I’m not sure what you’re suggesting. Sure, men historically created the issue, and those men still causing an issue should be fixed but many of those men are gone and the systemic issues can still exist for systemic reasons.
And I think the notion of using a bunch of data to say OK this set of groups should be equal on average so we’re going to incorporate an adjustment factor to “fix” everything is crazy. Who determines what groups? And what variables are we controlling for, and what’s the line for determining which variables are significant in determining whether the pay differences are fair or not?
Clearly all people should be treated equally in the workplace regardless of tenure, sex, etc. Anything short of that is something that clearly needs fixing. The notion that two groups should be paid equally simply on that basis alone isn’t right though, there will always be some differences in the population that drive differences in pay and they can be perfectly reasonable.
I’ve worked for a company that analyzed pay across gender, race, lots of other factors, and gave market adjustments annually to account for biases that contributed to unequal pay. What is crazy about that? They managed to find the groups to analyze, and in fact hired experts to help them with it. Is it perfect? Obviously not, but it’s an effort.
You seem to be asking women to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, which is an impossible task. Men contributed to this problem 60 years ago and, believe it or not, are still contributing to this problem today. I say that as a woman who has been treated differently than her male colleagues. Think men aren’t still part of this problem? Think again. Systemic issues are still worth fixing!
What differences between men and women support pay disparity, in your opinion?
How do you determine which people have better performance? HR grades are often deeply insufficient. Or all sorts of other difficult to measure things that go into a job (like willingness to work longer hours at peak times, etc.). There’s a host of things that determine whether one person or another adds more value and the notion you can just fix this top down I think will lead to meaningful inefficiencies, so you’d basically just lose the people most losing in terms of performance vs adjusted pay.
I didn’t say systemic issues aren’t worth fixing, they clearly are, but adjustment factors on the tail end are an inherently flawed, blunt instrument.
Genuine differences? How about average hours worked, college major, consecutive years in the workforce, profession?
As I said before, I’m all for working on the systemic issues to fix these things, but adding in an adjustment factor on the tail end is a flawed idea, in my opinion.
I once got a significant bump in pay out of the blue that was labeled “market adjustment” or some such. I have no idea if this was due to a study of market pay in general or if it was a gender adjustment. Honestly didn’t think much of it at the time. Seems pretty doable to me.
At my very first job, I did as well. And I’m a guy. I also had a Master’s Degree and two exams passed, but I guess I did not negotiate well during the hiring process.
I don’t know how to fix that, but I’m open to a discussion that attempts to. We should start with the questions like, why is the work of an actuary significantly more valuable than the work of an educator? Why are we willing to pay little more than minimum wage to the people who care for our young children? I don’t think it’s because we don’t think our children are worth a safe environment, but because we significantly undervalue arenas dominated by women.
Sorry, not trying to hijack this thread. I don’t think it’s possible to have a discussion about gender and pay without bringing the value of women’s work into the equation at some point. Can move to a new thread.
I’m not exactly sure what your point is, but I had been with the company for years at that point. And like I clearly said, I don’t know what the story was behind the adjustment. At the time I assumed that it was an overall market pay adjustment, but it very well might have been something else. They certainly didn’t publicize a company wide pay study, but I don’t usually ask a bunch of questions when someone decides that they want to pay me more money.
ETA: I know the conversation started by discussing pay negotiation, but I think we all know that pay levels can get out of whack other ways, right?
I hate this. Guess who takes on the bulk of responsibility for children, historically and currently? There are anecdotal and incremental changes, but moms in general carry the majority of those duties. Using longer hours as a benchmark inherently biases pay towards males.
I completely agree it’s male-biased because of how society is set up to care for children. That said I think we should be careful in what we seek to change as otherwise we may be ineffective or even harmful in our intervention.
Like the willingness to work longer hours in busy periods is cited because it is objectively more valuable to the employer. If you try to force employers to not value that that’ll just result in unintended consequences elsewhere. Another example of this is laws around forcing employers to give generous maternity leave/pay. I’m all for generous maternity leave/pay but I think as a society we should have the government be on the hook for that and not the business, otherwise you’re just incentivizing the business to be sexist because you’re forcing them to bear the risk that their expensive new hire immediately goes on maternity leave.
Well, I didn’t ask why, either, just took the money. Not saying every company does this, just that mine did for me. And, it was a LONG time ago, at a non-profit.
All else being relatively equal, it was a poor move on my new employers part to pay me less than my male counterpart. Although, he clearly is the better software .. expert. I’m all over here like, what’s a git?!? while he’s diving into cloud.. things.
