In the details of that recent Glassdoor survey of male and female wages is an interesting little point that the Wall Street Journal has picked up on. Among computer programmers the gender pay
Mind the Gender Pay Gap: Female Computer Programmers Earn 72 Cents on the Dollar, Study Says
That looks like it's a large enough difference that we'd like to do something about it, doesn't it? The obvious question though is, well, what do we do about it? Because as ever with these sorts of gross numbers this isn't a very good guide to policy. For:
Computer programmers, some of the oldest workers in the tech industry, have the largest gender pay gap compared to all other professions across all industries, according to a new study.
Women who write the software that runs on mainframe computers earn on average 72 cents per dollar earned by their male counterparts, according to research conducted by Glassdoor Inc., the online job information firm. That pay gap exists even after controlling for age, education, experience, job title, employer and location.
Yes, but, is that some point that is specific to the mainframe computing, or even the computing, industry in general? Or is that a reflection of something more societal?
However, not all tech jobs pay men and women so differently. Among mobile developers, there is just a 2.9% gap between the average salaries for men and women after adjusting for age, experience and other factors. For software engineers, men on average make 6% more than their female colleagues.
And:
Part of these narrower pay gaps can be explained by age. Jobs that employ younger workers have smaller gender pay gaps, which increase the longer people are in the workforce. Software engineers and mobile developers, meanwhile, are more likely to be younger workers, Mr. Chamberlain said.
To emphasise this, the gender pay gap in workers under 30 is either non-existent or, in the big cities, in favour of women. But we know that the same gap overall is that 76 or
So, a reasonable thought is that what we're actually seeing here is just the reflection of the general, society wide and by age cohort, gender pay gap rather than anything specific to the computer industry. Other industries tend not to be quite so age stratified in their different fields: there are young and old lawyers, young and old accountants, but older programmers tend to be over there with the mainframes, younger over here with mobile. If we do have an age related (and we do, and yes everyone does indeed agree that at least part of it is related to motherhood and child care) gender pay gap then this is exactly how we would expect the results to look in this particular industry.
This isn't, therefore, at least prima facie, evidence of any greater discrimination in the computing industry than anywhere else.
But we can in fact go further than this. The Nobel Laureate Gary Becker pointed out that discrimination on taste grounds is costly to the discriminator. By rejecting qualified people on the grounds of gender, race, religion, whatever, they fail to avail themselves of the available talent. By restricting the job opportunities of those discriminated against those talents are also cheaper to others. And thus those others can make greater profits by hiring those discriminated against. This isn't just a theory either: we have proof from this very field of mainframe programming. There was very much discrimination against women, most especially those married and with children, back a number of decades. At which point someone took advantage of that price differential:
Fighting paid off: Dame Stephanie, or Steve to those closest to her, went on to create a multibillion-pound IT software consultancy, the F1 Group, from which she made a £150m fortune.
...
That was 1962 and she was 29. The company was Freelance Programmers and, mainly because of the workplace misogyny she had faced, she employed only women software specialists, and, even more shocking for the time, women working from home. It was serious stuff: her team programmed Concorde's black box flight recorder, among other projects.
More details here. The interesting thing about this is that, as Becker surmised and Dame Stephanie proved, if there is taste discrimination going on then there's a profit opportunity. A statement which is just as true the other way around: if you don't think there's a profit opportunity in deliberately and specifically hiring those underpaid female mainframe programmers then you don't think there is that taste discrimination going on. Meaning that the pay gap we're seeing is coming from those wider societal influences of the choices that are made about children and their care and raising perhaps.
There are still things that can be done about this at the margins. My native UK now has shared parental leave as a result of my convincing a politician or two that this was the cause rather than it being employer discrimination. That would and will help over time. So would the more general idea of more men becoming the primary care providers to their children. But if this is the cause (and I certainly think it is) then the general policies argued for in public aren't going to help. Paycheck fairness acts and so on will only aid if it is employer discrimination. If the cause is the choices people make about their own children then such laws will make not one iota of difference.
As ever with public policy it's not enough for us to note that there's something about the world that we don't like. We've got to work out why that thing we do not like is happening. And only if we get that identification correct can we craft policies to amend the situation. If the gender pay gap exists because, by and large and in general, women prefer to be the primary care givers for their children then perhaps that's something we need to do something about and perhaps it isn't. But even if we decide we must change this, the correct policies will be very different from if we decide that the cause is employers discriminating against their female employees. Thus we do need to find out why this is happening rather than just plunging into the passing of laws before we have done so.
