Can making employers share pay in job postings help fix the gender pay gap?
19thnews.org
19thnews.org
I did some rough-and-dirty calculations based on US census data (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI725219) and the 83-cent statistic in the article. Turns out non-Latina white women actually earn _more_: about $1.03 for every $1.00 earned by non-Latino white men.
A lack of transparency will do more to hurt gender and racial equality in the long run. It's better to leave the statistic in and explain why the numbers are as they are instead of turning a blind eye.
Because that's not necessarily a valid assumption.
Louis CK, Snooki, Vanna White, Charlie Sheen, Nicole Richie, and Ryan Lochte are all considered white, but have Latino ancestry.
Maybe the author could re-post a version that has a better breakdown of race and genders?
Current one excludes black males, Asian males as well as Hispanic whites. Also doesn’t aggregate per occupation, seniority nor immigration status. And despite mainly focusing on gender equity omits white woman?
There has been a trend in social studies lately to just group whites and Asians together when convenient in order to avoid discussing certain issue [0]. Hope the author isn’t trying the same tactics here [1].
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ex-recruiter-accu...
[1] https://nextshark.com/students-of-color-washington-asians-wi...
Other than that though, standardizing pay will balance the playing field towards smaller companies. Bigger companies will face pressure to standardize pay packages per level (see: Coinbase, Uber) which limits their ability to reward top performers. Smaller companies won't have that same pressure. The pay gap is largely a function of how much each gender negotiates on average and if you take away negotiating then people will just leave to places where they're paid what they're worth.
Smart women who are capable of STEM careers largely choose different careers, if they can. Whats wrong with that? Doesn't assuming that there is something to "fix" here imply that women are broken? It's already clear that removing the barriers to enter these fields doesn't make them substantially more attractive to women, so whats left to "fix"?
> removing the barriers to enter these fields doesn't make them substantially more attractive to women
Any why is that the case? There are a lot of assumptions about the types of jobs that men/women should be doing, and there are also a lot of cultural assumptions about those job positions themselves and what they expect of their workers. There are also still many jobs which are not receptive to one gender or the other, either by their cultures or the cultures of their customers. This is something that should be fixed, even if it doesn't impact the choices that people make, although we do know that cultural expectations have a huge impact on choice.
We also don't only have cultural expectations about jobs women should have. We also have expectations about jobs men have. For example, many cultures expect men to make personal sacrifices in order to earn more money. Gender expectations usually affect both genders at the same time, rarely one in isolation.
How are you going to correct humanities concepts of gender that have existed for a long time?
Nowhere did I suggest as much. I am simply suggesting that the gender roles we ascribe to children early on leave permanent impressions upon what they choose, and maybe more importantly, what others expect of them.
We raise children with an expectation that women need to be “protected” from certain jobs (and other expectations), then after two decades of that conditioning, we ask them to make a “choice”. Of course those “choices” end up being biased. But they didn’t fully choose, they were raised to believe certain things about themselves and their surroundings.
But we do have plenty of examples where the expectations of society have influenced their choices in a way that conflicts with the free will of men and women.
I am sure we can both come up with many examples of things that society expects men to do, and things that society expects women to do. And, examples of scenarios where people would be treated very differently if they were a man or a woman. Obviously, these are a factor in people's life experiences, and therefore a factor in the way people make decisions. We may not expect them to choose differently given their own free will, but we also know that they are not making these decisions due to free will alone.
It's tiring (and amazing) to see people still hang on to that thoroughly debunked position in 2022. It's still comparing the salary of a CEO to a kindergarten teacher.
We can extrapolate what's going to happen.
People who are bad at negotiating will get more money, people who are good at negotiating will get less and will be pushed more to contracting / entrepreneurship.
If the pay gap actually existed for same level positions, and was the 83c per dollar as is commonly quoted, why wouldn't there be all-female firms, paying their employees say 90 cents on the dollar, such that their overall payroll costs are much lower for the same quality work as a workplace with mostly males. Shouldn't that company be able to outcompete other companies?
If group A is more willing than group B to sacrifice their health and relationships to improve their value at an office, how can groups A and B ever be equally represented beyond entry level positions?
The ideal that everyone’s skills can be ranked using material criteria is an oversimplification of society.
And it's not about gender or race (or other) politics. It's about making a market efficient and fair. That's why no one would shop at a place where nothing had a price label.
Norway does this. And you can basically do it for all sorts of state employees (teachers with X degree and Y years experience get Y0,000 ±5%)
That would never work in tech. And the higher paying firm you go to, the less it works. High performers in FAANG can have refresher and bonus multipliers of 2.5x the base performance rating. In HFT high performers total comp can be double or triple low performers' TC.
I would think it shouldn't work for teachers either. In the US there is a marked difference in teacher compensation between good districts and bad districts and you see the quality difference in the students that come out of those schools.