Chinese Workers Abandon Silicon Valley for Riches Back Home

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.

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.

The higher number of men in senior positions isn't necessarily sexist. I think it's because men are more likely to accept insane work-life balance in exchange for the status, because it increases their attractiveness more than it does for women. A women who is a CEO is not much more attractive to a man than a women who is a dental hygienist; however, a man who is a CEO is much more attractive than a man who is a welder. Take it as sexism or not but lots of men are hellbent on getting that high-status, high-stress job.

None of this establishes that there aren't other reasons for wanting a high-paying job besides attractiveness (e.g., not wanting to be dependent on finding a spouse with a high-paying job).

Also, this would imply that gay (non-bi) or asexual men, who are not seeking women as partners, would be found in high-status/high-pay positions at rates more comparable to (all) women than to straight men. This seems like a pretty straightforward hypothesis - do we have the data to test it?

True, there are probably many other factors. For some we have the data.

All of them more credible than „theres a giant conspiracy against women“.