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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

A kind of pay gap can still sneak in by having roles that are typically favoured by women being less well paid. Also via women being penalised for taking time off to have children (in the US, probably quite a significant thing given the paucity of holidays). And another pay gap that's still quite insidious is when women are passed over for promotion to the next level that has a higher pay grade.

This is not quite as bad as two people doing the exact same job being paid differently, but it can still lead to a pay gap, and some of those factors are worth being conscious of and addressing.

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I'm a startup founder and I'd like to understand this:

Let's say we have a pay scale that pays you ~15% raise yoy + years of experience.

We have 2 people for this example - one male and one female.

Both join in at 5 yrs of experience and make 100k (example numbers) as intermediate engineers.

A year later both are making 115k.

Now the female engineer goes on maternity leave for 16 months - she get paid at the rate of 115k/yr for that period.

The male on the other hand - makes a little over 130k. On top of that he's at 7 years of experience so he's now a senior engineer - that promotion beings his salary to 150k.

The female engineer is at 115k with 6 yrs of real experience while her colleague is making 150k.

On the face this looks super unfair, but is it really?

She's getting paid based on years of working experience and those 16 months can't count towards it of course

Is my train of thought wrong?

Is my train of thought wrong?

If the job hasn't changed and each of the two people can still do what's required of them equally well, why should one earn less than the other? The man shouldn't be earning more because he's got more years at the job. He should have been promoted in to a higher paying and more responsible role. That's what experience should count towards. If he hasn't been promoted and he's still doing the same work then there's no reason for him to be earning more than the woman.

People should be paid for doing a particular job, not for being more experienced, or older, or 'better'. Promote the people who are better and more experienced.

This is the beauty of the Basecamp pay model. What the job pays increases even when someone isn't doing it, so when they come back to work they'll be on the higher salary because the market values that job more.

Then you get "females tend to be promoted less frequently than males" and the argument continues.

This makes sense to me. Thanks for providing another view point.

Women's time producing offspring is necessary for society and men should not have an advantage because that responsibility is of the gentler sex.

Your train of thought is not necessarily right or wrong, it's simply logical based on your assumption salary is a function of working experience.

Few companies truly pay on working experience, many pay on favoritism, sexism, productivity, luck, loyalty and other things.

But in a world where companies pay, promote, and reward on experience, let's further examine the disparity of men v. women.

Few would argue that in a world enthralled with grow, women producing offspring is a necessity for the human race.

If a woman is participating in required activities for the furthering of overall society, why should they be penalized for that?

So, I think your train of thought is wrong, but because I disagree with your premise that people should be paid on experience.

"She's getting paid based on years of working experience and those 16 months can't count towards it of course."

This is basically an arbitrary choice, you're still paying their salary so why not continue everything else? Similarly a male engineer might want to take 16 months paternity leave.

Allowing 16 month long full-paid leave for new parents would be an amazing policy though. This also seems like an issue with this example as IME there are very, very few companies this generous.

We are paying salary as a perk. Legally we don't have to.

With that in mind, why should those 16 months count to experience?

Work was not done by said engineer, and experience was not gained.

The other engineer worked, gained experience that's valuable to the company -> hence the raise + promotion.

Well you don't have to, it's a perk just as you don't have to pay their salary. Which is why the distinction is pretty arbitrary. And experience isn't the only reason to keep up pay level for example you want to remain competitive with the local market and inflation. Presumably you also value this engineer and want them to come back to the company rather than find a new one with better pay if they feel they are falling behind whilst on leave.

You could also make an argument about the gain in experience due to motherhood and being able to take an extended break from work. I believe I'm a stronger developer for having two children for example.

I didn't recheck your calculation (assuming it's correct).

The problem often arises because it makes more sense for the mother of a baby to take a longer leave than the father (e.g. breast feeding).

Therefore, that time shouldn't count as missed work experience (although it factually is).

One can discuss if 16 months is the right time frame (or maybe say for 6 months it doesn't count as missed work experience, anything above that does). That's a different discussion.

As the father of 5 I can say that many things would have been easier if I had been able to take a long paternity leave when the kids were born. The first year is an exhausting one and having two of you around to share the work and be moral support would have made it all much easier.

It would be better in all kinds of ways, more equitable, better for the mother and child, better for the company, if the father got just as much time off as the mother.

> that time shouldn't count as missed work experience

Assuming (big assumption) that they started at exactly equal skill, and learn at the same pace...well, practice makes perfect. One will be better than the other.

Ive taken sabbaticals in the past, and it sure as hell affected by skills vs someone who didn't.

I don't think we should compare voluntary time off to raising a family. I don't have kids, and I know it's voluntary to have kids, so one could make the argument we should equate both.

But the reality is that when raising a family almost always the female takes more time off work than the male. So, governments and companies should incentivize that both take equal time off and that it has the same effect on their respective future careers.

It definitely is not equal. Having a kid likely means much less time for side projects and continuous learning and has a huge impact on sleep quality. It will most definitely have a negative impact on skill and productivity unless one makes up for it with more grit and harder work.

Totally agree that the only viable solution is for men and women to share the burden more equally and that starts with near equal leave, as you said.

Won't change the advantage that people with no kids will have, but they are giving up on "the most wonderful thing in the world" to get it, after all.

Did your sabbatical affect future pay raises?

Raises, vacations (when I was at companies that gave them based on tenure), promotion considerations, you name it.

I recovered a bit since I was working on side projects during sabbatical and could talk for them in interviews, so switching companies helped a tad (though finding someone who would hire someone with a big hole on their resume wasn't easy).

There's also just stuff that you only learn on the job and can improve on indefinitely, like managing people, projects, etc that obviously was behind by the amount of time I was off work and meant I wasn't up to snuff for some opportunities.

I have worked with people who have as many years of experience as me but are at a very different seniority level, for example by learning less (or more) in their prior jobs than I did.

If you were to hire them and me for a role where that difference is relevant (as it often is), we shouldn't be in the same seniority of job and shouldn't receive the same salary.

Most companies have a particular pay scale for a role - based on experience, position etc. (let's say a formula exists)

I'm arguing about this with the above mentioned model

Yeah, even in that model, number of years of experience correlates only loosely with performance and with seniority in how someone thinks, communicates, leads, and produces.

Are you advocating ignoring those factors in how to compensate or internally promote, considering them only in the decisions of whether to hire into / fire from a given role?

If so that's not very common in the software industry and didn't seem to be what you were saying (I might have misunderstood).

I did once work at a startup with formula-based comp. However the "level" they used in that formula was intended to consider all of the above factors and was not a strict mapping to length of career.

This is exactly the reason why there's talk of making paternity leave for fathers as long and mandatory as maternity leave. It has the added advantage of getting young fathers more involved with their kids, as well as being there for the mother after she's delivered a baby.

The downside is of course that mandatory leave sounds weird.

I'm not aware of any company or country that makes even maternity leave mandatory for the worker. And in every case where the kid isn't born directly from the mother's body, such as via surrogacy arrangements or via adoption, there's no inherent reason why one parent is biologically more likely to need time to recover than the other.

That said, it's absolutely a good thing to offer good paternity leave and encourage fathers to share the burden.

Social structures can help make this more possible than a small startup could otherwise afford.

For example, in Quebec where I currently live, there's a provincially run parental insurance plan which funds a benefit of partially paid parental leave by a payroll deduction, which employers sometimes augment further but the provincial part still goes a long way.

It's mandatory for employers and self-employed people to fund the system; use of benefits, and the choice between different benefit packages, is at the option of the new-parent worker.

Replace the “male” engineer with “female” and then ask the same question.

My answer would be the exact same which is why I asked the question.

Then i don't think there is a problem with your logic - at the end of the day i think the question is: are you treating people fairly? and if you can honestly say that [gender] is not playing a role in compensation then you are fine.

You are discriminating against a temporary disability, no?

Basecamp's maternity/paternity policy is "Paid Parental Leave: When you welcome a new baby, Basecamp encourages you to take up to 16 weeks maternity leave and up to 6 weeks paternity leave, at 100% paid salary. Single fathers, or primary care givers, can also take up to 16 weeks." (correct as of 2016)

As I understand it that's amazing compared to most American companies. It's roughly equivalent to what you get in progressive European countries.

Scandinavian countries have more like a year parental leave.

It's comparable to mainland Europe, and better than some: in Netherland, I believe paternity leave has just been expanded from 2 days to 2 weeks. 6 weeks is significantly better, but probably falls short of what Scandinavian parents get.

Paternity leave is still shocking in many countries.

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