Feel free to read my post I’m a woman and I make more than my Husband.
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Apple Report Reveals Men Are Paid 5% More on Average Than Women in UK
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That’s not what I said at all, they’re irrelevant when comparing equal pay for equal work, a master craftsperson is going to earn more than an apprentice because it’s not equal work. Similarly, if the performance of an employee is greater than their peers then surely they are working harder, so again not equal work.
Education is a misnomer, why would you pay somebody who went to a top university more than school dropouts if they were doing the exact same work to the exact same standard?
The key topic is equal work - gender should be irrelevant, but as can be seen in some of the results, it’s not.
You have a very strange definition of “equal work”. Sounds a lot like “I am female; give me money.”
The pay gap is absolute bunk. You know it. I know it. Economists know it. The politicians who pander to uninformed voters know it. We all know it.
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The only one fueling the anger is you. Apple said themselves that the gap doesn’t exist.
I’d like a well explained reason as to why you had to say that. Absolutely inappropriate.
Except it’s not, Apple’s report shows the gap - believe what you like but it seems you have an axe to grind.
Apple have said they maintain pay equality, not that the gap doesn’t exist (they are different), because it does as their data shows. The reason why the gap exists is because there are currently more men in senior positions than women.
This is something you’ll see in a lot of these reports, especially where companies operate in industries dominated by a particular gender. Apple even show in their report that IT companies in the UK have an average pay gap of 22%, which would be due to the large number of male employees - on the flip side, I could hazard a guess that female fashion companies would be reporting gaps in favour of women, since male employees may be a minority.
You know exactly what I mean. Stop trying to obfuscate. The "pay gap" is meant to imply discrimination or unfair labour practices and, according to authoritarian ideologues, needs to be addressed to achieve "equity". This is insane for hundreds of different reasons, chiefly the arbitrary use of genitalia to divide employees. What about trans vs. non-trans? Jewish vs. Muslim? Overweight vs. thin? IQ above 110 vs. IQ below 110, employees who were raised by single mothers vs. those raised in 2-parent families (and I'll bet that gap would absolutely dwarf any differences in male vs. female). Where are these stats? To achieve equity, you need to address any such imbalance in pay (hourly and salary) across every single one of those groups... and we are just getting started. That doesn't even scratch the surface. All of those groups can be further divided almost infinitely.
For the record, this report clearly states women on average are paid more than men on an hourly basis. Still not good enough for the authoritarian ideologues, I suppose.
My only axe to grind is against "equity" ideologues. And I am very open about that. Proudly so.
Lies, damned lies, and the gender pay gap (aka statistics).
In the UK it is illegal to pay women less than men for doing jobs of ‘equal worth’. It doesn’t happen. Because if it did there would be widespread prosecutions.
If a woman chooses to interrupt her career by taking years off to raise a family the average she will earn less than someone who chooses not to do so. This is blindingly obvious.
If a woman chooses to do part-time or less skilled work (let’s say cabin crew vs airline pilot) the average she will earn less than someone who chooses not to do so. This is blindingly obvious.
If a woman chooses an easier life rather than aggressively competing for a ‘top job’ on a board because she, on average, has a more agreeable nature than a man the average she will earn less than someone who chooses not to do so. This is blindingly obvious.
What isn’t so obvious is whether two jobs are of equal worth. You will find that a court ruling in the UK deems clerical work to be as worthy as refuse collection. So, if you sit at a warm desk typing all day for a council, you will be paid as much as a bin man. I’ve seen one bin woman in my life. But I never ever see die-hard feminists calling for more bin women.
In the UK it is illegal to pay women less than men for doing jobs of ‘equal worth’. It doesn’t happen. Because if it did there would be widespread prosecutions.
If a woman chooses to interrupt her career by taking years off to raise a family the average she will earn less than someone who chooses not to do so. This is blindingly obvious.
If a woman chooses to do part-time or less skilled work (let’s say cabin crew vs airline pilot) the average she will earn less than someone who chooses not to do so. This is blindingly obvious.
If a woman chooses an easier life rather than aggressively competing for a ‘top job’ on a board because she, on average, has a more agreeable nature than a man the average she will earn less than someone who chooses not to do so. This is blindingly obvious.
What isn’t so obvious is whether two jobs are of equal worth. You will find that a court ruling in the UK deems clerical work to be as worthy as refuse collection. So, if you sit at a warm desk typing all day for a council, you will be paid as much as a bin man. I’ve seen one bin woman in my life. But I never ever see die-hard feminists calling for more bin women.
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More women take off from work after starting a family or having kids. Are we really surprised?
Look up statistics for single women in their 20s, you’ll be surprised.
Look up statistics for single women in their 20s, you’ll be surprised.
The groups you mention are all sub-groups of gender and much smaller than the roughly 50:50 ratio of men to women on the planet.
As I said in an earlier post it looks like Apple are doing a decent job in balancing the pay gap, but that’s not going to be the case for every company.
These numbers are wholly uninterpretable. First, without some sort of frequency histogram of salaries, it is not clear whether the means or medians should be used as the measure of central tendency (since salaries cannot be <0, I assume the distributions are skewed, so the median would make the most sense). Also, there is no way of judging whether any apparent difference is statistically meaningful (namely, not expected due to random variation). Finally, the actual salaries differences between men and women are not the point. The question is whether the salaries for women based on their education, experience, years of seniority, job description, personnel management responsibilities, etc. are predicted in the same way as men's salaries. For instance, the pay between men and women might be equal for a given job, but you might find the women are more qualified. @cmwade77 was correct.
This release is typical management BS. Release enough information to create the illusion of transparency, but withhold vital information that would allow meaningful interpretation. I thought Apple would be above this nonsense, but apparently not.
This release is typical management BS. Release enough information to create the illusion of transparency, but withhold vital information that would allow meaningful interpretation. I thought Apple would be above this nonsense, but apparently not.
Wow. I am shocked at the comments. This is like people saying the global warming does not exist or that evolution never happened.
My wifes brother is a headhunter for a huge german company and he was openly admitting to us that he is offering women around 20% less then men. For real. Why? Because he can. Most other companies do the same. He fears that a women will one day have a baby and leave for a year or two and this causes problems for the company to find go find a replacement yet keep a place for her. Of course officially they don't do this. This is what he just told us in private, like sorry sis, but you would have never gotten that much in my company.
Luckily times are changing since more and more men are also staying at home for a year or two for the kids and more and more headhunters are female, but these changes will still take a whole generation to happen.
My wifes brother is a headhunter for a huge german company and he was openly admitting to us that he is offering women around 20% less then men. For real. Why? Because he can. Most other companies do the same. He fears that a women will one day have a baby and leave for a year or two and this causes problems for the company to find go find a replacement yet keep a place for her. Of course officially they don't do this. This is what he just told us in private, like sorry sis, but you would have never gotten that much in my company.
Luckily times are changing since more and more men are also staying at home for a year or two for the kids and more and more headhunters are female, but these changes will still take a whole generation to happen.
Nature is to blame here. Men have more logical brains while women have more emotional brains. The tech industry favors logic over emotion. Yes, it really is THAT simple. Next....
Some women certainly are guilty for imitating the worst behaviours of men, so in that sense, you’re right.Feel free to read my post I’m a woman and I make more than my Husband.
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Nothing complex in life is simple except to simpletons.
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The problem with this tired, ill-informed argument is it ignores the obstacles that women face trying to enter the higher paying positions. It is not equal access and never has been. So it isn’t just about equal work for equal pay. Name one female that has held the CEO position in Apple’s history, for example.
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Can't tell if you're being serious. If so, this is so wrong on multiple counts.
It's not just about CEO positions though, is it? According to Apple's leadership page - women hold the no 2 and 3 spots on the board.
I agree, there shouldn't be a pay gap in an ideal world - but I don't agree with the numbers this report is generating. Yes, certain professions have a higher number of senior males - banking, pilots, but this is also because far less women tend to apply for these roles, or choose these career paths. That's not a pay gap, that's a difference in career choices.
The biggest issue here in the UK at least, is the massive difference between senior and non-senior pay. At my place of work (a UK higher education institution), we're having budget cuts left-right-and-centre. Pay has been basically been frozen for ages, and we can't hire new staff because of "uncertainty around Brexit". Meanwhile, our VP is on a half-million point basic salary, with a stupidly high sign-on bonus, extra pay of twice the average staff salary in lieu of pension contributions, and other perks such as first-class flights everywhere they go.
The biggest issue I see here is that this report is only going to encourage positive discrimination, which at the end of the day, is still discrimination. "We need more females in higher roles, so we better hire a woman, despite there being a better qualified man". "We need to give females pay rises at a higher rate than men to balance it out".
As an example, we get very few males applying for roles in admin - it's 90% female, and they tend to be lower paid roles, not because they're females, but because of the role. One of our software development teams, a mid level role, is entirely male - because no females applied, not because of "glass ceilings".
In my opinion, this should have been done very differently. It should have been the pay gap at different levels - e.g. what is the pay gap at entry/junior, senior, management, and at exec level? That would give a much more useful picture in my opinion.
Positive discrimination is illegal in the UK. And we have to ask why women are not pursuing certain career paths. Also, I note the financial sector seems to have the biggest pay gap and yet they nearly ruined the UK with their fraudulent and sloppy practices (which required taxpayer bailouts). I marvel that anybody employed in the financial sector just before the last economic fiasco still has a job, particularly at senior levels, but they do, ... and they're mostly men.
I agree that equal pay is about whether salaries for equivalent jobs are paid equally rather than a gender or minority pay gap per se. However, we also have to examine why it is that men still dominate the higher positions in management. Until we address the bias toward have male senior managers, the system will be neither fare nor effective.
Probably are.
This is why I like what my partner is doing with one of their creative companies. Head hunting women only..... They see it as a way of trying to turn the tides on inequality by highlighting the sex ratio. They're doing okay at it too having recently won a regional award. I can understand how some people would feel threatened by the focus on inequality. If I had something good for a while and that future was now becoming uncertain I too would be worried & upset.. It's catching on as one of the investors of said company runs an 'angel investment' group that fund women-led projects.
Did anyone hear about alt right conservative milo yiannopoulos and his right-wing men-only investment group?? It recently shut down with the investment money he collected not going to anyone.... I believe he's being investigated if the headline I skimmed was anything to go by.
This is why I like what my partner is doing with one of their creative companies. Head hunting women only..... They see it as a way of trying to turn the tides on inequality by highlighting the sex ratio. They're doing okay at it too having recently won a regional award. I can understand how some people would feel threatened by the focus on inequality. If I had something good for a while and that future was now becoming uncertain I too would be worried & upset.. It's catching on as one of the investors of said company runs an 'angel investment' group that fund women-led projects.
Did anyone hear about alt right conservative milo yiannopoulos and his right-wing men-only investment group?? It recently shut down with the investment money he collected not going to anyone.... I believe he's being investigated if the headline I skimmed was anything to go by.
Excuse me, you’re telling a 51 year old mixed race partially disabled woman who has struggled against racism and sexism in education, medical care, and the workplace that my argument is tired and ill-informed?
Fine. Fair enough. Let’s get to know each other then. How old are you and what have you faced in life and what have you learned first hand about people? I don’t pretend racism and sexism are gone. I know better. I faced so much. I’m sick and worn down with it all.
During my lifetime, the institutionalized racism and sexism inherent in the medical studies on which so many practices are still based was particularly bad and could have killed me and has killed and disabled a lot of women and people of color and continues to this day. This problem is only just now being recognized and studied. In fairness to society, it’s only been in my lifetime that the population has become racially and ethnically diverse enough for the issue to become impossible to ignore. When lives are on the line change can’t come fast enough, I know firsthand. But harsh reality is that it takes time for solid efforts to come to fruition. Rushed stuff falls apart fast.
I’m only 51 years old and it’s only been in my lifetime that women of my mother’s generation started entering the workforce in droves and making the legal fights for equal rights. Even with all of my mother’s generations of struggle, results were still mixed for my generation. When I came out of college in 1989 and went for interviews, it leaped out at me that employers only cared how fast I could type but my male friends were asked about other skills. So yeah I ran into some obstacles, to say the least.
And even though men knew it wasn’t cool to sexually harass women at work, I had to put up with it anyway even as late as 1995. I did report it and was told by my female boss they wanted a company where people felt comfortable to joke around. So in other words, suck it up sweetheart, because boys will be boys. I met similar humiliation attempting to report sexual harassment by a doctor to an unsympathetic female referring physician. I should have fought harder for justice but I was young, poor, ignorant of any options I might have had, in poor health and easily beaten down in those days.
But I have not been guiltless of being a sexist pig myself. I once ignorantly offended a male coworker when I made some jokes about his being a male cheerleader. He pointed out the offense as the sexist idiocy it was and I promptly apologized. It was a wonderful teachable moment between two human beings.
This business of diverse people getting along is difficult and messy and likely will never run smoothly, so I have little comprehension for people who expect change to be something that happens at the flip of a switch.
Equality of opportunity and equality of treatment is an ongoing process of people learning to get along and respect each other even if they struggle to understand each other’s point of view.
But I have to say despite the pigs and pitfalls there were also decent men, black and white, who went out of their way to give me opportunities and training and support. And they expected nothing in return. If I hadn’t gotten disabled by chronic disease, they would have been the brothers who ensured I would have gone far in my career.
My husband’s mentor was a black woman who believed in fairness and merit. He owes much of his success to opportunities she opened for him and he does attempt to pay it forward but she didn’t want him to ever give anyone preferential treatment to do so. Just fair access, which is what you say isn’t the issue. I can’t agree with that. It has to start somewhere and that is with fair access to opportunities.
Okay enough about my perspective and past.
Let’s look at what’s going on NOW.
Nobody is ignoring those obstacles to higher paying jobs as they damn well better not or their companies will get sued. That is right and just.
But things now are in danger of being run by quotas and it’s now white males straight out of university who are the most vulnerable. It is not right or just that any innocent hardworking person should be made vulnerable.
They didn’t pinch women in the butt in 1979. They didn’t Harvey Weinstein women out of a career. Things are in danger of being less equal opportunity than ever, but in a way that is punitive and damaging to innocent people and patronizing and condescending to the people we mean to help.
When flawed metrics are the basis for hiring decisions, we risk candidates being judged not based on their merits, but on race and gender.
A woman candidate for a tech job will be prized for her astuteness with programming languages, right? Well one would hope. But the reality of the numbers games means her gender and possibly her race are the prime concerns, her abilities second. That’s patronizing and insulting to say the least.
Where is the fairness in that? Where is the equality?
Equal means equal. I don’t think it’s right to disadvantage anyone to try to get retribution over what was done in the past, even a recent past.
We have a chance now to make everything truly a meritocracy where people of any race, gender, orientation can advance to the positions for which their experience and education and accomplishments and work ethic best qualify them. We now have the perspective and societal maturity to see that nothing less will do for the benefit and advancement of all of us in total.
The challenge is to ensure this happens without relying on flawed metrics and ratios and statistics that show nothing more than the possibility that women aren’t drawn to Silicon Valley type careers as much as men are.
Maybe they are more drawn to medicine. I have noticed over the course of my dad’s battle with multiple cancers over the past 15 years, his surgeons and oncologists have remarkably been mostly female...and many are black or brown(Indian and Hispanic and Middle Eastern)!
We can look to see if there are any biases in education that steer one group to or away from certain careers and opportunities and do what we can to rectify that. But once the finished product comes out and is standing there as a job applicant, the only question should be are they the best applicant for the position?
I know some would argue these metrics are all the means we have to look for bias in hiring and advancement. I accept again that change comes slowly and this is the best we have for now.
But like I said, these dangerously reinforce judging people on race and gender. We need to find better ways.
You say it’s not about equal access but about barriers to women entering higher paying positions. Well again, we’ve only had about one and a half generations so far that have been legally ensured equal access. We won’t see the fruits of this equal access until the current batch of Millennials works their way up to CEO levels. Despite how much they might think it should be otherwise, that usually doesn’t happen until one reaches middle age, so let’s see what the stats are in 15-20 years.
And if we continue to skew things against white males, next generation we may see a white male underclass and have to figure out how to fix that mess. Best not to make the conditions that would create that mess NOW.
Well said. People don't understand the underlying issues such as why women don't hold higher positions in the first place, when they are quite able to.
Its a bit more complex than people realize, especially this poster:
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We need to survey girls and women still in schools and women in the workforce on a regular basis and find out what impediments and factors affect their choices and career paths.
End result ratios of which gender has ended up where don't even begin to tell us what we need to know.
We may find that working conditions for women in the technology sector require schedules or something else that is inimical to childbearing and the child rearing responsibilities that still fall primarily to women. Or maybe there are still too much asinine behaviors and assumptions that create a hostile work environment for women in those professions.
It is fairly recently that women are opening up about the sexual harrassment they have endured attempting to secure funding for their startups. This is one area in which women have faced significant barriers and discrimination and harrassment that men have largely not had to face. Who knows what businesses and female CEOs we would have had running amongst the likes of Bezos and Musk if so many women hadn't been told they need to sleep their way to funding.
Quite a lot is already known about why women may not apply for, or be hired for jobs when they are fully qualified. It is up to companies to make the changes necessary. That is just for starters.