<p>Things like race and gender have an effect, either consciously or subconsciously, on almost everyone. </p>
<p>For example, a car saleswoman would probably be less successful than a car salesman because people feel more comfortable with men selling cars. In fact, I think most people would feel uncomfortable with a woman trying to sell them a car, as stereotypically, women know nothing about cars. And since men are often the main breadwinners, men make the final decisions on what to buy.</p>
<p>Another example: Consider a scenario with a male employee and a female employee, both married, spouses employed, same number of children, same total income, etc. Both employees request more hours. The employer will tend to think that the guy needs more money to support his family, while the female employee just wants more spending money to buy a Coach bag or jewelry. People tend to have a belief that men are breadwinners and women spend money on frivolous things. </p>
<p>As for race, Black people are stereotyped as dumb, Hispanic as illegal/cheap labor, and Asians as weak and nerdy. These stereotypes hurt minorities a lot, especially in promotion to management. Even if employers are not prejudiced, they worry that the low-level employees might be and would resent having to report to a Black/Hispanic/Asian manger.</p>
Those professions you mention share one or two characteristics that engineering lacks:</p>
<p>1) Medicine and Law require postgraduate degrees, while engineering starts out with a strong salary at the undergraduate level. Further, these degrees (unlike graduate engineering degrees) are highly expensive and almost always self-funded, meaning that higher salaries are in part offset by the expense of prepaying or repaying tuition.</p>
<p>2) Medicine and landscaping (and most trades) require an extended period of time before you see the real money.</p>
<p>Engineering is the highest paying profession requiring only an undergraduate degree. Trades (like landscaping) can pay more, eventually, for some, and only after many many years of tremendously low wages. Law pays more right from the get-go, but with a delay of a few years and starting with a big debt. Medicine takes as much as a decade past undergraduate before those stellar paychecks start - until then they have massive debt and little income, and even after that they can see as much as half their salary go to malpractice insurance.</p>
<p>Did your Dad make $75k+ when he first started doing landscaping work?</p>
<p>If you don’t like engineering, there are ways to make more money, and if that is what interests you I heartily encourage you to chase them. I know doctors, I know lawyers, and yes I know a couple of landscapers and other tradesmen - without exception I prefer my comfortable yet “lesser” income to what they endure to get theirs.</p>
<p>And anyway, this should be addressed in one of the other hundred threads that comparing engineering salaries to other fields…</p>
Even if a man and a woman are equivalent in terms of their jobs, there’s no easy way to prove there is bias if there is a salary difference. Subjective factors are frequently a part of this. If the employer does favor males over females, some how, some way the employer will always believe the male employee is better than the female. </p>
<p>Our society has come a long way in terms of gender and race discrimination, but we still have a long way to go.</p>
<p>I will believe race and gender are not a factor in the workplace when I see that they are no longer issues in everyday society.</p>
<p>Medwell, this is where your engineering education may have fallen short. Hudson is a conservative think tank. Nothing wrong with that of course, but what you will find at particular sources are reports that will match what they believe.</p>
<p>Listen, you may personally as a young person believe the world is fair and meritorious. Those who have worked a lifetime already know that the simplistic, idealistic version of youth is anything but. The world is a political, irrational place. Biases operate often under the radar and are not even conscious to those that hold them. Most performance is extremely subjectively evaluated, especially as you move up the ladder and away from counting widgets to abstract and complex things like innovation, effective management, strategic development. </p>
<p>You can ake up all the naive theories you want to hold onto illusions, but be assured, there is a reason that 5 decades of research, parsed every which way, and yes statistically controlling for obviously basic things like ‘occupation’ and ‘tenure’ and ‘rated performance’ shows that women consistently earn significantly less than men.</p>
<p>This just makes me really sad you are starting off with such a simplistic and unrealistic view of the world of work and yet you are the future of management…if even ‘you’ don’t get it, we have at least another generation of this nonsense to deal with.</p>
<p>But then here’s the killer question: did he put his money where his mouth is by paying the women more? In other words, at your former employer, were women making higher salaries than men? If your former boss truly thought that women were more qualified, then they should have been paid substantially more, right? Heck, the men at that company should have been grumbling about why they are always being paid less than the women. </p>
<p>If the women were not being paid more than the men, then that implies that your former boss was either highly sexist or just ruthless. After all, he was employing extremely highly qualified women…and then deliberately choosing to underpay them, relative to their actual value. That’s a fantastic deal for the company, but not for those women.</p>
<p>“I was kinda worried about becoming an engineer after I read that report. I’m Asian and I’m a girl, so I’m (on average) going to be making “only”(compared to others) about 60k mid career.”</p>
<p>I would wholeheartedly love for you to prove them wrong. It has nothing to do with being asian or a woman, if those are the statistics then prove them wrong :)</p>