The plight of the Kagatob

[GradnerLives]

Originally Posted by KagatobLuvsAnimu [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

So you are campaigning for STEM fields, good. Would you like to campaign for more women to join manufacturing/construction/utility/trucking jobs while you are at it? Those pay very well and there are hardly any women in them either.
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Absolutely! Why wouldn't i be? Those sectors are all highly stigmatised, i'd suspect, because of an assumption that most women aren't 'tough enough' to handle them. He brought up my theoretical tech startup so that's what we went with.

What's your point though?

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Raev [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Well Grader, how about you form a new tech startup and hire all of these women? Logic suggests that if you pay them a male wage, you'll get all of the best female programmers on the planet and destroy your competition. Then you can retire to a tropical island and sit on a beach drinking those fruity unbrella things.

I'm not sure that was a very serious argument, but since Orruar took it seriously ...

• "how about you form a new tech startup and hire all of these women" - for one thing because hiring competent programmers of ANY gender is incredibly difficult; if you'd ever actually worked at a startup yourself you'd know as much.
• "Logic suggests that if you pay them a male wage" - really limited childish logic sure. In the real world, people are motivated by many things other than pay. If it was really as simple as "go work where they pay you more" don't you think women would have done that already, and we wouldn't have this pay gap?
• "destroy your competition" - there is SOOO much more to a startup's success than the quality of their programmers; I feel like I shouldn't even need to explain something this obvious

Originally Posted by Orruar [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Nobody who defends the significance of the gender gap will ever answer this, because they can't. They'll come up with snarky replies or shift the conversation.

Or maybe they have better things to do than explain obvious life realities to you.

Let me turn it around: men like you will never recognize the very real challenges women face because you personally don't face them and you lack the empathy to sympathize with the women who do.

I'm pretty sure you would care though if you got paid less for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of your work.

[Orruar]

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Or maybe they have better things to do than explain obvious life realities to you.

2/2, the streak continues

[Raev]

Loramin, only someone who went to college could come up with ideas as stupid as "people don't like to be paid more money" and "good people are not important to the success of a startup"

[paulgiamatti]

Originally Posted by Raev [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Loramin, only someone who went to college could come up with ideas as stupid as "people don't like to be paid more money" and "good people are not important to the success of a startup"

I certainly didn't get "people don't like to be paid more money" out of "people are motivated by many things other than pay", and on this point Loramin is absolutely right. This is precisely the reason why startups are appealing in the first place - you don't go work at a startup for a handsome salary, you work at a startup because it provides unique challenges and the opportunity to actually be a part of building something that you take interest in from the ground up instead of just warming a desk from nine until five. If you want a handsome salary, go be a warm body at a megacorporation where the degree that qualified you will be put to better use during the job interview than in any of the things you'll actually do on the job.

However, on his point about the importance of the quality of a startup's programmers, I completely disagree. The quality of the programmers is pretty much the only thing that matters to a startup's success, which is why IT entrepreneurialism has in many cases become a kind of one-man endeavor where a single talented programmer with a good idea and the means to write a piece of software can become an overnight multimillionaire with the right VC invester. Sure, good startup companies include other things; QA, product designers, marketing, team management, etc., but show me a tech startup that doesn't first of all have competent, talented programmers and you'll be showing me a failed tech startup.

Anyway, on the topic at hand I have a few comments but nothing has really gotten underneath my skin. No one has said anything especially stupid yet, I'm disappointed in all of you.

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Raev [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Loramin, only someone who went to college could come up with ideas as stupid as "people don't like to be paid more money" and "good people are not important to the success of a startup"

Paul already shot that down, so I'll just leave this here.

Originally Posted by paulgiamatti [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

This is precisely the reason why startups are appealing in the first place - you don't go work at a startup for a handsome salary, you work at a startup because it provides unique challenges and the opportunity to actually be a part of building something that you take interest in from the ground up instead of just warming a desk from nine until five.

Don't forget the stock options! But yeah, no one with a brain joins a startup for the salary, because established companies can offer much better salaries.

Originally Posted by paulgiamatti [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Sure, good startup companies include other things; QA, product designers, marketing, team management, etc., but show me a tech startup that doesn't first of all have competent, talented programmers and you'll be showing me a failed tech startup.

Bad programmers can write terrible code that still works well enough for the company to succeed. That code might not be maintainable/re-usuable/etc. but that doesn't matter because the code doesn't have to be great, it just has to be good enough to realize the business vision.

In contrast, the best coders in the world can't save a bad CEO or a bad product idea. There are thousands of failed Sillicon Valley startups that had great programmers working for them, but that doesn't matter when the CEO is convinced online pet food (advertised by sock puppets) is the wave of the future.

[GradnerLives]

By Orruar's request:

Originally Posted by Raev [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Well Grader, how about you form a new tech startup and hire all of these women?

It's actually Gradner, not Grader.

I work at a software company, and I'm actually pretty happy with my position here. For that reason alone, I'm not that interested at the moment in starting my own business. If I did, I probably would hire a lot of women and their gender wouldn't be a factor in their wage, their work would be. I probably would do pretty well.

We also have no women in technical positions at my company. Isn't that weird?

Originally Posted by Raev [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Logic suggests

Logic actually suggests that if I pay standard male wage to these women based on their performance, then my company would perform at exactly the same level as my competition. I'm not getting better performance for less money, I'm getting the same performance for the same amount of money as my male dominated peers in the industry.

Originally Posted by Raev [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

tech startup

Funny Raev should bring up the tech industry, as I think the article that started this whole crappy thread can actually shed a bit of light on that. I think there's a lot of misplaced anger from the shut-ins that populate the industry. A lot of women have their work scrutinized in a different light by people who maybe aren't the most socially stable managers and co-workers given that the spergy nerd persona is quite common in these environments. I've seen it at game-jams and other programming events far more than in work environments, but if they can act like that in a social situation, it's inevitable that it will pervade their professional life as well. I suspect that women are either pushed out or uninterested in getting involved in a lot of these situations.

That's just my personal experience, might not be indicative of the whole. Even if my assertions are totally baseless, it's ridiculous to say that women don't have the aptitude to be as good at programming as men, and the numbers, both in the wage gap and just sheer employee numbers is staggering in tech.

Originally Posted by Raev [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

if you pay them a male wage, you'll get all of the best female programmers on the planet

As Loramin had mentioned, corporate culture goes a long way as well. They have to want the job, so it has to be a good job at a good company for anyone - male or female - to be interested. I can't just hang out my wallet and watch the womens swarm to it. That's actually a pretty sexist notion in and of itself.

Evacuating troll thread.

Why y'all hate women?

[Jimjam]

When I went to Iceland I learned that female slaves were only worth 80% the value of male slaves (the good old Viking republic).

Today, wages (the modern way of valuing workers) are still around 80% of that of men for women.

It's weird that 1000 years ago and today the relative financial value of women to men was the same.

[loramin]

Originally Posted by katrik [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

After companies spend money training women, they leave. They get pregnant, and leave. Their health care costs soar, while the company is out a valuable employee they spent money on training. From a sociological perspective, this is a big reason women earn a little less. It kind of sucks, but it is somewhat validated. This will eventually change I think.

One big part of this is that women get maternity leave but men don't (or very rarely) get paternity leave. Once it's just as socially acceptable for men to take just as much time off as women, I think it will help level the playing field.

Originally Posted by Jimjam [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

When I went to Iceland I learned that female slaves were only worth 80% the value of male slaves (the good old Viking republic).

Today, wages (the modern way of valuing workers) are still around 80% of that of men for women.

It's weird that 1000 years ago and today the relative financial value of women to men was the same.

In Deuteronomy they lay out rules for how much you have to pay when you accidentally kill your neighbor's _____, and the amount for killing a female is half the amount of killing a male. So evidently there was great feminist progress between three thousand years ago and a thousand years ago, and then progress has flat-lined since [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[radditsu]

You are all fucking idiots.