> My paycheck is 18% less than my less qualified male colleagues.
I stopped reading here.
I stopped reading here.
There's a great article published by Salon called "The Confidence Gap" which talks about this issue. Women do seem to have less confidence than men in western societies, but that's a greater social issue.
If you are a female engineer who finds out you are underpaid, go find a new job and ask for the salaries you discovered your male counterparts made. You'll most likely get it.
..and in general, you should switch jobs at the 2 year mark if you're young and fresh out of school. That way you don't get stuck as a Java/.NET/Ruby/limited-language developer, you expand you skills and you know to ask for larger increases with each job and get the current market rate. If you get stuck with the standard 2%~5% cost of living increase each year, you'll be under market value very quickly.
The wage gap is mostly a myth. When there is a gap, it has less to do with gender and more to do with the larger socialite taboo of knowing other peoples' incomes. If income/wages were transparent at every company, we'd see much less income inequality.
In reality the wage gap is rarely as cut and dry as "women get paid less than men for the same jobs".
It's a separate point that isn't going to get her much sympathy in many circles, because that pay gap could be less real than you think.
18% less could be a result of negotiating skills or any other confounding factor. How has she quantified her qualifications vs all other male employees?
No need to add this unsubstantiated drivel to an otherwise potentially useful insight.
She wouldn't have needed to approach HR in the first place if not for the systemic abuse from males within the company.
There's no way I'd ever date a women who worked in HR. Once, many years ago, I met a woman on an online dating site who worked in HR for some big retailer. She made a comment (in the messaging app, we never met) disparaging the people who interviewed to work there. I commented that maybe if they paid better, they'd get better applicants. Never heard back from her after that. (No, she didn't work for CostCo; they're famous for paying well for those types of positions, and having very loyal and hard-working employees as a result.)
It seems like HR people are really the worst kind of people: they're just rank-and-file employees usually (except the HR Director), but they'll happily defend the very worse corporate treatment of employees.