←back to thread

219 points thisisit | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.203s | source
Show context
lostmsu ◴[] No.16126641[source]
There's one important datapoint in this article: "The Bamboo Ceiling".

When the whole fuzz about gender discrimination started, Microsoft and Google published numbers, claiming women got the same pay at the same positions as men. Knowing there's discrimination from personal experience/feeling, I theorized, that women are discriminated in a different way: they don't receive promotions.

Under otherwise similar circumstances having children does not feel to be enough to explain why of 100 women hired in tech on professional roles less are promoted to higher positions, than of 100 men. That trend is (at least anecdotally for me) observable even before people become parents.

This "Bamboo Ceiling" shows the same effect for another potentially discriminated group of people.

replies(5): >>16126781 #>>16126794 #>>16127061 #>>16127979 #>>16138507 #
geofft ◴[] No.16126794[source]
This is the allegation of the Ellis, Pease, and Wisuri lawsuit against Google - that Google does okay at hiring women, but slots them into lower positions and gives them fewer promotions than men. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/14/technology/google-gender-... The NYT's report on the leaked #talkpay spreadsheet seems to show that pattern: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/google-salarie...

The neat thing about this form of discrimination is that you can claim to be fixing "the pipeline" all you want and you can still maintain the discrimination, because the leak is after the pipeline. The dominant group isn't threatened by competition if they fund efforts to increase the number of underrepresented groups in grade school or college STEM education, as long as those college graduates aren't later competing for senior jobs on a level playing field.

replies(3): >>16126943 #>>16127042 #>>16127247 #
ThrustVectoring ◴[] No.16127042[source]
Your post kind of assumes that a fair process would promote women at Google at the same rate as men. If reality is sexist, are we obligated to discriminate against men to fix it?
replies(4): >>16127199 #>>16127225 #>>16127243 #>>16127479 #
denzil_correa ◴[] No.16127199[source]
Curious - how would gender affect promotion rates?
replies(2): >>16127434 #>>16127656 #
ThrustVectoring ◴[] No.16127434[source]
Suppose men tend to work harder to get more promotions out of a fair system that rewards hard productive work. I mean, there's a reason men as a class tend to earn more money and die on the job more often than women - most of my model weight is on "men tend to be more willing to make tradeoffs in exchange for higher paychecks".
replies(1): >>16127626 #
geofft ◴[] No.16127626[source]
> men as a class tend to earn more money and die on the job more often than women

Are these correlated? My impression is that high-paying jobs tend to be low-physical-injury....

(Also, there are no shortage of barriers against women participating in high-mortality jobs - take the rules against women in combat for a particularly obvious example.)

replies(3): >>16127652 #>>16127680 #>>16128090 #
1. dragonwriter ◴[] No.16127652[source]
> Are these correlated? My impression is that high-paying jobs tend to be low-physical-injury....

Just intuitively, longer working hours (which may correlate with higher pay) and later average retirement age (which may correlate with higher paid jobs, especially with less physical demands), may contribute to greater probability of death from non-work causes, including age-related causes, happening while at work.