That's irrelevant to the view of a single company. Let's say 10% of the tech workforce is female. It would be impossible to achieve 100% female employment across the entire industry, but certainly possible for a single company. You'll have to interview 10x more people to go 100% female with your workforce.

Well, you don't even have to interview the guys if you know you're going after women, so you'll interview the same number of people, it'll just take longer to get those applications.

When you advertise something like "We pay 15% better than Google" I would imagine you'd get at least a few takers, including female Googlers who are tired of being underpaid.

What exaggeration! Google has 30% * 47000 = 14000 female employees. 17% among tech workers.

A startup looking for 50 female applicants could pull that off by walking around the Google parking lot for 15 minutes at lunch before security kicked them out. Carry a sign that says "Bring us your paystub, get an immediate offer with a 15% pay jump and a long-term management position."

That's my line...

It's not unexpected. The gender-wage gap is well known. I know it, you know it, everybody who moderately pays attention to the news in the last 20-30 years knows it. It's always an issue, it's always being looked at and criticized.

Do you honestly believe that among the hundreds or thousands of new tech businesses each year, some portion of whom go on to get funded and hire a bunch of people, NONE of them have thought of this?

How about the smaller group of venture capitalists who advise the new company? NOT ONE of them ever said "Hey you know, you can save a boatload in the long term if you hire women. Keep that in mind." ???

It's not reasonable. The only explanation is that the premise is false. If there's a pay gap, it's far less significant than 30%. Maybe 5%, maybe less than that.

No, as we see in these articles, big companies apparently try to recruit minorities and women to increase their diversity. It's clearly possible to do. It would be even easier for a small company since the somewhat restricted women-only labor pool would pose less of an obstacle. (I mean, if you need to hire 20 people for your startup, it's not significantly harder to hire 20 of the 10000 women looking for jobs as opposed to 20 of the 40000 men looking, using hypothetical numbers. You're not stressing the capacity of the pool.) The question is simply why more people don't do it given the obvious advantages. (If they were real.)

You would be right if suddenly every company tried to hire women exclusively. But they don't. So the question is, why don't just a few companies do that, and succeed wildly, undercutting all their competition while delivering superior shareholder return yada yada. The business plan writes itself. "We're going to do the same thing as IBM, but with women, and our costs will be 30% lower!"

In that context, understaffing is not an issue. Google alone has thousands of highly qualified female tech workers, showing that the labor market has the capacity to supply many thousands of women for tech jobs. Any startup, any small business, any medium sized tech business should be falling all over itself to hire predominantly women, because they'll save so much money. You got $2 million in venture capital? You can hire either 10 guys for a year, or 10 women and give yourself a raise, or 14 women. All with the same budget. What kind of idiot would say "Oh gee I'll take the 10 guys please." That's the worst option.

The reason you have no answer is because it's just wrong. The premise is faulty. Women do not make 70 cents on the dollar for the same job. That's just obvious crap and it's unbelievable that anybody would attempt to stick to that story after a few seconds of contemplation.

I didn't say sometimes women are hired instead of men. I said at least sometimes there should be a case where women are hired more than men.

Statistically significance comes into play when you're doing an experiment and you're wondering if the combination of sample size and effect size is due to randomness.

I don't know what you mean by "statistically significant workforce" since we're not talking about an experiment.

What? Of course it makes sense. It's proof by contradiction. If it's true that women do the exact same quality and quantity of work for significantly less money, then there should be a big success story by now of an all (or nearly all) female tech company that does the same quality and quantity of work as its competition, but either charges significantly less or has significantly higher profit margins.

You don't have an answer for this contradiction, that's clear. It's because there is none... the premise is false.

What official policy? It's perfectly fine, and would be lauded, to start a tech company "for women, by women" or whatever. You're grasping for straws here.

Forget 100% women, why aren't there tech companies that are 80% women and 20% men? That obviously wouldn't be a big scandal since there are plenty of 80% men, 20% women tech companies. Saving 30% of salary on 80% of your labor force would be a huge advantage. You see that right? Do you understand what I'm talking about, and why it would make strong business sense to do... if it were possible?

The answer is, as I said, yes it would make great sense, and so the reason there isn't a single example of such a company is that... it's not possible. Women don't accept 30% less pay for the exact same work. If you're paying a woman 30% less than a man, it's because her work is not as good as the alternative.

You're joking right? The measured pay gap? If you actually read the reports that come up with things like "women make 70 cents on the dollar" you'll find that they are looking at aggregate income across the entire population. Once they start correcting for differences, the pay gap magically shrinks. Last I saw, when factoring into account education, experience, time commitment, and a bunch of other factors, it was like 92 cents on the dollar. As they add more control variables, the gap gets smaller and smaller. It's disingenuous at this point to even say an 8 cent pay gap exists.... what exists is an *unexplained* 8 cent pay gap.

And once again you're missing the fundamental idea of proof by contradiction. Yes there are plenty of stupid people. Good job. But there are at least some smart people right? So out of the tens of thousands of entrepreneurs just in the tech industry in this country, and the top 0.1% of those people who are smart, cunning, ruthless, and willing to do anything to make a buck... why haven't ANY of them stumbled on this rather obvious idea and used the gender pay disparity to mop the floor with the competition?

You have no answer for that.

Yes, of course, though I highly doubt they have had a policy of hiring whites in the past.

Here's the source of your confusion. You don't have to make an effort to hire anybody of a particular race. You certainly don't say, "Hey I'm going to go hire some whites today. Then tomorrow I'll go hire some blacks. Then I need some Asians."

That doesn't mean you don't hire *anybody*. It means you don't target people based on characteristics like race and gender. You just say "I'm going to hire the best people for the job."

Your first few ideas are good. The last idea, somehow "knowing" the percentage bias they exhibit and counterbalancing it by giving an explicit advantage to minorities, is not okay. That's discrimination.

The problem is your assumption that the bias is known, and then applying a known bias to correct it. You don't know what your bias is, otherwise you could just eliminate it. So how are you going to fairly counteract that bias?

Hiring decisions should be based on evaluations of an individual, not a group the individual represents. When you apply broad "corrections" to perceived discrimination against a group, you inevitably discriminate unfairly against some individuals. If you correct for race on the premise that blacks just have a harder time, then there's going to be a white guy who is even more discriminated against than blacks, because he's also had a hard time, and now yet another chunk of the population is given an edge over him.

I'm not sure how to respond to your question of why I think this is wrong. You either believe in fairness or not. You clearly believe in fairness, but you are more concerned with fairness "on average" to groups, rather than fairness to individuals.

To me it's obvious and intuitive that if you are fair to all individuals, you will automatically be fair to groups. But the reverse is not true... being fair "on average" to groups means that you will still be unfair to individuals, sometimes boosting them and sometimes hurting them. As long as the average works out..

That's a very weak deflection. While you're right that corporations don't ALWAYS act rationally, and that acting rationally doesn't ALWAYS produce the best outcome, it's simply idiotic to think that a widely known and widely accepted pay disparity wouldn't result in more women being hired at least SOMETIMES.

So forget the entire industry. Name a single large successful tech company that has a vast majority of women and uses that to their advantage to cut labor costs. Just one.

It's reasonable to assume that not all companies would take advantage of it, because there are irrationalities as you pointed out. But not even ONE? Does that really make sense to you? That every single successful large tech company makes the same fundamental oversight that would save them 30% on labor? And that the irrationality is pointed out time and time again in every single comment section of every single article ever written about the gender-wage gap? I mean don't these evil misogynistic CEOs read online news?

So again, if companies know that women will earn 30% less over the course of their careers at the company... why would they hire men?

Are you joking? That's irrelevant since Apple recruits from around the country.

Umm no, outrage about a lack of outrage is not the same as outrage about the lack of men in cosmology. Nice try though.

That doesn't make sense. It is widely considered a problem that blacks are overrepresented in the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. OP is pointing out that if single white Christian males were overrepresented in the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, it would probably not be considered a problem.

That's pretty dense. While Tim Cook's statement doesn't explicitly say "we're no longer going to hire white males" if you read the comments posted here you'll see plenty of people advocating quotas to increase the percentages of women, blacks, and Hispanics. Now if you are familiar with math, the percentages of each partition have to add up to 100%. So if you increase the percentages of women, blacks, and Hispanics, what do you think happens to the percentages of non-women/blacks/Hispanics?

Yes, because the current tech industry with its lack of diversity is so terrible. The companies who have come out with "severe diversity problems" like Google, Facebook, and Apple are in no way world leaders in tech.

In some ways it makes sense to hire a team of like-minded people, which may mean culturally similar people. I don't see what's wrong with that. While there is less diversity in any given team, other teams will balance it out.

So they didn't even like each other? 20% is enough that they are their own colleagues. I'm sure you were just talking about the evil misogynistic guys in the class though.

Copyright violation conviction results in having to pay monetary damages to the copyright holder, and to cease redistribution of the copyrighted work.

Fulfilling the requirements of the LGPL on new copies in no way is required by, and conversely also does not get you out of, the punishment. Therefore for every possible reason in the book this "viral" idea is false.