[walkhour]

You claim "at least partly" and then proceed to prove it with anecdotal evidence. You'd need to prove it with a study similar to the ones that send identical CVs to companies, just changing one thing, which is what they want to discover if there's bias against.

[lyaa]

I am not obliged to defend every statement I make with a study for my thoughts and experiences to be worth sharing. Also, anecdotal evidence is evidence. Not as generalizable as controlled studies but not as worthless as you seem to think.

In any case, I have done the five minutes of googling you seem to want. Biases in evaluating resumes based on gender and other such factors are not new nor unknown: here is an early study from 1986[1], 1988[2], 1999[3], 2001[4], 2007[5]. Feel free to visit google scholar and look more studies by yourself.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0022103186... [2] https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-3514.5... [3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018839203698 [4] https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0022-4... [5] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-23339-007

[Manuel_D]

Interestingly, when those resume studies are more narrowly focused on Silicon Valley tech firms women experience a significant bonus relative to men [1].

1. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Gender-and-Race-Prefer...

[walkhour]

You can sure share your thoughts, and I can share my thoughts on whether you're correct, I'm just pointing out it's not proven your personal experience proves discrimination is part of the explanation.

None of those studies support your original claim. They support the more broader claim that women are discriminated in the job market.

> Not as generalizable as controlled studies but not as worthless as you seem to think.

Sorry, a single data point, by itself, when you share it attempting to generalize, is worse than worthless, since it can be terribly misleading.

[lyaa]

Do you not see the logical link by which these more general studies contextualize and support my earlier statements?

[walkhour]

I see why you may think that way, but I don't think you're right.

I guess for you it's a given QA jobs are "inferior" to SWE jobs. I guess you believe the articles you linked proof women tend to get "inferior" jobs just because they're women? (I haven't read the articles, although I believe this to be true).

I just can't make the jump that this applies to QA jobs (granting they are "inferior"). That would imply "inferior" jobs are always overrepresented by women, and there are counterexamples to this, by almost any definition of "inferior".

[cycomanic]

So talking about generalities, there are plenty of statistics that show that women have lower paying jobs and get paid less even for the same jobs. We can argue about the reasons but the fact that they are paid less has been shown many times, so if you are disputing it you should be provide some compelling evidence.

So the the question is are QA jobs lower paid or not. That's easy to check and is a pretty good (though not perfect) indicator of status. A quick Google would have shown you that this is generally the case. Funnily enough you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".

[Manuel_D]

> So talking about generalities, there are plenty of statistics that show that women have lower paying jobs

Yes, that's not disputed by anyone serious.

> and get paid less even for the same jobs.

Also yes, but only if you don't account for hours worked and experience. A Harvard study found that after accounting for both the type of job and hours worked [1]. Google actually found women were paid more than male employees working the same job [2].

In short, the pay gap definitely exists in the sense that women's average pay check is less than the average man's. But there's not much evidence of discrimination in pay. Men make more because they work different jobs, work longer hours, and stay in their field for longer.

Also,

> you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".

One, this isn't calling QA "inferior". Compensation is not a moral judgement of work. Pointing out the fact that coding isn't a requirement explains why there's a larger potential labor pool and thus lower pay. My first job in QA was doing manual testing, following a script of things to check on canary and staging builds. I was paid $12.50 an hour. This wasn't some moral judgement about the value of this job, it's the fact that pretty much anyone could do it so there's no reason to offer more than minimum wage.

1. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bolotnyy/files/be_genderga...

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/technology/google-gender-...

[walkhour]

> We can argue about the reasons but the fact that they are paid less has been shown many times, so if you are disputing it you should be provide some compelling evidence

I state I believe this is true in one of my previous comments.

> So the the question is are QA jobs lower paid or not. That's easy to check and is a pretty good (though not perfect) indicator of status. A quick Google would have shown you that this is generally the case. Funnily enough you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".

This could be, but you need something else to prove it, otherwise lower paying jobs with different distributions than the job market distribution are always root caused in discrimination, is this your argument? There are many high paying jobs that result in a huge selection bias with respect to employees, just because many people simply don't want to put the hours. And thus discrimination is not the whole story in these cases. It may be the case in QA teams though (or part of the story), I'm simply saying it needs more research.

Nevertheless this hasn't been my point, my point is simply a single data point by itself can't be used to account for part of the explanation.

[PeterisP]

The average salaries in QA are noticeably lower than those in SWE, so those are indeed "inferior jobs" - i.e. less attractive, and pushing some group from one to the other would be discriminatory because it would underpay that group.

[walkhour]

Good, did I deny this? I'm simply asking for proof and saying what has been provided in this thread is insufficient.

By the way, lower salary doesn't mean "inferior", there are very high paying jobs, very stressful, that I wouldn't want, and work life balance is a huge component of a job.

[vijaybritto]

The onus is on the victims. Hmm, this sounds very familiar..

[walkhour]

Hmmm yes, we can't just make universal rules out of personal experiences, this sounds very familiar.

[caente]

I think anecdotal evidence is almost literally what "partly" means.

[walkhour]

Obviously not, see my other comment. Anecdotal evidence is part of the evidence, it doesn't allow you to claim part of the explanation is your anecdotal evidence.

[drewcoo]

No.

A single anecdote is sufficient to merit "at least partly."

You can say it's not generally proved. But it also wasn't a universal claim.

[walkhour]

At least partly means part of the explanation is what follows. Not that there's at least single case of what follows in the world.

Do you realize how absurd language would be if what you claim is true? For example:

- Is is true latino men are discriminated against when applying for florist positions?

- Yes, it happened once.

Literally any group would be "party discriminated" in every possible scenario according to how you define "at least partly".

[yarrel]

Every number is a number, including zero. Therefore some number of members of any given group have been discriminated against. Therefore any group is indeed discriminated against. You can't argue with objective mathematical proof.

Slightly more seriously, if someone is discriminated against for being part of a group, you don't get to appeal to the fallacy of composition applied to all groups in order to claim that there is no discrimination against that individual. Yes, yes, you're not actually writing out that argument, you're just leaving its ingredients lying around next to a naked flame.

Entirely seriously, here is your proof:

https://www.r-bloggers.com/2019/12/modeling-salary-and-gende...

Now switch to some other attempt at distraction via reducio of the actual argument.