[steveklabnik]

They aren't individually created, no, but they do feed into each other.

We, socially, consider 'women's work' to be less valuable then men. Hence, positions that have a gendered connotation have a difference in salary.

Your (1) should mean that their salary is way _higher_ than programmers. Supply and demand, no? I also don't know if what you say is true.

[pessimizer]

>We, socially, consider 'women's work' to be less valuable then men.

I definitely agree with this when we're talking about teachers, nurses, librarians, etc. but I don't think web/product/UX designer is a particularly gendered role. It just looks that way because there are so few working women programmers (in comparison to their solid majority of the population) and the sex ratio for designers is more even.

We consider designers to be less valuable than programmers because there are 5 times as many of them than there are programmers.

Of course designers do something that you can't, and if programmers were common, the designers would be calling the shots. Architects do something you can't, too, and they make a lot less than you do - because there's more of them than we need.

[theorique]

I explained (1) poorly. And yeah, I do agree that they feed into each other. Companies and orgs collectively create supply and demand, and people's attitudes have impact on that.

What I meant was there are fewer designers on staff because there's a need for them, but a much lower need for designer man-hours than coder man-hours.

Your average web/software startup can be served by one or two designers while the coding team scales up to 10+ times that number. Maybe that's different in video games or other design-heavy areas but consumer and business products don't seem to have as much demand for designers.

Designers work tends to be in much more of a winner-take-all star system, where a celebrity with a track record like Johnny Ives, Karim Rashid, or Phillipe Starck can make millions, while your 'average' designer makes very little. In contrast, it's probably a flatter distribution for software engineers.