How does this work with equal pay legislation though - if you're male then you can't get a pay increase above a female because if that's discovered the company is in for a heap of pain??
So it's not relevant and nobody should be blaming women for not being able to give you a raise. If someone in management at your company tells you that, they are lying to you and you should change jobs.
But don't let facts stop you from repeating the same tired lies that have been debunked for years
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/apr/09/...
It contains links to many more sources at the end.
Life is so good when rational arguments can hit a higher pitch than the virtue signals. ;)
But guess what...
If women choose to forgo higher salaries in favor of something else, that's a different issue and it doesn't immediately mean that they are being "irrational", it just means they favor different things than men do.
If the hiring managers (of any gender) have an irrational bias towards thinking that women are not as effective as their male counterparts, this will affect the respective pay scales even within a competitive market.
Note that I'm not providing evidence or making a claim about the gender pay gap. I'm just saying that the claims you've made have many possible consistent explanations, including irrational bias against women.
They care about one thing, dollars. If you are making them money, they will keep you no matter what. If you are not making them money, they will get rid of you. Pretty rational I think.
Corporations are run by people, and they draw on a huge variety of sources to make their decisions. Including, obviously, some that are not rational.
And rationality of any one particular hiring manager isn't going to make a big difference; they still need to compete with every other hiring manager in the labor market and must offer something competitive accordingly.
Like wise the BBC being forced to disclose pay rates for talent some Male presenters have taken pay cuts btw
I mean, even if it's true that particular company is paying its women worse than its men, and even if legislation means they can't quickly fix it (I don't know how onerous this legislation is in the U.K.), the proper response on the part of any employee who is given these excuses ought to be "Look, that sounds like you have a difficult problem, but that isn't my problem. My problem is that my salary is $X when it should be $X+Y." Because at the end of the day their excuses aren't going to change the fact that they can either fix your problem or not, and if they don't fix your problem somebody else in the labor market can.
It's interesting because younger women hear the USA stats and complain about how they're being hard done by.
In both cases, it's because women choose to leave the labor force for a while, which makes them no longer like the men who made similar choices as them up until that point.
I don't think either is likely.
Sometimes men get awards in UK under equal pay legislation too but if it's true that men on average negotiate pay more effectively (and it appears so) then they will disproportionately be affected. When they negotiate and win a pay rise they are unlikely to get it for being male, it's going to be based on merit (largely) & retention needs; but equal pay legislation means a company takes on a risk if they can't sufficiently differentiate that workers output from another - of the opposite sex - who can claim to be doing work of similar value.
Example case http://www2.cipd.co.uk/pm/peoplemanagement/b/weblog/archive/..., see also the ASDA case where working in a different location, doing a different job haven't been considered enough to warrant different pay.
Women are socialised to be less aggressive than men. They are also much less likely, statistically speaking, to negotiate their salary when starting a new job - never mind proactively seeking a raise based on their market value.
The solution - of course - is to have an employer policy of paying market rate, all the time. Satya Nadella got in hot water for talking about this problem in a gender neutral way, but the unfortunate reality is that an individual contributor can't hope to simply do good work and be recognized for it. Employees have to be proactive about ensuring that management has visibility into their work. Employers are incentivized to pay below market rate where possible and this will bite them in the ass when it comes to equal pay audits.
How would _you_ describe an agressive attitude towards one's career?
Long, but worth a read. Here's a section from the middle of it:
> Right now, the burden of child rearing disproportionately falls on women
> Some of this could be by choice — but there are also cultural forces outside of a woman’s control at play.
> Consider a study of lawyers’ salaries from Mary Noonan at the University of Iowa. She found that men see their salaries decrease more than women when they switch to a part-time schedule for a year.
> "It seems that men in the legal profession who take on non-traditional gender roles (i.e., taking responsibility for child care) pay a high price for that behavior," Noonan and her study co-authors write.
> If the workplace penalizes men more than women for taking breaks from work, then it could be the wiser financial decision for a mother to take on more caregiving activities — the decision that society overwhelmingly expects.
> And even before having children, just the act of becoming pregnant will mean more doctor appointments and actually delivering a baby — all things harder to do in jobs with rigid schedules.
> There are some arguments that women have lower salaries because they don’t negotiate salaries as well or aren’t as naturally competitive
> Studies do find that women negotiate their salaries less frequently than men — but also that they may choose to do so with good reason. One series of experiments found that managers were less interested to work with women who asked for higher salaries in job negotiations.
> The data tells us that this can’t be the entire story. It can't explain why the wage gap is so much bigger for those with kids than those without. One 2015 study found that childless, unmarried women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns. Remember that study we started with, the one about the MBA graduates? It showed that women with kids had a wage gap twice as large as women without.
> "There are really three groups: men, women with children, and women without children," says Bertrand, who worked on that research with Goldin. "Things like negotiating skill might matter on the margin, but it is not the core issue."
> If the problem were that women aren't competitive, it couldn't address why the wage gap is smallest when women are youngest. It's not as if women would lose their negotiating skills over time.