[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.