| These types of articles seem to always get the same mixture of responses. The biggest problem that I see is that everyone starts with completely different sets of assumptions and they are almost never up front about them. The lack of cited sources in articles like these leads people to bolster or criticize particular studies that they have read or heard about, usually without referencing those. Many of these studies are either flawed or contain assumptions that some people don't agree with, so this ends up going nowhere also. Are there any really good studies on this topic that we may discuss as a common point of reference? Once that take into account all the facts, and don't start with assumptions like the following: 1. There should be equal numbers of men and women in tech (or there is some other ratio that is preferred or correct).
2. Women and men in tech should - on average - be paid the same. Some people have these assumptions as part of their personal belief systems, but they entail a whole bunch of other assumptions that are not prima facie true. One other huge weakness in these kinds of studies is that they measure the things that are easy to measure; things like education and experience. If companies are hiring compensating employees rationally, they would use these only as heuristics, and have some measure of how much an individual employee would contribute to the company as the determining factor. Measuring job skill, as well as all the other skills that go into being a good employee is really hard, but until a study tries to actually do this, they are coming up with conclusions that aren't at all useful in the real world. |