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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

> The goal is to narrow the gender wage gap. If a woman is paid less than a man doing the same job and a new employer bases her pay on her prior salary, gender discrimination can be perpetuated, the bill’s backers say.

Hmm, I'd never thought about that angle,but I guess it makes sense.

No word on if they are allowed to use Equifax, etc to pull salary data from?

EDIT: looking at the bill it looks like querying Equifax is probably also prohibited

> (b) An employer shall not, orally or in writing, personally or through an agent, seek salary history information, including compensation and benefits, about an applicant for employment.

As a side note one of the biggest issues macro economists have is that its very hard to prove their theories as you often can't run huge macro economic experiments.....

> Delaware, Massachusetts and Oregon have passed similar laws that take effect later this year or next, said attorney Ben Ebbink of Fisher & Phillips in Sacramento. Philadelphia passed one that was supposed to take effect in May but is being challenged in court. New York City and San Francisco have similar ordinances that take effect Oct. 31 and July 1, respectively.

With the number of states introducing legislation like this it will be interesting to see if you can tease out any state or city based GDP growth/shrinking based on these laws.

View on HN

Equifax has salary data? I hadn't heard that.

//edit: Well shit, TIL: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/10/equifax-breach-fallout-y...

Any time you apply for a credit card or other form of credit, you generally have to give your income.

It's much worse than that... The recent "The Work Number" incident showed they shared access to your entire paycheck history, in detail.

at the granular level of per paycheck, even

So they're buying it from ADP?

Or getting it automatically from the employers in exchange for having access to it for new hires.

I doubt most employers would go for that, but I suppose it's possible. More importantly, though, it'd also be much harder than getting it from a payroll provider.

According to wiki they have 225 million employment records and according to The Work Number they are used by 82% of Fortune 500 employers.

Then they turn around and sell all that data while telling the participating companies what a wonderful service they are providing them by offloading this task from traditional HR.

It's crazy.

Oh, wow, that is crazy.

Prepare to be even more shocked. Here is a 'sample' of the EDR report you can request from The Work Number containing all the information that they have on you and may or may not be giving out (or selling to the highest bidder):

https://www.theworknumber.com/samples/The-Work-Number-Employ...

As you can see its much more than 'just' your salary. It includes (amongst other things):

Union Affiliation; Salary breakdown (Base, OT, Commission, Bonus); Dates of pay increases; Medical Insurance (coverage, Policy #, Provider name, Annual cost); Any Workers Comp claims; Breakdown of your paycheck (401k contribution, taxes payed, garnishments, etc)

Just imagine the national outrage if some employer was shown to be directly selling this information to someone about their own employees. Yet a third party is doing just that and many companies are complicit. It is absolutely outrageous!

'hmmm maybe I don't want to hire Joe Shmo, after all he did join a union in the past. He might try to unionize our plant'

'looks like Joe also has some garnishments, doesn't sound like someone we want on our team. Probably has a troubled past.'

'well looks like Joe made 70k last year, but a lot of that was from working OT. I think we can get away with offering him 60k and promising him a lot of OT "opportunities"'

Proving my income (with paystubs or a W2) separately from the credit report the bank ran always gave me the impression that the credit agencies didn't have that info. Nor do I ever recall seeing it in the reports I got from them.

Welp.

I've only given fairly vague numbers on these things. Can't say it's hurt my creditworthiness.

You don't need to be honest in your applications, just consistent. The data you enter becomes "the truth" in their system.

>you generally have to give your income.

Well, you certainly don't have to give your "real" income. Aspirational income is fine.

Wouldn't applying for credit based on "aspirational" finances be fraud?

It generally asked your household income. This means many 18 year olds can report 6 or even 7 figure household incomes.

I wouldn't call that an aspirational income, though — would you? That's just your real household income. It's also not an option for most adults, who are almost all older than 18.

Putting aside the household income for a moment: "Many" being able to report 6 figure incomes seems quiiiiite a stretch to me, 7 seems insane.

Do you have a source for this? Or can you define "many" some more?

A million or more 18-20 year olds could no doubt truthfully report 6-figure household income. To me, that's "many".

(Slightly over a quarter of households in the US have a household income over $100K as reported on tax returns. Household income for the purposes of credit application can be meaningfully higher than for adjusted gross income tax return concerns.)

That's actually an interesting stat. If there are ~115 million US households and 20% have > $100,000 income, that is ~23 million households. If 18-24 year olds make up ~9.5% of the population, and we 'assume' they are evenly distributed in these households, then this statement (well 18-24) could be true.

Per this: https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator-201...

it's 26.3% of households with incomes over $100K. I saw another estimate of 125 million households, so it could well be ~33 million households with >=$100K household income.

(I'm not so much quibbling with numbers as trying to get across that "it's a lot of people")

No you can't. The CARD Act of 2009 explicitly forbids this. You can't include anyone else's income if you are under 21.

Even after you're 21 you're supposed to only include someone else's income if you have access to it. If your parents don't give you a stipend then you aren't supposed to include their income.

Thanks!

Not a lawyer, but for major credit lines lenders would generally want to see a few pay stubs and even tax returns, so seems like they’re using the data from the application form as a ballpark figure anyways.

Not a lawyer, but they left their door unlocked, so I think it should be legal to just walk off with their stuff.

Well, if you phoney up some W2s on your laser printer to apply for a mortgage, that might be a problem.

But (on credit card applications) I've always put a 6-figure income in when asked. Even as a college student with an income of $0.

FFS, that's called "fraud." Providing false information on a credit application is a criminal offense. Are you going to go to jail for it? Probably not, as long as you pay your bills. But it's 100% fraud and illegal and you can go to jail for it and people have.

Also, your accounts would be closed if they found out that you lied on your application. American Express, in particular, is known to conduct financial reviews and shut down accounts who can't prove their income.

You'll be in a lot of trouble if you ever default and provided "aspirational" income, or at least that is the impression I get from the text that accompanies such inquiries.

https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/buffalo/press-releases/201...

>ROCHESTER, NY—U.S. Attorney William J. Hochul, Jr. announced today that David P. Gaylord, 51, of Rochester, New York, pleaded guilty to bank loan application fraud before the U.S. District Judge Charles J. Siragusa. The charge carries a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison a fine of $1,000,000.

>Assistant U.S. Attorney Tiffany H. Lee, who is handling the case, stated that in 2006, while residing in the Western District of New York, the defendant submitted various credit card applications to Advanta Corp., Bank of America, and Family First Federal Credit Union. Gaylord knowingly provided false information regarding his income in order to obtain lines of credit from the banks and credit union. The defendant indicated that his income was anywhere between $90,000 to $122,000 when, in 2006, he reported to the Internal Revenue Service that his income was approximately $12,488. Gaylord ended up leaving outstanding balances on the various lines of credit and filed for bankruptcy.

They do - I'm not sure how they licence it though or what data sources they use but I've seen that their data on high income households is the best in the business and shockingly accurate.

However, I can't imagine the compliance nightmare that would exist around a process that lets HR people look up people's equifax information. If they get a full report, it could contain information about disabilities, national origin, ethnicity, religion, and enough information to construct knowledge about sexual orientation.

However, all that information is pretty worthless for most decisions. Aside from it being illegal to use that information for hiring decisions (in most situations), the equifax stuff isn't super accurate. I've looked myself up and it gets a lot of information wrong, most other people I know who have looked themselves up in have also found major inaccuracies.

> However, I can't imagine the compliance nightmare that would exist around a process that lets HR people look up people's equifax information.

Employment credit checks are perfectly legal.

"... disabilities, national origin, ethnicity, religion, and enough information to construct knowledge about sexual orientation."

Don't employers already get most of that from doing in person interviews? Even through phone screens you can gather most of that information.

In the US, those are protected categories about which a prospective employer may not inquire. This point was explicitly called out and repeatedly reiterated in the training I received a few years back about how to participate in an interview from that side of the table.

Some of that information can be obvious, as in the case of visible disability and occasionally ethnicity. But it's not permissible to inquire in any case. And speaking from the side of the interviewee, such questions would immediately bring the interview to a not overly friendly close, both because the answers are none of any prospective employer's business, and because no company so insensate to liability concerns is likely destined to end up anywhere I care to go.

They can ask, legally. Maybe it would be used as evidence they wanted to discriminate but it's not a violation of the law simply to ask.

Unless the protected characteristic is in some material way relevant to the role, asking such questions is likely to contravene the law or laws establishing the protection. It's not a criminal act, but it is unlawful; to do so, without a very clear and compelling argument for why it's relevant to the candidate's ability to perform the job, places the organization at the mercy of any candidate who cares to file a claim.

This is false, it is generally not illegal to ask about protected characteristics, it's only illegal to use them in hiring decisions. The distinction is important.

The reason people avoid asking (and tell others to avoid the same) is to avoid accusations or the appearance of using that sort of information in their hiring decision. You really have no defense if you ask about ethnicity and then decide not to hire that person, it's logical that you were asking about ethnicity because you wanted to use that information in your decision.

"Don't ask don't tell" is a good policy.

Once you actually have the job it's STILL just as illegal to use this information in promotions/firing decisions. However, it comes up in casual conversation all the time. People don't fret about asking a subordinate where they were born in casual conversation.

It's more unwise than unlawful.

Fair. I sort of assumed from "don't even think about doing this unless you have signoff from general counsel in writing" that it was the latter, but on further research, I am indeed finding the former is more accurate to fact.

> In the US, those are protected categories about which a prospective employer may not inquire

No, they aren't. First, it's questionable whether sexual orientation is a federally protected axis of discrimination, and, second, it's illegal to discriminate on protected axes (except where they are bona fide qualifications, or some other exception to the general rule exists), not to enquire on them (HR will generally avoid enquiry not necessary for a clearly legal purpose to mitigate the risk that that will be viewed as evidence of discrimination, not because it is illegal in and of itself.)

This makes me wonder. My employer has some customer data. We're very careful about not just letting any random employee access it without careful permission, auditing, logging, etc. Customer privacy is important to us.

At Equifax, though, information about random people isn't customer data. It's the product. They give it to anyone who asks for money. Do they have any motivation to say J random employee can't just look up everybody's data? Why? Letting you have free access to what they charge everyone else for would just be a perk, right?

Given that NSA employees in the past have abused that power, I wouldn't put it past current Equifax employees to do the same.

https://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-stalking/

I believe it's quid pro quo. Equifax sells analytics services to corporations, and presumably you get a nice discount if you enter into an agreement to give them your information.

Likewise for credit scores--why else would a lender report data to Equifax if Equifax wasn't purchasing that data, either directly or as part of a larger contractual arrangement.

> Do they have any motivation to say J random employee can't just look up everybody's data?

It violates FCRA at the very least.

>what data sources they use

Usually the data is reported by the employer themselves.

You can query the employment data without querying the full Equifax report.

I'm not sure how they licence it though or what data sources

Ever filled out a credit card application? Most of them ask for your current salary. This is before the credit check is done.

My guess is the credit card companies are passing that information back.

Of course, any time I put my salary in one of those applications it's correct in a range of $50K+. If they have those numbers, they are really inaccurate.

They (The work Number/Equifax) don't license it at all. Company's pay for the privilege in fact. It's sold as outsourcing the "costly" HR task of providing salary data themselves. Other companys or individuals then pay Equifax $35 to make a single enquiry or subscribe at a monthly rate.

Users include 82% of all F500 companies and they have 225 employment records.

My company uses it :(

http://redtape.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/30/16762661-exclusi...

This is a pretty shocking news article regarding the last time Eqifax was in the news about this a few years ago. At that time (like now) they were selling the data to all kinds of companies.

Shameless plug for something I wrote today, in case you’re wondering what companies use it for and what you can do about that

“Developer employee cheatsheet: WTF is Salary Benchmarking?“

https://codeformore.com/developer-employee-cheatsheet-wtf-sa...

Interesting read, thanks. How does one go from "senior engineer" to "architect"? Any tips?

Stop writing code and start writing documents. Use lots of buzzwords and emerging technologies.

Well the first step is to design some architectures for large systems. Poof, you're an architect.

Can I use it to find out what my co-workers make and negotiate a better salary,

Wouldn't you need their social security number?

Luckily you can just download those from the internet.

No. The FCRA makes you obtain premission from your coworker first.

You give permission to your employer to query those sorts of databases when agreeing to a "background check" as a condition of being hired.

If the employer needs permission, then they presumably don't get that permission if it's against this new law.

There is nothing wrong with HR having that information. It's only illegal to base hiring/firing decisions on protected information, it's not illegal to have it.

Obviously it gets really tricky to prove someone did or did not use protected information in their hiring/firing decision, so it's clearly safest for HR to avoid having any of that.

Why would a resource department need information from payroll? They aren't the bosses of the employees so it's not like they are making the ultimate hiring decisions.

In your company that may be the case. Some (many, especially public) companies use HR as the initial resume filter. They are supposed to make sure the resume is accurate, the applicant didn't lie about job titles, dates of employment, education, etc, and sometimes the dreaded keyword scanning. Some places they'll also do the initial phone screen to make sure the applicant can form more-or-less coherent sentences. Then they give the person hiring a stack of screened resumes, and that person then does the interviews for the actual position in question.

And I have worked at places where HR could unilaterally veto a given employee based on certain criteria (education, background check, etc).

So do LexusNexis and probably a handful of other data brokers.

That is a total nightmare. How are employers allowed to give that kind of information to Equifax? I do not get why Americans allow this.

It's not different than credit card companies giving payment histories to credit bureaus or insurance companies giving claims history to LexusNexis.

Shouldn't this be handled by a government agency? It seems awfully risky to have unaccountable companies trade your sensitive information around for profit.

The government is at least equally incompetent if not more so, at least if a private entity screws up you can sue.

The government is also not operated on a for-profit basis incentivizing doing the bare minimum level of security to shield yourself from liability.

>The government is also not operated on a for-profit basis incentivizing doing the bare minimum level of security to shield yourself from liability.

No instead they hire contractors for that purpose.

OK, well, while I'm making proposals, let's go ahead and hire people to be employed by the government instead.

The reason the government doesn't do that is talented people don't want to work for them. Virtually all the government jobs are union and pay is primarily based on time served. You'd be getting third rate talent at best.

I don't think that's the real reason, to be honest. More like some combination of anti-hiring ideology and a handful of people getting rich off the process. The British government did it with, apparently, real success. And are government contractors really much better places to work?

I guess we'll see how that turns out with Equifax.

Some of this stuff is handled by the government, such as your driving record (which includes accidents and tickets). You can obtains a copy of yours from your state's DMV.

They aren't totally unaccountable, there is some regulation, notably the Fair Credit Reporting Act, as well as other laws that regulate data brokers.

Americans, in general, are much more comfortable with private for-profit industries handling these sorts of matters over governments.

Anyways, there's absolutely no laws that salaries should be kept secret, your employer can post that information anywhere it wants. In fact, government employees salaries are expressly public information. The reason why employers limit access to salary data is because it keeps salaries lower, it gives them an upper hand in salary negotiations due to information asymmetry. That's why the salaries of professional athletes are public information, they have unions who make sure this information is available.

For me it's a good thing this information is available. I pay lower interest rates, lower insurance premiums, have more access to credit, have no trouble renting before I bought a house.

Yeah, at one place I worked they were able to use that to determine whether people were qualified for means-tested aid in seconds. Which obviously made things faster but it gives you pause to know it's so easy to find out.

If you gather this information in any way from an applicant, you are opening yourself up to a lawsuit that will cost you many multiples of whatever you were hoping to save. Even if you win, which you won't.

Also, "and — if applicants ask — must give them a pay range for the job they are seeking"

So start offering what the job is worth.

are you sure you are replying to the correct comment. Nothing you wrote seems to have anything to do with what I posted:)

Gargoyle is responding to "No word on if they are allowed to use Equifax, etc to pull salary data from?"

This is so dumb. Employers can research candidate history without any chance of getting caught, and it's an obvious goal of most ethical (1st amendment respecting) hackers to make sure it stays that way.

I'm curious, how does the 1st Amendment play into this?

Are employers not people?

My question was more "how does not being allowed to use Equifax violate the First Amendment".

Probably because the first only protects your right to speak, not to read. Querying a database isn’t expression.

...without any chance of getting caught...

Never take that for granted.

Clearly CA needs another state agency to look for employers breaking this law. Heck... why not go full China?

You didn't understand. This kind of situation is very common. It's not that there's someone looking for a certain violation, but that the violation arises in the course of an already started, maybe unrelated investigation.

Actually I don't like this kind of law at all, because it causes random enforcement or in the worst case enables selective enforcement.

Considering that companies like Google and Apple went to illegal extremes to prevent competition for labor and depress employee wages, I find it unlikely that they’re not going to do the same thing here. They’ll probably invent some cryptic, convoluted means to launder the data, and if they ever get caught, pay whatever slap on the wrist fine is the cost of doing this kind of stuff.

I'm as cynical as you are, and even won an award in that lawsuit. However, aren't both companies under different management now? (Tim vs. Steve, etc.)

Apple, maybe. Google, not so much. Still skeptical either way.

The head changes - the process stays the same. Without monetary damages, companys would just continue to hire CEOs to take the blame, like a ablative hull.

Calling this a gender issue is like saying "we're raising the minimum wage to help women".

The law benefits male employees just as much as it benefits women. Lawmakers and PR teams just like to spin everything as addressing the gender gap to appeal to society-wide damsel in distress syndrome.

Not sure about that. It helps anyone who has been systematically discriminated in hiring against over time.

When you start a new job, it's not uncommon for your new employer to offer you a salary that's X% higher than your old one, using that as a base. If your old salary was lower due to discrimination, you'd start with a lower base, and would get less in the new job than someone who was not previously discriminated against.

Not even outright discrimination.

Data shows women tend to do much less negotiation than men. If you didn't negotiate your first salary that can compound for the rest of your career even if you negotiate later salaries.

It helps anybody who's underpaid. One being underpaid doesn't imply or even suggest that one was discriminated against. I was underpaid my first job, and it wasn't due to discrimination. I would imagine that the majority of people who are underpaid are underpaid not due to discrimination, but due to poor negotiating ability, lack of awareness of the market rate, etc.

My analogy of "we're raising the minimum wage to help women/<insert minority>" still stands.

Also there's evidence to suggest that the gender gap is a myth http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...

>I would imagine that the majority of people who are underpaid are underpaid not due to discrimination, but due to poor negotiating ability, lack of awareness of the market rate, etc.

That is due to discrimination. Discriminating against someone who is socially awkward and can't negotiate isn't any different than discriminating against someone for their gender. Both factors are things people can't generally control. One might even go so far as saying it is worse than discriminating based on religion, given the general view of religion being a choice one can actively change.

Historically we have been fine with such discrimination, but it wasn't too long ago the true was based on all the forms of discrimination we now view as wrong.

> Discriminating against someone who is socially awkward and can't negotiate isn't any different than discriminating against someone for their gender. Both factors are things people can't generally control.

Actually, it's very different, precisely because most people can control social awkwardness, and further, a socially awkward person by definition can be difficult to work with others, which is a major component to just about any job.

> precisely because most people can control social awkwardness

This is a wild generalisation at best. I know many people with crippling social awkwardness that they would give anything to be able to control to any degree but they can't.

> a socially awkward person by definition can be difficult to work with others

This I will concede is more true than not.

Real wages for everybody have been roughly flat for decades even as productivity and GDP/capita have skyrocketed.

I wouldn't necessarily call this exploitation since I think there's a broader issue in play, but it's not exactly like everybody, except this one isolated discriminated segment, is just thriving. And in particular I thinking framing this as an issue of discrimination works as a red herring against the aforementioned broader issue. That issue being that general increases in productivity and the percent of qualified individuals are resulting in a downward pressure on wages. The rapid growth in outsourcing, increases in foreign workers, free trade, and other such things also work to compound these issues.

I do not believe there is any clear solution, but I think it's a shame that the focus is rarely placed on this issue. And when it is, it's often more in the context of jingoism than the issue itself.

I think you have it a bit backwards... you're suggesting that we should sideline equality and discrimination issues and focus on raising the boat for everyone.

But the economy doesn't really work that way, it's the opposite. When the economy is doing well, fewer people complain... it doesn't matter if my neighbor makes more than me as long as I'm improving at a decent clip.

But when the economy does less well, it's only reasonable for everyone to look at the inequities.

But just because fewer people complain about inequities in a good economy doesn't mean that we should forget about them and solely focus on the economy overall. Curing inequities is a moral goal in its own right.

Right now the economy, by most all of the normal metrics, is doing extremely well. Yes real wages are flat, but the stock market is hitting record highs and accelerating, unemployment (even more realistic measures like U6) is lower than it's been in a long time, inflation is stable, and so on. So I don't think it's really reasonable to take as an assumption that people behave in a certain way during a bad economy and imply we're in a bad economy. I would completely agree with you [about the state of the economy], but this is not a majority view so we can't extrapolate outward.

And a bit of a tangent here but the "it doesn't matter if my neighbor makes more than me as long as I'm improving at a decent clip" is also a bit dubious. One social study that has repeated and reproduced countless times is that people are happier being the king among rats than a pauper among kings. People ought care about themselves objectively. In reality we measure ourselves relatively. Kind of a bad trait for a species seeking to make global progress, but again - that's all a tangent that's way out there!

As for my own view, the way to "cure inequities" is to ensure equal opportunity. It turns out time and again the medicine is rather worse than the disease when we start working to ensure equality of results. I'm actually in favor of this law since I see no positive result from employers asking for employee past earnings. What's offered to somebody should not be based on what they earned in the past like some sort of soft caste. It also takes another burden off applicants. However, I would be rather shocked to see this have any meaningful effect whatsoever. An employer is going to have a high price and a low price. I don't see removing one tidbit of information making all that of substantial changes to either, or the applicant's ability to more effectively hit the high. But I would absolutely love to be proven wrong.

> Right now the economy, by most all of the normal metrics, is doing extremely well. Yes real wages are flat, but the stock market is hitting record highs and accelerating ...

When stocks are up and wages are flat, it means that those with wealth get wealthier and a faster rate than those without wealth. Inequality worsens, and advancement is based not on what one is doing, but on what they started with. Not exactly equal opportunity.

I think it's fair to say it benefits all workers, but benefits underpaid groups, such as women, more than most.

Same law getting passed all at once in multiple places: makes me wonder if (bigger) companies with access to government figured out some angle on this.

Does this law prevent employees from sharing salaries though?

I could see companies low-balling when they don't have salary information, but then going up if they find out they're not matching/beating the candidates current salary, which would effectively be the same thing as today.

Can they simply seek a recommendation from a firm operating in a state or region that DOES allow seeking salary data.

If I merely ask how much I ought to offer and provide the applicants data then it would seem no law is breached.

> With the number of states introducing legislation like this it will be interesting to see if you can tease out any state or city based GDP growth/shrinking based on these laws.

Probably not reliably; the numbers are still small and there are way too may potential confounding factors.

> The goal is to narrow the gender wage gap.

This makes the law seem even more ridiculous to me. Do we really need the government stepping into the hiring process like this and micromanaging? It feels like they treating us like children incapable of tying our own shoes or something

Apparently, yes, as this gap has not narrowed.

This seems like a very low-impact way to ensure that your past salary history is not used against you. Why should it be? And what is the burden of simply disallowing a line of questioning, with no burdensome reporting or auditing requirements?

If the gap was virtually unmeasurable before, and it hasn't narrowed, it doesn't exactly seem like a case for more regulation.

It's weird how well-measured an "unmeasurable" value is...

> This makes the law seem even more ridiculous to me.

Why is it more ridiculous? We already have laws against discrimination based on gender. If the issue isn't being solved, while being hands off, it seems natural to try something different.

> It feels like they treating us like children incapable of tying our own shoes or something

Well it does seem employers are incapable of eliminating the gender wage gap so perhaps the treatment is appropriate. Not that I blame them.. being unbiased is extremely difficult and requires a conscious effort.

Except for the fact that male and female pay for the same job, and experience level are statistically the same and there is no actual pay gap.

The $0.79 on the $1 shit has been debunked a million times yet is still persists for some reason.

The last good study I read showed a gap of something like 5% which was in the statistical margin and was largely accounted for by negotiation tactics.

For an anecdote I (a male) earn less than many other men in my same job, and same experience level. Why because I am TERRIBLE at salary negotiation, (or any other price negotiation, i.e I prefer the CarMax pay what the sticker says model to the haggle over every last $1 model)

At the same time, I have been involved in the hiring of both male and female employees in the IT world, never once at any time I have ever seen, heard or been a part of discussions where a person would be offered to get a lower salary simply because of their gender.

Every hiring process I have ever been involved in the Pay scale is always set long before we even have any applicants. We have a budget, wages for each position are set based on the budget the gender or personal circumstances of the person have no factor in it. We have to find someone that not only fits the job requirements, but also the salary requirements. That can be a challenge, and we have had to pass on candidates simply because we could not meet their salary demands.

Moving jobs is the best way to get a large pay increase, especially if you're underpaid in your current job. Once you tell them how much you currently make, you've screwed yourself. This is a negotiating tactic used by employers to know how much they'll set as their upper bound for pay.

Your employer may have strict pay bounds set, but a lot of places don't. The pay can vary highly between candidates, especially if the candidates are weak negotiators. If you disclose your current salary, you're a weak negotiator, but employers put a lot of pressure on you to disclose it. I tend to tell employers that I'm not allowed to disclose my salary, which ends that part of the conversation, but most people don't know to do this.

This law benefits you just as much as it does women.

I dont disagree with much of what you said, I am mainly speaking out against the pay gap myth.

As far as disclosing pay, I alway deflect it and treat the question as them asking me what my salary expectations are, which likely ends up doing the same thing, but I dont think I have ever told a company what my salary was at a previous job

My current employer never asked, they said "this job pays X per year" did get a small increase over that first offer but not alot.

At this point in my career though (17 years in) I focus less on raw salary and more on working environment, I would rather take a lower salary to have a care free easy environment than make 15% more but have a high stress high demanding employer. Been there done that... not for me.

> I am mainly speaking out against the pay gap myth

I'm sure you're very smart and know better than all[1] the current[2] research[3].

[1] https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/publication-download/...

[2] https://www.accenture.com/gb-en/gender-equality-research-201...

[3] https://www.strath.ac.uk/business/research/research/highligh...

[1] - this is a good report, but it uses a different definition of "gender pay gap" than parent - it does not analyze a "pay gap" for the same position/same experience(i.e. gender discrimination), but rather the aggregated difference in payments men and women receive for their work, which are affected by a multitude of factors(referenced in the study) - men working more, full-time, longer careers, different types of jobs, etc..

[2] - there are no sources or data analysis in their report, it's just infographics. Even then, their definition of the gender pay gap is similar to [1]:

"The report flags a clear risk, however: the choices that young women undergrads are making now are setting them up to enter the workforce with fewer digital skills, less mentoring advice and lower interest in pursuing high-paying jobs, compared with their male peers. "

"Adding to this imbalance is the fact that women are much less likely than men to have paid work (50 percent and 76 percent, respectively). This contributes to a hidden pay gap that increases the economic inequities between women and men. Based on the hidden pay gap, our research shows that for every $100 a woman earns, a man earns $258. Since women are usually responsible for the bulk of unpaid work, such as child care and housekeeping, the effects of the hidden pay gap for them are immense."

[3] - link to report is dead

At a minimum it does appear I have a better ability to read and understand what I am reading because none of those sources refute what i stated.

Number 1 is not comparing Equal Work and experiance, infact one of their summary bullet points is how part time women earn less than Full Time men... ummm yea. Part time people earn less than Full Time people.. That is not a earth shattering fact nor it is a symptom of sexism

They also point out that Part time women earn MORE than part time men...

Further most of the study looks at Overall wages in general with out comparing actual job roles to job role. This is a general misdirection often used by people that want to invent sexism where there is none. The fact that women often choose careers in fields that are traditionally lowering paying like Social Work, or Teaching is not a symptom of sexism

Number 2 is not a study

Number 3 is 404 page not found

> Once you tell them how much you currently make, you've screwed yourself.

This is the truth. When I finished my CS degree and started looking for work, I had a recruiter tell me I shouldn't expect any pay over my previous job, and since my previous job was a software testing internship for $12.75/hr, I shouldn't expect more than $15/hr or so. I said "Yeah, no. I'm not taking a software engineering job for barely over $30k/year." He insisted that's how the industry works, even though my previous job was just an internship and wasn't even an engineering position.

I basically told him to pound sand, especially after he told me that at that position, I'd be expected to work 45-50 hours/week. Sure, I needed work, but I wasn't destitute.

In India, your resume qualifies for interview only if you disclose your previous salary.

I don't think its mandated by law, but thats's how the system works anyway.

I've been through 2 employers and working at my third. I've never disclosed my salary pre-interview. All three jobs at Bangalore, India. So no, that's not how the system works.

That is absolutely how it works.

Unless you disclose your prior CTC no one will call you for your interview.

Start ups are a different case.

The best response to 'here's a penny more than you were making' is multiple offers.

The second best response is 'your offer is better, but inspires zero loyalty. If you want me to stay for longer than it takes for your competitors to get back to me with an offer, you'll improve that offer.'

> The $0.79 on the $1 shit has been debunked a million times yet is still persists for some reason.

Because a certain group of people insists that the original $0.77 on the $1 statistic DID control for career choice and the like...even though it didn't. Any claims to the contrary are obviously misogynistic lies continuing the patriarchy. \eyeroll\

I've always said...if the pay gap really WAS that big, then why would employers bother to hire men?

http://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/05/business/the-quiet-allure-...

That did in fact happen and was being done by economists. This was about 35 years ago though, so I have no idea if the effect is still in place

That questioning of the gap being that big makes me think about this exchange Milton Friedman had with some college students in like the 70s or something regarding equal pay for equal work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsIpQ7YguGE

> I've always said...if the pay gap really WAS that big, then why would employers bother to hire men?

The proposed answer is that the employers are sexist. Even large corporations don't always act rationally.

> The $0.79 on the $1 shit has been debunked a million times yet is still persists for some reason.

It persists because it's a real average.

And uh, it's not the case that the pay gap has been disproven in many industries.

Yes, it's a real average that proves that a female teacher makes less than a male mechanical engineer. How does that help anyone, other than pushing a false narrative?

Well, it might tell us the shape of discrimination is less overt and more structural. Why exactly was it that out of my CS graduating class of 100 there was 1 woman?

Given the supplied anecdote, it is because 99 men and 1 woman completed the requirements for a CS degree, for whatever reasons the individuals decided go do so.

Let's step aside the point of generalizing one anecdote to be representative, however. Can we really assign the disparity solely to microaggressions against women? Would we feel the same if the split were 75/25,or 51/49? What is the threshold of equality with respect to noise?

I don't... don't really get why the above poster's observation is not inline given national graduation rates for CS. Seems within the expected distribution, no?

> Can we really assign the disparity solely to microaggressions against women? Would we feel the same if the split were 75/25,or 51/49? What is the threshold of equality with respect to noise?

Why don't you use your powerful male thoughts to do some basic bayesian modeling and come up with some proposals? Many people have so maybe you can borrow their work, if that sounds like too much effort.

But hey, to do an analysis we need some data! Let me provide you with a recent and impartial source: https://nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/#/

Here's a fun one: Stats suggest in the US that men:women declare majors ~3:1 across all engineering disciplines but ~2:1 in computer science at the outset. However, when we look at graduation rates proportional to the whole of their class in 2016 we saw: computer sciences (17.9%), engineering (19.3%), physical sciences (39%) and mathematics (43.1%).

Computer science has an abnormally high attrition rate despite a increased chance of declaration for major. Other similarly complex and abstract disciplines such as mathematics (which CS leans upon heavily to get any real work done) do not have such a falloff.

So gosh. Where do YOU draw the line? Care to show us the work for how you derived it? I'd love to know.

I could probably get numbers for major vocational education startups. I think I might go pursue that. Since many of those are online, they'll have less noise from on-campus harassment.

> Can we really assign the disparity solely to microaggressions against women?

No. Did I suggest that? I don't think I did. All I mentioned was structural disparity, which is likely multivariate. Microaggressions is a strange thing to jump to from the conversation, compared to say, the effect of video game marketing on preferences, the attitudes of parents and guidance counselors, or parental fears about internet predators and private PCs for children.

I don't have data readily available on this, but there weren't that many women declaring CS to start with, and I kind of expect that if we divided CS freshmen men into 'has written a program before' and 'has not', attrition rates for women would track the 'has not' fairly closely.

> Would we feel the same if the split were 75/25,or 51/49?

I don't know where the bright line is, and there probably isn't one. If it exists, it'd probably exist be between those to ratios. But the fact is it's more imbalanced than either ratio suggested, which should probably motivate policy changes more strongly.

It tells us either: there are a handful of professions that are drawing down the average. OR: That a pervasive wage gap exists.

Either is unacceptable, don't you agree?

Why are you so eager to assert the labor of women is obviously worth less?

> Why are you so eager to assert the labor of women is obviously worth less?

What an insane and condescending assumption.

I support focusing effort on training women for high paying jobs. I support researching why women don't study STEM degrees as much as men, and working to mitigate that gap.

I do not, however, support paying those that study less valuable "feel-good" degrees more money just because more women choose to go down that path.

And finally, I don't need to actively "support" women making the same as men within the same professions, because that's already the reality we live in.

I don't agree that every profession should make the same amount of money. If that's what you find unacceptable, I find it acceptable.

Which false narrative is this? That women get paid less?

If an average exists then an average exists. We can talk about how it's structured, but the existence of an average pay gap is hard to dispute at this point.

If you find that narrative offensive, ask yourself why. I suspect the motivations are not very laudable.

> Except for the fact that male and female pay for the same job, and experience level are statistically the same and there is no actual pay gap.

Sure, but if women have a harder time getting promoted then they also have a harder time getting the same job and experience. Thus, even if women are being paid the same when they have the same job and experience, the discrimination still exists and they are still as a group prone to being paid less. Perhaps we should name it something more appropriate than wage gap though since the nuance is lost.

http://www.businessinsider.com/women-are-less-likely-to-get-...

That still doesn't support the idea there is a need to "minimize the wage gap" by controlling what questions an employer can ask. If such a bias does exist it won't be eliminated because they aren't allowed to ask a single question.

Most research I've seen show that it's the women who are failing to take initiative in asking for raises, rather than the employer purposefully holding them back.

Yet the pretext of these laws is always under the assumption it's the employer actively doing something to block it instead of passively not offering it to people who don't ask (for whatever cultural or biological reason), likewise the women are not active but also passive in this situation.

Additionally you made the same jump in logic to assume women aren't getting the same jobs, the study was limited to promotions and this can't be easily assumed either.

This isn't about blaming the victim either but if you're going to micromanage it at least have to clear motivations and end goals that are being controlled for...

> If such a bias does exist it won't be eliminated because they aren't allowed to ask a single question.

Agreed.

> Most research I've seen show that it's the women who are failing to take initiative in asking for raises, rather than the employer purposefully holding them back. Yet the pretext of these laws is always under the assumption it's the employer actively doing something to block it instead of passively not offering it to people who don't ask (for whatever cultural or biological reason), likewise the women are not active but also passive in this situation.

I don't get that impression but that's a fair point.

> Additionally you made the same jump in logic to assume women aren't getting the same jobs, the study was limited to promotions and this can't be easily assumed either.

Is it unreasonable to assume that someone with a higher position and more responsibilities would have an easier time landing a higher position job at another company? Or perhaps I'm not understanding what you're saying?

> This isn't about blaming the victim either but if you're going to micromanage it at least have to clear motivations and end goals that are being controlled for...

Fair point.

The next step I'd like to see is for them to prohibit asking where you went to college. You still need to show credentials, but if you went to an accredited 4-year institution and got a BS in, say, chemistry, you would say you had an accredited BS in chemistry, and there would be a gov't database against which that claim could be checked. Someone who couldn't afford the tuition at a ritzy private school but still completed the same requirements for a BS in chemistry from an accredited state school would have the same access to jobs requiring an accredited BS in chemistry.

The next step after that would be for accreditation to be made more flexible, accommodating combinations of work-study, self-study, community college, private lab classes, and standardized testing to qualify a person for an accredited degree without having attended a traditional university at all.

Competition for admission to expensive, elite schools that apparently don't teach any better but simply pick the applicants who have already made themselves elite and charge them exorbitant fees to grant a brand-name credential which then boosts the value of the brand itself is distorting actual EDUCATION beyond all recognition.

The sooner employers have to judge applicant quality by means other than perceived eliteness of their school, the more diverse the paths to employment success can become, which ought to be a goal of both the left and the right politically.

> The next step after that would be for accreditation to be made more flexible, accommodating combinations of work-study, self-study, community college, private lab classes, and standardized testing to qualify a person for an accredited degree without having attended a traditional university at all.

You can already get an accredited 4-year (or graduate) degree without traditional University; e.g., through Western Governor's University, which is an accredited but non-traditional, competency-based, online school that’s been operating for almost 20 years.

https://www.wgu.edu/why_WGU/competency_based_approach

I am curious as to why this makes it more ridiculous? If you think it is government micromanaging, wouldn't it be that no matter what issue they were trying to solve?

I don't see a problem with it. I never saw the reason why any employer needed to know what someone was paid before. A job is worth around $X to your company to be performed. What I was paid in my previous job has absolutely no bearing on that.

But you can always use it to your leverage too, I have lied about my previous salary before and it worked out great.

I've also been told that they would verify it before, so that would be out.

The law also requires that a pay range be provided by the employer upon request. I'm completely in favor of this law. Those who are strong negotiators will still be able to negotiate how they wish, and those who are in less fortunate positions won't have their pasts come back to bite them.

Is there any reason that you can't continue to do that?

Because your current employer may report salary information to one of those data brokers like Equifax and your prospective employer requests that information for verification. Lying on a job application is a good way to get get denied the position.

Why should you have to do that? If they can't ask, you don't have to lie, and wouldn't that be a better world to live in?

> It feels like they treating us like children incapable of tying our own shoes or something

Well if the objective assessment of the evidence didn't reveal a wage gap based on gender, then maybe we could agree.

But it seems, left to their own devices, many companies perpetuate the wage gap.

So what this does is further increase the cost of doing already shady and illegal business by making a practice that's almost universally bad for workers anyways and made that illegal to.

These laws don't result in jail, they result in fines. So it's the government engaging in it's population-mandated practice of making illegal practices more expensive.

What about this

> We get the market rates through a company called Radford. [1]

Is "Radford" still allowed to pull salary data?

https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-pay-people-at-basecamp-f1d...

37s/basecamp uses Radford for market information - what is the going rate for a person with X responsibilities. This law bans the use of an individual's salary history to make a salary offer to that individual.

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