Mind the Gender Pay Gap: Female Computer Programmers Earn 72 Cents on the Dollar, Study Says

What a mess of bovine scatology.  As many others have noted, if employers could reduce employment costs by 25% simply by hiring women . . . enough said . . .

Its so politically incorrect to state this, but I have grown pretty tired of all the "super mom" types demanding equal pay but at the same time assuming the rest of their team members will schedule their personal lives around little Billy's soccer practice, or hold meetings early or late, or on weekends to make accommodation for the "equal" person.  Those type of things do not show up in metrics any "social justice" champion will ever report on but it is at the basis of the problem and the reality of the situation.

"Women who write the software that runs on mainframe computers "

yes both of the women who do mainframe development probably make less than the chain smoking 60+ year old males left that dominate that ancient technology(everyone else moved on with the client/server revolution in the late 80s).   I would imagine if you wanted to try to track down a part of tech to find a wage gap it would be in the stagnant cobweb ridden world of mainframes.

I can see the need by the left to change the American IT industry.....its arguably one of the only things we still lead the world....so naturally LETS CHANGE IT!

I never post, but, goodness, this foolishness gets so tiring. Thomas Sowell, America's greatest living intellectual (an economist by training), screwers this nonsense here (in five short minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_sGn6PdmIo

"Tech companies are just starting to release data about how much they pay their workers. Amazon.com, under pressure from a shareholder, said on Tuesday it found women and men earn essentially the same in its U.S. workforce. Apple and Intel have said they found little-to-no compensation discrepancies among their U.S. workers."

Microsoft is conspicuously absent among the self reporters.  

First of all, that "study" says nothing about software engineers or programmers.

You even contradict yourself with the following phrase: "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."

Secondly, the study even says "Going further, when we compare workers with the same job title, employer and location, the U.S. gender pay gap is about 5.4 percent." A far cry from the 72 cents figure in the title.

This article is bad, and the author should feel ashamed of their poor journalism.

In fact, not sure she even read the blog post.

Discrimination based on sex, religion, race or sexual orientation is both illegal and economically unwise, as it puts the company at a competitive disadvantage.  Pay differences between men and women does not mean there is discrimination.  Even the White house noted that men make more on average than women.  Do we want to suggest that Obama or his staff is committing discrimination?

If there discrimination exists, it should be prosecuted.  But averages like those mentioned in this article are meaningless at best and misleading at worst.  Do we want to suggest discrimination against young people because teenagers make 50% of what 20 year olds make.  Life choices, differences in competency and length of service affect compensation.  Let's stop suggesting illegal actions unless we can point to what we are seeing that is illegal.

If the female programmers were truly paid less relative to their contributions, the free market capitalism would have forced companies to hire more female programmers (as they did with H1B visas).  

In reality, there are far fewer female programmers and far more H1B programmer in most companies.  This would only lead to that, even at 72 cents on the dollar, female programmers are still over paid on average.

Most software engineers do not care about genders, as long as they can get the jobs done. Even within the same job titles, such as Sr. Software Engineer, the productivity of individuals (regardless male, female or H1B programmers) vary sometimes up to 3x or 10x. So simple HR statistics is very misleading, as Mark Twins once said "Lies, damned lies, and statistics."

I wonder what would happen if you compared wages of women who didn't have children to men, instead of all woman. The wage gap thing never made sense to me. 

I own a small service company and 4 years ago I hired a 25ish woman. She was energetic and enthusiastic. I gave her several raises in a short time. She worked hard and pushed herself to learn our systems. 

Then two years ago I got the I'm pregnant speech. I had to find a temporary replacement, for a job that takes a year to learn, tell that person that this is a short term job that will probably last about three months. After three months I was told I'm not quite ready to come back. After 5 months she came back. This is not the same person I hired. She is not as dependable as she used to be, often comes in after only sleeping 1/2 the night and is unfocused. It has been 2 years, of her 4, that she has not increased her skills. I believe that she had not had a baby she would be much more valuable to us.