[mrweasel]

Sadly "equal pay" means whatever you want it to mean.

At some point the nurses union in Denmark argued that their education was roughly the same length as that of an engineer, so they should be paid the same on that basic. Completely ignoring that engineers spend five years at the university vs. the 3.5 years for nursing school and that engineers are pay wildly different salaries bases on their field of work.

In my mind, equal pay is for people doing the exact same job, and the exact same number of hours, but that just my interpretation. Many will use the equal pay term to advocate for a pay rise, because they feel that their line of work is underpaid.

If someone believe that they should be better compensated, just say that, don't hide it behind "equal pay". One issue of cause it that people don't understand economy, it not necessarily about the hours you work, the responsibility you have, but about the profit you generate for your employer.

[hvidgaard]

If we for a while ignore the difference in education length, general education level, and requirements to even enroll. Then a nurse in Denmark is traditionally employed by the state, with a near guarantee of employment for the rest of life. An engineer do not get the same, and that alone is worth quite a bit in pay to many people.

[apercu]

> In my mind, equal pay is for people doing the exact same job, and the exact same number of hours, but that just my interpretation.

I find that hard to quantify in many professional settings. Say Sally and Tim are both project managers. They have basically the same education and experience levels. But Sally has more tact and is more organized. So she gets all the complicated and risky projects. Should Tim and Sally make the same? I'd argue, no.

[hermitdev]

> In my mind, equal pay is for people doing the exact same job, and the exact same number of hours, but that just my interpretation. Many will use the equal pay term to advocate for a pay rise, because they feel that their line of work is underpaid.

I'm with you here, but I think you also missed another point: at the same level of productivity. Equal hours at work doesn't mean equal productivity.

[bluGill]

In fact equal hours is not a factor. If one person works 4 hours and gets as much done as another person working 40 hours they are wroth the same.

[jonny_eh]

> the profit you generate your employer

Ideally maybe, but it's just market forces. How much does an employer want you and how hard are you to get and retain?

[FranzFerdiNaN]

plenty of jobs generate no profit, or only indirectly. How are you going to measure the profit a secretary generates? Or a cleaner?

[crusso]

Compensating support-role positions is hardly a new problem for businesses.

They slice and dice budgets in many different ways to ensure that the overall business can maximize profits/productivity.

[logfromblammo]

Not having much of a head for business, I think I'd try to estimate the amount of non-revenue time they save the directly-measurable employees. You count the time they save those employees as their revenue. You pay everyone about 1/4 to 1/3 of their revenues.

So if the contract specifies that the company gets paid $200/hr for developer labor up to 40 hr/week, you pay the developers $50/hr to $67/hr by the rule of thumb. If there were no support staff, they would each have to spend 2 hours a week on personnel management, which couldn't be billed to the contract. So an HR employee could support 25 other employees, since they can do the same work in 90 minutes (and still have to do the personnel management for themselves). Cleaning saves the specialists 30 minutes a week, so each supporting up to 119 other employees, since they can do the same work in 20 minutes (and still have to clean their own workspace). A manager saves each developer 8 hours a week, but can handle 10 developers (or 5 managers), since they can do that management work in half the time (and someone else manages them). The CEO is an otherwise uncounted manager of managers, paid out of the owner's share, so the first 5 managers don't require an additional manager to manage them.

You add as many support employees as are necessary to ensure that the employees directly measurable as making money spend all their working hours on making money, instead of something else. They get paid out of the fraction you didn't already pay to the revenue employee, and then the owners take what's left over. The closer you get to optimal productivity, the more calculations you have to do to get even better.

This would all go into a very complicated spreadsheet that changes the numbers based on how many direct-revenue employees there are, and how much support staff. Then I'd add a fudge factor so that if a measurable employee quits, nobody gets an automatic pay cut. This requires a lot of speculative hiring and firing in different categories. Everyone has to be paid according to the maximum they could be paid, if there were one more of them.

In this hypothetical, 20 developers have 2 managers, 1 HR, and 1 cleaner. Weekly revenue is $160k. Developers get $53333 of that, for $2667 each at $67/hr. Managers could get up to $10667 of that, for $5333 each at $133/hr. The HR person can get up to $2667, for $67/hr. The cleaner gets up to $667, for $17/hr. But the managers are operating at capacity, one more developer would require one more manager, for 3 managers over 21 developers, maxing out at $93/hr. So you target that instead. The same speculative calculation for the HR person means that one more developer adds one more manager, which puts the only HR employee at their workload limit of 26 (21+3+1+1). One more developer would require one more HR (22+3+2+1), which maxes out at $37/hr, so that's what you pay the one you have. You wouldn't need another cleaner until 102 developers (102+13+5+2), which would be as much as $43/hr. You never see cleaners paid that much, though, because cleaners have more competition as less-skilled labor, and they never hit the maximum any given company could afford to pay them. So you end up with payroll of about $63k/week, leaving $97k/week to pay the building lease, utilities, depreciation, taxes, etc. with the remainder to the owners.

[koonsolo]

> One issue of cause it that people don't understand economy, it not necessarily about the hours you work, the responsibility you have, but about the profit you generate for your employer.

I have a more simple view on this: the job market is just like any other market, with supply and demand. Those are the factors that will determine the price.

[fwdpropaganda]

> Sadly "equal pay" means whatever you want it to mean.

Exactly this. At a fundamental level every individual has an infinite number of "dimensions" (in ML parlance) associated with him, and "equal pay" people or groups will try and convince you that expected pay should be the same over a certain subset of dimensions while ignoring all the others. Invariably they will pick the most beneficial to that particular person or influence group. They will give you arguments from moral, while forgetting to mention that like in any midly complex problem, data bias and confounding variables are of paramount importance.

So "equal pay" means whatever you want it to mean because try and you may, you will never have a model with the full infinite set of dimensions that the real world has. Having to pick you pick the ones you want, a choice that others will attack.

[jwfxpr]

You cannot dismiss rigorous statistical analysis by arguing it can never encompass the full dimensions of the data. Of course it can't. The map is not the territory; it is a useful way to find our way around it. Ignoring the map is perilous, if not arrogant, even though it is merely a flawed representation of the real truth.

You might argue that a specific study or meta-analysis contains a bias or misinterpretation, but only if you've actually examined their methodology, data, and reasoning. You cannot argue that all studies of complex topics are invalid simply because their topics are complex.

[tomp]

> You cannot dismiss rigorous statistical analysis by arguing it can never encompass the full dimensions of the data.

This simply means it's not rigorous. See Omitted-variable bias - from [1]: The bias results in the model attributing the effect of the missing variables to the estimated effects of the included variables. For example, including gender but not education or hours worked will result in attributing pay differences to gender, but including all relevant variables shows that's gender is irrelevant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omitted-variable_bias

[dwaltrip]

You entirely missed the point. We can never include every single relevant variable to perfectly explain the observation. It's impossible.

This doesn't mean statistics is useless.

This is the meaning of the phrase "the map is not the territory". All models are flawed, but some are useful.

[mseebach]

No, statistics aren't useless, but its usefulness cuts both ways: if you can add one or two relevant variables and almost entirely remove the observation, then statistics tells you that the observation was only there due to omitted-variable bias.

[dwaltrip]

Sure, that's fine. That's part of using statistics to the best of our ability.

[fwdpropaganda]

I think there's some middle ground between saying that the analysis is rigorous and saying it's useless, no?

[dwaltrip]

Indeed. But that's where all the hard work is -- trying to determine how rigorous something is, knowing it certainly isn't perfectly rigorous.

[PurpleBoxDragon]

>You cannot argue that all studies of complex topics are invalid simply because their topics are complex.

If you take a random sample of studies you can make a statistical analysis. You don't need to examine every cow to make an argument that there are no pink cows, but you do need to do a random sample. And that's if you only want to meet the highest standards of evidence. Much lower standards can be far easier to meet.

[fwdpropaganda]

> If you take a random sample of studies you can make a statistical analysis. You don't need to examine every cow to make an argument that there are no pink cows, but you do need to do a random sample. And that's if you only want to meet the highest standards of evidence. Much lower standards can be far easier to meet.

Your comparison of this problem with pink cows shows that you haven't given it two seconds thought. Estimating the number of pink cows in the world is a very simple problem. Determining pay gap is a very very complex problem that starts with defining what the question really is and associated fights between different interest groups which might prefer one or another definition, then goes on to the (social, privacy, and rights) problem of obtaining the data, and moving on into with the data analysis itself which is just hellish if you want to have any semblance of rigour, and finally policy take aways from the analysis which hinges crucially on how you defined the question initially.

Stop adding to the noise please.

[PurpleBoxDragon]

>Estimating the number of pink cows in the world is a very simple problem.

If by 'estimating' you mean a scientific study that tries to answer the question, then it isn't simple at all. First we need a rigorous definition of pink cows. If I dye my cow pink, does that count? What if other people don't agree with my definition? A pig whose skin is pink is considered pink, so should I only rely on hair color? And what counts as pink? Are we only going with stereotypical hot pink? There is a red cow, but it is a really brownish red. Would a brownish pink be enough to qualify as a pink cow?

So once we solved all those problems, we need to come up with a methodology, and it likely won't be the same everywhere. We could make the problem a lot simpler by reducing our search space to say, only cows on ranches in the state of Montana. But to do a global sampling isn't easy.

>associated fights between different interest groups which might prefer one or another definition

To my knowledge (and with no peer reviewed research to back up my view), there is no groups who have a political stake in what counts as a pink cow. So for that reason it is simpler because there aren't political complications.

But you seem to be confusing something. You appear to be talking about studying wage gap. I was talking about studying studies of wage gaps.

So for my plan, it would work like this:

Taking all the studies of wage gap in the last n years, pick x at random. For each of these, determine if each one does or does not account for some factor that impacts pay regardless of gender (say height of employee). You can then compute what percentage of studies took this factor into account.

Then you repeat this with a few other factors, each time repicking the studies investigated. From those percentages, you can determine how often your selection of factors are taken into account, and from that you might be able to make the argument that the data is biased enough to not be usable.

[dominotw]

Isn't that why we have 'replication crisis' in fields that 'can never encompass the full dimensions of the data'

Doesn't replication crisis prove 'that all studies of complex topics are invalid simply because their topics are complex.'

[boomboomsubban]

Science as a whole has developed knowing that it is impossible to encompass the full dimensions of the data, the goal is to find the best explanation given the available evidence.

The replication crisis is a result of the misuse or misunderstanding of the statistics, and the current nature of journals.

[stdbrouw]

A heuristic in which you refuse to undertake any action without complete information of perfect reliability is always biased towards the status quo. Heck, it's straight from the CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual. So in the guise of "first needing to understand the complexities of the problem", you are rationalizing away the preponderance of evidence which shows that, yep, any way you cut it, there's a gender wage gap.

[fwdpropaganda]

> A heuristic in which you refuse to undertake any action without complete information of perfect reliability is always biased towards the status quo.

I agree with that phrase, and I acknowledge that it's a problem, but you're jumping into conclusions about what I was trying to say. I wasn't trying to say "we don't have complete information, so we should do nothing." Read on:

> you are rationalizing away the preponderance of evidence which shows that, yep, any way you cut it, there's a gender wage gap.

No, that's is precisely my point. It is NOT true that any way you cut it there's a gender gap. If you let me cut it how I want it I can have the gap be anything I want by carefully (as an example) picking which of the omitted variables I adjust for sampling bias and which ones I don't[0]. That is what I was trying to say.

[0] And lets not talk about confounding variables, that problem is at least an order of magnitud harder even than sampling/population bias.

[ada1981]

In case anyone needs a PDF of the CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual

https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/...

[kristianc]

> Exactly this. At a fundamental level every individual has an infinite number of "dimensions" (in ML parlance) associated with him, and "equal pay" people or groups will try and convince you that expected pay should be the same over a certain subset of dimensions while ignoring all the others.

Surely the right response to a study which challenges your existing worldview would be "Hmm, that's interesting - I wonder what is driving that?" rather than "The equal pay people or groups will always try to convince you..."

[mseebach]

It seems that GP did that, and learned that these studies ignore inconvenient factors.

[mcny]

What we should mandate is transparency. We all think we are expert negotiators but we are all idiots. We will all be better off if all salary and all compensation information is public and easily accessible. Sadly, a lot of people think they have something to lose and will never support it.

[crusso]

It would be an interesting experiment. Has it been done before? That could lead to some unpleasant things:

    * A lot of unavoidable angst as people of less worth to the business are proven to be paid less in no uncertain terms.
    * More internal strife as people jockey for identifiable rank within the organization based upon their salaries.  "Why is Sue paid $10k more than I am?  Sue wasn't at her desk all week last week while I was here busting my butt."
    * Eventually, many managers and organizations would just sidestep the battle by paying everyone the same thing based upon easy-to-identify metrics like seniority.  As a result, the people with more value to the business will find jobs at companies that pay them according to a better measure of their bottom-line worth.  With no one left but the lowest-common-denominator employees, the company flounders and fails.

[majormajor]

> Eventually, many managers and organizations would just sidestep the battle by paying everyone the same thing based upon easy-to-identify metrics like seniority. As a result, the people with more value to the business will find jobs at companies that pay them according to a better measure of their bottom-line worth. With no one left but the lowest-common-denominator employees, the company flounders and fails.

In most fields, there are already companies which pay wildly different amounts for the same jobs, so the people contributing more in those similar roles are already highly incentivized to leave for higher-paying pastures.

[fyi1183]

In certain Nordic countries (Sweden at least, I believe), all tax data is public. By extension, everybody's income is public as well. It doesn't seem to be an issue.

[dingo_bat]

I don't want my salary to be transparent. There is something called privacy. My salary is a private matter. I really don't believe I'm any kind of expert in negotiation.

[oblio]

His point is that your need for privacy is preventing group wins. You want to avoid a bit of shame or envy but by making this decision we, as employees, lose a lot of our leverage.

You wouldn’t have to negotiate a better salary if it would be obvious that you are underpaid.

[jabot]

> I really don't believe I'm any kind of expert in negotiation.

That means that transparency works _for_ you, not against you.

[everyone]

Why? What benefit does that entail? Is is greater than the benefits of transparency?

[LanceH]

But the bar -- as established by the 77% number -- is that a difference in pay is sexism.

[mistermann]

> Exactly this. At a fundamental level every individual has an infinite number of "dimensions" (in ML parlance) associated with him

And of course, this applies not just to people but to most complex entities or ideas. The problem is, when dealing with humans, even intelligent ones, good luck getting them accept this approach when it interferes with their political/emotional/fiscal beliefs or desires. For reference, see recent discussions here on topics like trade tariffs.

[fouc]

We can use bayesian inference here to update the probability of equal pay as more dimensions are added.

[JoeAltmaier]

Easy for 'mrweasel' to say, safely working as a man without bias to hinder him? Let's just ignore systemic bias in gender pay because, well, it may not be cut-and-dried so just forget about it? I sense some bias.

[door3]

Women are paid less not because their jobs are worth less, but because employers can get away with paying them leas. There are values other than market value. Society needs both nurses and engineers. Women and men should be equal not just in opportunity, but in outcome (ie, economic power).

In addition, women are usually the primary caregiver and disproportionately spend more time doing domestic labour (raising children, taking care of the home) which they are not compensated financially for. Women (or whomever is the primary caregiver in a family or does more domestic labor at home) should be paid more for fewer hours in the workplace.

[dang]

You've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not what this site is for, and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which ideology they favor. This is in the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). If you would read them and use HN as intended, we'd appreciate it.

More explanation, for anyone who wants it, is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16402648, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16185062, and plenty more at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

[jabot]

> Society needs both nurses and engineers.

Yes. And if more people want to become engineers, and if becoming an engineer is easier, then engineers will end up getting less money than nurses.

I mean... the more fun a job is, the more people will want to do it despite getting little money, right?

> In addition, women are usually the primary caregiver and disproportionately spend more time doing domestic labour (raising children, taking care of the home) which they are not compensated financially for.

I recall reading some statistics that (in germany) 80% of domestic spending is done by women. Seems about right.

> Women should be paid more for fewer hours in the workplace.

Uh. That's outright discrimination there. Either against men or against childless people.

[hackerman12345]

A good manager is expected to give an easier schedule to someone who is caring for a sick family member, why would it be horrible to give an easier schedule to someone who has to spend a lot of time taking care of a new baby?

Biology has already discriminated and made her life hard, should we make it worse? Should we make having children as difficult as possible for our fellow citizens?

Paternal leave is important too.

[Gerardo1]

"Women (or whomever is the primary caregiver in a family or does more domestic labor at home) should be paid more for fewer hours in the workplace."

I think you have to work a bit more to support that assertion. I'm not opposed to the idea of some kind of compensation for home-makers, but putting that on employers seems backwards. Why should that not be a form of social support?

[door3]

I’m speaking on the level of principle, not implementation. There are a variety of ways you could implement this, but I think that is a secondary question to the basic principle that donestic labor exists, is socially necessary, and is, unjustly, not compensated financially. Most people in this debate, even left-leaning people, don’t acknowledge that.

[fjsolwmv]

If a homemaker is married, they are compensated by their partner (including alimony and child support after divorce). If a homemaker is single, they receive charity from government.

[door3]

Some, but not enough. Men and women should be absolutely equal in terms of economic power, they currently are not.

[erkkie]

That's a strong statement with zero backing. Who else should be equal?

This experiment has been tried and it failed miserably, read up on the Soviet Union.

[burntwater]

"Women (or whomever is the primary caregiver in a family or does more domestic labor at home) should be paid more for fewer hours in the workplace."

Why should anyone be compensated anything for routine life-management work? What you're asking is akin to saying everyone should be paid to sleep. Sleeping, bathing, eating, maintaining the home -- these are all parts of functioning as a human. Taking care of children is a function of having chosen to have offspring - I would say it's a voluntary hobby, even.

[Frondo]

As a proponent of a universal basic income, I would agree that yes, you should also be paid for sleep.

[burntwater]

And under a plan where EVERYONE equally receives that UBI, I can see how you can say it's "being paid to sleep."

Under a plan where people are being paid unequal amounts simply for being alive, that's where it's wrong.

[door3]

Raising a child is not just "being alive". It requires a tremendous amount of uncompensated labor.

[door3]

Because unless you’re an antinatalist, some people having children is socially necessary. If the next generation had no children, society would collapse. Also, many women have unplanned pregnancies.

[Mononokay]

> Because unless you’re an antinatalist, some people having children is socially necessary. If the next generation had no children, society would collapse. Also, many women have unplanned pregnancies.

And that's the fault of the employer . . . how? If they have a child, it shouldn't be subsidized by their employer. Everyone in the West could abstain from having children for three generations and immigrants would make up the numbers - there's no need for most people to have children.

[burntwater]

Society would shrink, it would not collapse.

Pregnancy is a natural consequence of sex. There's no such thing as a truly unexpected pregnancy. Undesired and unplanned perhaps, but not unexpected. In the event it does happen, there are options for either continuing or ending the pregnancy, I still see no reason why anyone should be compensated for voluntarily choosing to continue the pregnancy.

[door3]

I guess "people that aren't rich have the right to comfortably raise a family" is an axiom that I had that I didn't really expect to have to defend.

[olavk]

If women had to be paid more for the same job, it would be irrational for any business to hire women.

[Reedx]

Likewise, if businesses could hire women for an N% discount on labor costs, they would hire only women.

[door3]

There’s a lot of things that are irrational to an employer, ie providing health insurance or limiting the hours their employees work. Fortunately labor laws exist and are enforced. And just to emphasize, I said the primary caregiver, who is usually but not slways a woman.

[fjsolwmv]

Employer provided healthcare is insane and is leftover from ecomic-distorting policies of WWII.

[door3]

Well yea, healthcare should be a right of all people and not contingent upon employment but that wasn’t really my point

[sudoke]

Healthcare requires the time and resources of healthcare professionals, and no one has the RIGHT to the time or resources of other people. We abolished slavery in this country, I'm sick of people like you arguing to bring it back.