[feminist17]

> Companies pay some employees more for pretty good reasons.

I think you give companies too much credit. Those pretty good reasons are typically that that's how much they asked, it wasn't unreasonable, and they passed the interviews.

People's salaries are all over the map for the same sorts of positions, and it's not just IT and development.

But, even though it might not be a clearcut answer to whether there is discrimination or bias in salaries, it should be explored. Even data with a wide, overlapping range doesn't mean that the mean and median can't be compared and valid conclusions drawn about probable bias.

Google seems to take bias seriously, and I think if it could be proven with adequate certainty that salaries were affected by the sex of the employee alone, they'd do something about it.

[stretchwithme]

I tend to think that successful companies tend to know what they are doing better than observers.

[ajross]

But the problem is "know what they are doing" can still be unfair. Consider: you're staffing up a company and need folks now. You've found two candidates who seem equally qualified and want to hire them. Both are asking for only a modest raise over their current salaries, but one happens to make 50% more than the other due to arbitrary reasons[1] having nothing to do with qualifications.

What do you do? Realistically you give them both what they ask and pay them unfairly. Congratulations, you're now part of the problem.

[1] Yeah, one is a dude.

[TeMPOraL]

And if we change [1] to "Yeah, one is a gal", then I'd expect a lot of pro-diversity people suddenly stop complaining that there's a problem.

Ultimately, the only alternative is to pay people equally. Which won't fly generally, as companies always want to pay the minimum amount that can keep the employee from leaving.

[spaceseaman]

> I'd expect a lot of pro-diversity people suddenly stop complaining that there's a problem.

The fun thing about making a straw-man is you make yourself immune from criticism. I can't attack this point without having to completely define someone who is "pro-diversity" (what's that even mean?), and give evidence that no one in that group has the traits you claim of ("look at this feminist, see I was right!").

More importantly, what's even your point if this straw-man were true? I could just as easily say this about anything.

"Oh your life is shitty? Well I bet you wouldn't complain if things were working out well." It's an interesting case of vacuous truth!

The argument is to make things better for the people who have it worse at the moment, correcting for previous inertia. In this case, the inertia is that men were previously paid more or gained an initial advantage that allowed them to be paid more, and then that advantage has percolated across their various positions until the difference becomes more stark all because as you say "companies always want to pay the minimum amount that can keep the employee from leaving". If that's the case, then if companies could pay women less for the same work, why wouldn't they? Similar arguments apply to affirmative action and similar programs. That's the argument at least, whether I agree with it is an entirely different question.

What irks me is you dismissing the argument with your little straw-man and moving on to "the only alternative". You completely disregarded the points of everyone opposite the aisle of you in the most condescending way.

[TeMPOraL]

> The fun thing about making a straw-man is you make yourself immune from criticism.

I don't. You just criticized me at length :). Some of it I could even agree with :).

My point is, the current narration coming from "opposite the aisle of me" is, on the one hand, "gender discrimination is bad", and on the other hand, "we need more discrimination to correct for existing one". Even if we leave out that I don't think there's that much discrimination happening as feminists would want you to believe (in fact, I think they're just reinterpreting everything in terms of gender, whether it is actually related or not) - still, you can't have it both ways.

I'm just against hypocrisy, especially this extreme. When someone admits that they are advocating literal sexism as a corrective action (hopefully temporary), I'll accept that (even though I don't agree it's needed). What irks me is condemning sexism when it goes in one direction, while at the same time advocating sexism in the other direction.

[spaceseaman]

> we need more discrimination to correct for existing one

I like the following analogy. Your body has cancer. The cancer is bad, and you don't want it. Obviously killing your own cells is also a bad thing, but you choose chemotherapy because it's the best way to get rid of your cancer.

How do you quickly get rid of the cancer that is discrimination?

...

I know you're itching to say, "Make everything equal!". But hold on, how do you do that? Can you ever do that? In my opinion, the answer is no.

First let's suppose we do it through regulation. The logistics involved in such a thing would be astronomical and more importantly would involve massive governmental regulation of basically all employment.

The other option is that we deregulate everything and just let the free market handle it all - wait it out till all the racists and sexists are dead! It's so easy. But that doesn't work either - humans tend to cargo cult. We haven't had slavery in this country for a long time, yet the effects of it are widespread and evident everywhere you go here. It's in the way people talk, the movies they watch, and the music they listen to (or don't listen to). You can't just shut off the lights, pretend none of that bad stuff ever happened and move on. People still walk and talk with that knowledge in their head.

More or less, we can't easily eliminate discrimination without drastic actions, and it definitely can't be done immediately. One of these drastic actions is to counteract the discrimination. In other words our chemo.

In my view, this is fine morally and not really hypocritical. It's also one of the things that's less difficult to actually implement in practice. Let me spin just one more analogy to illustrate:

Say a dude beats your face in at a bar. Completely wrecks you. Puts you in the hospital. The whole thing. Three years later you've finally regained your ability to walk. It still hurts every once in awhile but here you are. So you go back to that bar, and that guy is still there. He's gotten a lot weaker, doesn't have as many friends, but he's still there. Then he tries to mess with you again, so you punch him in the face and move on.

Are you a hypocrite if you think he shouldn't have beaten you to a pulp even though you punched him later on?

The point is that the thing we're counteracting with policies like this is so astronomically bad ("Black people are more suited to physical labor" "Women can only handle childbirth" "Women can't vote") that the policies that correct them ("favoring some black kids with equivalent records as the white ones because in theory they might have had a harder life" "favoring a woman for a position because she might have had a harder time getting there and you want to encourage more women") aren't nearly as bad in comparison.

Sure if you take the "any decision based on [race/sex/religion] is bad and always bad" then yeah, I guess it would be hypocrisy. But I'm not sure I believe that myself. Until we actually hit that mythical day of equality, we're always gonna have imbalances like that. In my eyes, it's better to try and correct them (while not actively hurting anyone of course - there's a big difference between Johnny getting into Yale but not Harvard and sending Johnny to a work camp for the summer).

These are of course debatable points. Any one could be argued about through an entire undergraduate course, but they're still arguments. I highly recommend you become more familiar with the points you are debating and the merits / downfalls of those arguments. It's much more productive than creating straw-men to argue against.

bell hooks' books on feminism are especially good for someone new to the field and interested in such topics.

[Chris2048]

> What irks me is you dismissing the argument with your little straw-man and moving on to "the only alternative". You completely disregarded the points of everyone opposite the aisle of you in the most condescending way.

"little" straw man is also condescending.

Plus, a straw man is "an intentionally misrepresented proposition" - not only can we not conclude what OPs intention was, but also it's not clear to me that it is a misrepresentation of the original comment.

[ajross]

> And if we change [1] to "Yeah, one is a gal", then I'd expect a lot of pro-diversity people suddenly stop complaining that there's a problem.

Find me someone (anyone, anywhere) who defends (even in the abstract!) a situation where women are paid more than men for the same work. That's a horrific strawman, and it tells me that you're looking at this as a war (with feminists as your "enemies" I guess) instead of a problem.

And no, you don't have to pay people equally. You have to pay them fairly. If there differences between individuals, that's fine. If there are systemic differences between easily classified groups of individuals, that's discrimination.

[kamaal]

>>I'd expect a lot of pro-diversity people suddenly stop complaining that there's a problem.

Isn't that their very argument?

Their point is a few need to be paid more even if they don't work for it, to make up for what is lost.

They are asking for inequality by very argument. Equality by their definition would be injustice to them.