorced from reality, it's like a luxury daycare where the kids complain that some other kid got a slightly better piece of the pie.
> Only getting fired for a good reason? Who decides what a good reason is?
There are these things that exist called courts and independent arbitrators...
> Pay discrepancies for "women or people of color" could easily have real world reasons, maybe they really are just worse at their job, less engaged, less ambitious, whatever it is that causes less pay.
> ...
> I need to have the legal power to pay worse people less money or we are in a situation where you just levied a massive hidden tax on my company.
Ok, then. We have these things called protected categories. If your contention is one of those categories actually consists of "worse people" that you need to be able to "pay less money," then you need to prove that each of those individuals is in fact "worse." A giant wall-o-text consisting of a bunch of coulds, maybes, and I-want-to-be-able-to-do-this's ain't gonna cut it.
> Yes it would be nice if we could all work how we want but how is that a legitimate negotiable thing for the union to involve itself in?
The short answer: yes. The long answer is: yes, and why is that news to you?
> The entire mindset here is so utterly divorced from reality...
Honestly, I could say the same about your comment.
We can just take this exchange as an example, maybe that helps to clarify my actual position. Imagine if I had to contact an independent committee before I could "fire"(=ignore) your comment with several snide insults. I'd get bogged down, my work day would be slower. Imagine if somebody could drag me to court over every comment decision because hey, maybe I just ignored it for no good reason, or because you are black or white or have a certain religion. You could file an appeal at HN that I have to give you more attention. So in your desired reality we will have to find out during the court proceedings and in the meantime I am forced to pay you 15% more attention *by default* in an irrational attempt of fairness to all the other comments if they received 15% higher attention.
Having certain protections against discrimination is a good thing but they should be very carefully applied. We can already see that the New York Times Tech Guild does not seem to want careful application of these rules if their website doesn't even mention any evaluation of worker productivity or value, all their study apparently did was to look at pay difference without looking at work difference. A perfect example of a total failure to care about the correct things, a total failure to care about what the company needs to achieve (=actual value) and just looking at pay with no connection to possible reasons I enumerated. https://www.nyguild.org/post/pay-inequity-at-the-new-york-ti...
> Imagine if I had to contact an independent committee before I could... ignore your comment...
I can imagine an orange when we're talking apples, sure.
> We can already see that the New York Times Tech Guild does not seem to want careful application of these rules if their website doesn't even mention any evaluation of worker productivity or value, all their study apparently did was to look at pay difference without looking at work difference.
Come on, it's an adversarial negotiation. You seem to really want to argue the side of the employer, and for some strange reason seem also want everyone to argue that side as well.
Point 1: The hidden implication is obviously the continued problem of large firms over-hiring when labor or money is cheap and then performing mass layoffs when it's not. If you are hiring someone or a group with plans of firing them later then the contract wasn't established in good faith. Many of these workers can make more hourly if they are independent, they are paying for stability.
No company should be able to double dip by hiring a large team to build a system and then firing most of them to maintain it on a shoe-string budget, if they want to do that they can pay top dollar to have a 3rd party build it
Point 2: No matter how it shakes out, if you structure your company in a way that white men or asian men are incentivized to do more or women and blacks are incentivized to do less, then your company has a racist incentive structure and it should be rebuilt. They aren't flying in 15-year-old Hadje from Chad, the people they hire are all similarly qualified so there shouldn't be such a large gap, as we know cause if we restrict it to just white men then there isn't this large pay gap. Besides, it's a complete myth that people are "payed what they are worth" if that were the case a 100xer would make 100x more than a 1xer after firing 99 people and keeping the 100xer. In reality they might double or tripple their pay and the rest just becomes (record) profits for the company and 99 people are out of work.
Point 3: Does the company have any evidence that it doesn't work or should we just take their word? Doesn't work in what sense? That profits for the company aren't maximized? If that's the only metric then why should the employees be payed at all? Just have them as slaves and use the government to beat or kill them if they disagree.
I'd also point out the irony that if the NYT had hired staff with balanced and diverse perspectives, it might not have put itself in this ouroboros trap.
Thank you!
I wish I could promote this (and @crazygringo's helpful summary a few min ago) to the top of the thread. The rest of the HN commentary so far would've benefited from it a lot.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-new-york-times...