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
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.
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.
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.
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'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...
[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
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
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.
I don't think its mandated by law, but thats's how the system works anyway.
Unless you disclose your prior CTC no one will call you for your interview.
Start ups are a different case.
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.'
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?
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
The proposed answer is that the employers are sexist. Even large corporations don't always act rationally.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
Either is unacceptable, don't you agree?
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.
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.
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-...
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...
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.