The gender wage gap in Silicon Valley – based on AngelList data
medium.comInteresting data, BUT... "Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team." - this is gender discrimination and it is illegal.
How about actually making the workplace attractive to woman applicants? Things like ridding your careers page of implicit biases and bro culture, putting extra emphasis on personal as well as professional growth, attending/hosting various women-oriented events/meetups/conferences, involving your leadership with mentoring at and recruiting from places like the Hackbright Academy, etc. etc.
It costs money, it costs time, hell, it takes a long time to produce results, but you know what - it's worth it! They are an outlier, but I do like Etsy's approach (and results) to gender diversity - http://firstround.com/review/How-Etsy-Grew-their-Number-of-F....
"How about actually making the workplace attractive to woman applicants?"
Yeah, and do you know what the best and easiest way to make a workplace more attractive to women is?
It is to have other women in the workplace!
I know many women who are unwilling to even apply to a company if they know they would be the first or only woman on the team.
It is a chicken and egg problem. Until his company is able to get SOME women working there, it is going to be extremely difficult to attract them in the first place.
Because of this it makes a lot of business sense to prioritize hiring women if your team is extremely imbalanced.
Agree with you up until the very last sentence. It does not make business sense to break the law (and gender discrimination is a real thing a company can get sued over). No matter how tempting, you can't magically wish the problem away and say "I'll hire 5 women, then 10 people of color, then a couple of LGBT folks, then I won't have any diversity problems". It doesn't work that way.
Yes, it is a chicken and egg problem. Yes, the first couple of hires will be difficult to make. But if you don't have the framework in place to actually support these women once they join the workplace, guess what, even if you luck out into making those hires, they won't be sticking around. It's not a one-time kind of thing.
Ehh, there are effectively equivalent ways of ensuring that you hire X more women without discriminating against men in the interview process.
If you have X people interviewing at your company, you should hire the best person who interviews, no matter the gender.
The REAL way to go about this is to discriminate at the referral/reachout stage.
If you go to your all male engineering team and announce "We are hiring! Refer all your friends!". What you are effectively doing is discriminating against women, because you are going to receive 20 male referrals and 1 women referral. But THIS isn't illegal.
I am suggesting that you do this same but biased towards women referrals, instead of biasing it toward male referrals. You make specific, targeted efforts to get as many women as possible to apply, while not bothering with referral/reachout processes that are likely to receive male heavy applications, and THEN accept the best person who applies to the job, which will almost certainly be a woman, since instead of having a 20male-1female application ratio, you now have a 1male-20female ratio.
One way of ensuring that you get women referrals is to reach out to all of your female engineering friends, and ask THEM for referrals. Or when you are making your job postings, forward it along to the mailing list of all the women in tech meetups, facebook groups, email lists, ect.
I mean, thats what the tech industry is doing right now, but targeted at men, and they never get in trouble for it, even if it is "accidental" that the job postings only get sent to tech groups/meetups that have a 20-1 male to female ratio.
>The REAL way to go about this is to discriminate at the referral/reachout stage. >If you go to your all male engineering team and announce "We are hiring! Refer all your friends!". What you are effectively doing is discriminating against women, because you are going to receive 20 male referrals and 1 women referral. But THIS isn't illegal.
God this hit me like a sack of bricks. It's exactly what I would do and I now realize, dudes gonna have dude friends, just like how ladies are gonna have lady friends.
I'm sick of made-up and ever-more-implausible reasons for women not comprising 50% of the workforce. (Someone once mentioned that a company might be having trouble finding women because an employee had a model of the Millennium Falcon on his desk.)
The truth is that fewer women than men choose to enter this profession in the first place. You may or may not agree that this state of affairs represents a "problem". Even if it does, the hiring stage is far too late to "fix" it.
>this is gender discrimination and it is illegal.
Employment discrimination laws don't kick in until you have 15 employees. This guy has 10.
Federally, you're right. In CA, you're wrong. The number to hit is 5 there. http://www.workplacefairness.org/minimum
But this guy has now set a precedent with a published article claiming he will actively discriminate against male candidates. So as soon as his company scales past 15, a male candidate that was rejected could sue, using that article as evidence.
Huh, would it apply retroactively? That seems weird.
It's not necessarily retroactively. If he has 10 people (8m, 2f) and wants parity (8m, 8f) then hes guaranteeing that the 16th person he hires will be a woman.
technically he could just fire a guy today and then hit parity at 14 and say the initiative is over.
Hmm, maybe. I think someone would have to prove they were discriminated against with more evidence in addition to a published article. It has to be proven that it affected the hiring team. I mean, his article would be used as part of evidence but there needs to be more than some self-claim, I would think.
I'd urge men to apply, and sue if rejected. Gender discrimination is a no-no.
>Education shrank the results to single digits for each occupation, gender and work experience, so I decided to remove it from the final dataset.
First of all you could have used buckets. Secondly, it doesn't seem like you have enough data judging from your charts.
Dice did a study and found that
>when you control for education, level of experience and parallel job titles, says Dice, men and women earn the same amounts.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/03/20/women-are-...
> At that point I made a decision to change this by enforcing a new hiring rule. Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team
I hope you get sued
But you know they won't be, because good luck winning that case, and before that, good luck finding a lawyer to represent that case.
IANAL but this seems like an easy case if the company has money in the bank. The CEO openly admitted on his personal blog that he plans to discriminate in the hiring process. Im guessing that would be enough to get past the chance of dismissal and then you're on to the discovery process which is so expensive the company would probably want to settle. Throw in negative PR and a pro bono (or fees from the case/settlement) lawyer who wants to make a name for themselves going after Silicon Valley gender discrimination and you've got a party.
I probably don't know what I'm talking about though.
Also, apparently anti-discrimination laws dont kick in until you have 15 employees, so what this guy is doing is probably not illegal anyway.
Depends on the state. In CA, the number is 5. [1]
> At that point I made a decision to change this by enforcing a new hiring rule. Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team
I stopped reading after this part!
"Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team."
The CEO should have run this blog post, and particularly this sentence, by a lawyer. It seems pretty clear that the above statement, if reflected in actual hiring practice by the company, is in violation of Section 703(a) of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act[1]. It is also pretty easy ammunition for an employment discrimination lawsuit.
[1]https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/titlevii.cfm Section 703(a) reads "It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer...to fail or refuse to hire...because of such individual's...sex" and "to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities" because of sex
You missed this bit.
>The term “employer” means a person engaged in an industry affecting commerce who has fifteen or more employees for each working day.
FTA:
>We’re team of 10 people of which only 2 are women, only one is a developer.
I actually didn't know the employer qualification of Title VII. Thanks for the tip.
However, the second part of my statement still very much applies. This blog post can easily become Exhibit A in an employment discrimination lawsuit in a year when the company has more employees, or even against a completely different company run by the same CEO in the future, to establish a pattern.
Point being, not worth the risk!
Then you really don't understand hiring women. Most women don't want to work at a place where they're the only woman. Or the workplace is ridiculously imbalanced in one direction. Even in large companies such as Amazon, women cluster into teams.
Not having women on your team usually points to a culture issue, and who wants to have a terrible work environment? It's another area where avoiding false positives is probably going to be better for you in the long run.
For instance, my wife moved to a new team that is 50℅ women, from a team where she was the only woman engineer. Her co-workers really didn't know how to interact with women. Complaining to HR would cause the team to assume it was her. When a co-worker did complain to HR, a large section of her team assumed it was her and made the workplace even less hospitable.
Plus from a business perspective if you can open your business to a pool of talent that isn't well catered to, you'll probably reap some long term benefit.
> Most women don't want to work at a place where they're the only woman.
That's a problem women can solve, not one that has to be solved for them.
> Her co-workers really didn't know how to interact with women
Examples? You react to them the same way as everyone else.
I think I'm on the same side as you, but the right approach to establishing a diverse balance isn't to have litmus tests for individual jobs.
If you want to shift the balance.
1. Start by mixing up your recruitment marketing and messaging to make them more appealing to your target demographic.
2. Then, consider any necessary policy changes to the workplace and culture that would turn away candidates who get a closer look.
3. Lastly, consider using your diversity preference as a tie-breaker among otherwise comparable candidates.
No illegal litmus tests necessary.
Sure, the author's worldview is twisted a little by politics, but I recommend skipping to the bottom, there's some substance there.
He has some interesting charts regarding how much salary is requested by people of different skill, experience, and gender.
So for future reference, best practice is to ignore any bad parts of an article that agrees with my political and moral leanings and only focus and trumpet the good parts??
A better takeaway might be "focus on the data"
If he had decided to give preference to (e.g.) Syrian refugees because he felt a sense of wanting to help, would you have the same response? If he gave preference to a veteran out of Patriotism or an ex-con out of a belief in "second chances" would you have the same reaction?
Yes, I would have had the same reaction. This is a great way to put a false limit on your potential talent pool. I'm not saying that adding programs or policies to add outreach to specific communities that are under-represented in your organization is bad. I'm saying that setting a hard-and-fast rule that your next hires must fit a particular trend to "balance the team" is a great way to frustrate your recruiting team (either internal or external), slow team growth to an unpredictable crawl, and will cause you to pass over potentially excellent candidates for the wrong reasons. The statement quoted by OP essentially equates to "the candidate had the wrong genitals at the wrong time", which is an absolutely absurd way to think about hiring. I would say the same thing about any of your counter-examples (e.g. to your Syrian Refugee example, "We won't be hiring you right now, because you're not a refugee from the right place" would be a rejection reason if you were trying to "balance the team" via preferential hiring treatment)
It's interesting that you brought up the hiring of veterans in IT. It's actually a real thing for many defense contractors and government agencies to give preference to former military members even in cases where they may be less qualified (citation needed).
Interesting argument. So you are equating being born the female sex the same as being a war time refugee, war veteran or ex-con? Could you explain that analogy a little better?
I was just presenting other situations where an employer might give someone hiring preference.
Is it just the idea that someone was getting hiring preference that isn't 100% tied to skills that is the issue? Or is it specifically because it was women that were getting hiring preference?
It wasn't phrased that way though. If he did that, would he 'hire Syrian refugees until they represent 50% of the team'?
Why? Hiring women over men is just good business.
The wage gap means that at a given salary level, the women is going to be better and more experienced.
If you have budgeted 120k for a software engineering position, why WOULDN'T you choose the best person for the role?
And the best person for the role at this salary point is almost certainly going to be an overqualified women who is getting underpaid at her previous job.
>The wage gap means that at a given salary level, the women is going to be better and more experienced.
Yeah... no. The "wage gap" means the CEO makes more than the receptionist. For people with the same CV and same work experience women make just as much as men.
Generally as a startup, many applicants come through current employees, friends, investors, etc. This generally encourages the cycle of the same people getting the same jobs. Don't rely on your website to widen the diversity of your funnel, even if your jobs list is current...most startups I know are not great about keeping this current anyway.
A few (relatively easy) ideas:
1. Join a few "______ in tech" email lists, and if you don't feel comfortable joining the list or it is not allowed, at least email the moderator and ask if they take job postings.
2. Send someone from your company to attend to a "____ in tech" meetup. There are a lot and they happen often. Ask people at these meetups where they get their information, what email lists they are on, etc. Then, act.
3. Interns. People have mixed thoughts on interns, fine, but the "lack of experience" trope happens because it's really hard to get that first chance. Take a chance on someone in a lower-risk way.
4. Host some kind of public-facing community event one or two times per year. Advertise it on your website and your twitter. Generally as a woman I am more comfortable attending something like this rather than cold-emailing a company for a position that I am not even sure they are hiring for. See: "Code as Craft" at Etsy. Tech-centric topic, inclusive and public-facing way to see the office, meet employees etc.
>Generally as a startup, many applicants come through current employees, friends, investors, etc. This generally encourages the cycle of the same people getting the same jobs.
Is that a bad thing? I say this from the perspective of small businesses who typically hire family then friends, etc. In theory it may be bad as they may eventually run out of vigor and ideas... but is it bad in other ways? I have known many businesses started by immigrants where lots of the employees were family, same ethnic group, etc. but I had not though of it as "wrong" in a moral sense maybe wrong in a business sense (as I think it limited their potential, but I saw that as "their" problem, not a social problem.
I thought this was an interesting article and then I read the comments. Oh dear, a bunch of white guys kvetching and clutching their...pearls. Your deprivation moves me. Really. Anyway I had a point to make, as a software engineer for 30 years and a woman. (The proportion of women in the field has fallen by half since I started my career.) For my last job I went with a high end recruiting agency and the recruiter got me to raise my salary request by 25K. I ended up getting 10K above her suggestion. It was interesting to see that indeed I was undervaluing myself. In this I find that I was pretty typical of female engineers. I'm glad I took the recruiter's advice. By the way my salary seems to be exactly in line with the salary of men with my experience, from these charts.
Your point is spot on: people should always know what they're worth when they negotiate salary at a job, asking for what you can get is the most crucial thing when taking a job.
Both men and women are uncomfortable negotiating up (I've heard that women are much more hesitant about this, but I don't know the research that well and never sat on the hiring side of salary negotiations), and low asks are probably the biggest mistake anyone can make: $10-20k doesn't mean shit to the manager that wants to get you on their team if you negotiate it at hiring time, but if you try to get that bump during annual raise period, that's almost impossible to achieve at any large-ish company (it means either nixing raises for other people on the team or calling in VP-level favors, which most managers don't have the ability to do).
In tech nobody is ever going to tell you to piss off for asking for $10k more than they can offer, they're just going to negotiate you down (if even that - most of the time they'll just say "yes" or split the difference). Now, if you're $50k+ out of line, that could be another matter, but that's why you do some research and don't go crazy with your ask.
The rule for contracting is more brutal, but also a bit simpler: you should always be losing a lot of business because of how high your rate is, somewhere between 25% and 50% is my rule of thumb. If clients are saying "yes" without negotiating or at least complaining, you're definitely charging too little.
Protip: you can look up top salaries at most non-profits online, they have to report them for I think the 15 highest paid employees. Pick a smallish one in your area, look at the engineers there, and you've got an anchor for senior engineering rates. Non profits might not be 100% competitive with for-profit companies, but the better ones have to be somewhat close as far as base salary (they don't offer stock or other perks, usually) if they want good people.
> Born white and male in today’s world I won the lottery without having a clue.
Here we go. (actually I stopped reading).
There's a couple comments to this effect. Why? It comes across as being unwilling to consider ideas at all.
Probably because Germans have won the "German lottery", Japanese have won the Japanese lottery, People from Syria "lost" the lottery. Many advanced nations in a kind of way "won" the lottery for their people. Many Americans believe Europeans won the lottery vis a vis the US because they think things are much better and more fair there. On the other hand, people from poor countries think America is a lottery and put great efforts at crossing the border...
It also has a "guilt" aspect to it.
It's a combination of a refrain we hear from people with specific views (too repetitive), an indication of stronger-than-average bias on the topic, and an accusation. For a white minority like me, it's also very false given the situation reverses completely in an area where Blacks are majority and control everything. I've always felt cursed far as societal circumstances rather than blessed by being white, male, and intellectual. Our whole childhood and then much job seeking is an uphill battle where I empathize with racial or gender minorities in other areas. And those I was in as they still existed.
So, these kinds of comments have at least four ways of causing an instant eye roll by my count. Two of which, repetitive and bias parts, aren't really caused by sexism topic so much as nature of people following sites like this on a regular basis and how we respond to certain things.
I've considered and thoroughly rejected that idea. If you choose to see the world through the lens of privilege and group grievances, my opinion of you plummets. That kind of thinking pushes us apart instead of bringing us together.
Do you have any fucking idea how unfair it is to discriminate against people, people who might have had very difficult lives, because they were born a certain way and share gonads and pigmentation with people long dead who do things that don't fit today's social mores?
If you choose the see people as group members first and individuals second, I want nothing to do with you.
Because it equates being white with privilege when it's more about socio-economic factors.
A white Eastern European probably faced plenty of disadvantage.
A white farmer in zimbabwe probably faced plenty of disadvantage.
The ancestors of someone of Irish heritage have probably faced plenty of institutional racism but managed to overcome it.
Nice work!
How many data points per graph? Really just 1 median salary a year (20x2 data points and 1k^2 pixels :)? I would have preferred just points with straight lines over the interpolated wavy line that looks fibbed. Why not more points? Why not a heat map/2d histogram instead of medians? And why not have the same axis on all the graphs?
Looks pretty compelling based on the graphs at the bottom. Seems like OP could lead with those or at least make a percentage right up at the top for those of us that need a TLDR instead of a play by play.
> At that point I made a decision to change this by enforcing a new hiring rule. Next couple of new employees are going to be women up until we balance our team
Most of us can agree that this is a bad decision, but I've always wondered how people can end up with such tunnel vision. Men in IT has always been overrepresented, so it's not surprising that the majority of teams are mostly men. But what I wonder is why this person thinks that hiring women only will change this trend? It is in fact gender discrimination, but I believe that inspiring women to work in the IT field is the key to solve the problem. I don't think anyone wants special treatment due to their gender, but rather evaluated by their skills and experiences.
> But what I wonder is why this person thinks that hiring women only will change this trend.
As someone else pointed out in another comment, many women feel better about working at a place that already has other women.
Completely tangent, but I'm surprised ops and hardware are so low.
Any idea where I can find LGBTQ wage gap too. Also, now that female glass ceiling is broken, which glass ceiling is next? L,G,B,T or Q?
Would be helpful to see some histograms. The patterns of the data seem oddly suspect to me (sinusoidal - with things like Operations in 5 year earning more than ops at 7.4ish year). Maybe I am missing something but am assuming this is just because of sample size. It seems extreme for things like Operations and Hardware Engineer though.
Now all men who were rejected can easily sue you. Solid move bro.
Data collection: A+
Analysis: needs improvement.
From the article:
> Based on the data, women are definitely undervaluing themselves in comparison to men. The gap starts around $10k/year for the first year and grows to a staggering $30k/year after 10 years of working epxeriences. [sic]
An alternative interpretation is that women are behaving entirely logically with the knowledge that their employability is maximized if they set their desired salaries lower than men with equivalent experience. Efficient markets are a thing.
I'm not saying that's my interpretation of the data, I'm just cautioning against jumping to conclusions when that conclusion is implicitly blaming the victims. It's a really great analysis and the dataset could set up a great follow-on study of causation.
The gap is large enough that the efficient market argument doesn't hold very much water. A 5k difference should be enough to favor one candidate over another all else equals. If firms are efficient they wouldn't be paying 20k extra for males.
I do think wages are really very much a bottom up thing in that people can collectively raise their wages by simply not accepting lower pay. Putting a (reasonably) high price on your head is not only good for you but for others like you in the labor market. Firms are not really in a great position to keep wages down, the best they can do is make sure nobody knows what anyone else makes.
As far as I can tell the data does not adjust for usual hours worked or overtime beyond restricting to only full time data points. Men working more hours than women is a consistent trend across pretty much the whole world.
Says who?
No, really, you're begging the question here. "Gender bias isn't a big problem among senior developers, so it can't be such a big problem."
If efficient markets are a thing, then why are companies not saving themselves $30k/year per senior dev by exclusively hiring women?
Everyone's always happy to wave their "misogyny" and "discrimination" flags around but, to me, the argument falls down the moment it implies that businesses hate women more than they love money.
Because they can't.
Explicitly choosing to hire women and pay them less is not acceptable. Not hiring someone who happens to be a woman at the same rate as an equally qualified man is completely acceptable.
And I'm not alleging explicit widespread prejudice here; I'm giving a hypothesis to explain behavior caused by implicit biases.
Your first post:
> An alternative interpretation is that women are behaving entirely logically with the knowledge that their employability is maximized if they set their desired salaries lower than men with equivalent experience.
Me: Then why are companies not saving themselves $30k/year per senior dev by exclusively hiring women?
Your second post:
> Because they can't.
Which is it? If you can choose to hire a man over a woman who's just as good, you can choose to hire a woman over a man who's just as good and much more expensive.
These aren't mutually exclusive, it's a perfectly logical situation in a game theoretic sense.
But I'm not arguing either, I'm pointing out that the data does not lead to the conclusion.
I realize you're going to get a lot of controversy on something like this but this is a great read. First and foremost, excellent work with the data gathering. Now I want to tinker with TensorFlow.
I think you drew the generally correct conclusion from this:
"But I hope that it will encourage at least some women to think more about their value for an employer and next time will negotiate a better deal for themselves."
My only problem with the conclusion is that statements like this make the assumption that women are not already thinking about their value. My family owns a business that employees almost entirely women with graduate degrees. All very sharp and want to do well in their careers but having diverse interpretations of what doing well actually means to them. Your data is probably better than any I've seen to point that out since it is based on DESIRED salaries.
Some want to advance their careers primarily and while others significantly value flexibility for sake of their families. Men tend to be more singular in focus. We want to advance our careers for sake of ourselves AND our families.
The goals naturally align with a desire to advance in large part to make it easier for our wives to take a pay cut to have more time for the kids. While there are plenty of stay at home dads and role reversals today, the norm is very much the opposite...and it's going to stay that way not because of social acceptance but because of biology...unless of course men start carrying babies for 9 months, going through childbirth, recovering from childbirth, breastfeeding and everything that involves (waking up and night, pumping, freezing milk) and the bond that naturally comes from all of that. Before repeating the process for additional children.
A lot of that stuff is hardwired. I see my wife doing all of that and realize there's only so much I can do to help...but I can try to make more money to make life a little easier.
There are a WHOLE lot of women who decide they want to stop having to work for a while after they've had kids, at least for the early years but then discover that they can't afford too. Between student loans, potentially going overboard on a mortgage from two incomes, etc NOT having a job with the new expense of a child becomes almost unimaginable to handle. There's even a book about it called The Two Income Trap.
All that's to say, don't make the mistake of thinking that people are undervaluing themselves because you don't agree with what they're asking for. You never know what they really want.
> implying being born in Slovakia is winning some sort of lottery
Yeah, unfortunately a lot of these blog posts are very US-centric. There are still plenty of people in Europe living in poverty and their white privilege somehow didn't save them.
It's interesting how these racist ideas get tossed about proudly here and in the US media.
The author was actually born in Slovakia but it seems like he got infected with white guilt when he came to the US.
"graphs generated for each occupation, representing a median (not an average!)"
But the y-axis is labeled average salary!
>If you are a female engineer living in the Bay Area, we’d love to meet you.
Totally not sexism folks. Equality at its best!