California passes law requiring companies to reveal pay by race, gender
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
I really don't understand the politics here. Isn't this way more likely to sew even more polarisation?
It's only companies with 100 or more employees. That's a big clue that suggests why those categories.
The EEOC already requires all private employers in the US with 100 or more employees to annually report demographic workforce data, including race and sex data [1].
I'd bet that California picked those categories, and only those categories, and only made it apply to 100+ employee companies to make it easily fit in with that.
I suspect that companies are already required to collect this information, so the extra burden from this law is mostly around how to report it.
but in all seriousness, when you make optimize for the metric, the metrics will cease to reflect reality. I can see this easily being used for to prevent people from negotiating as individuals because this will allow companies to blanket drop all salaries in the guise of "being fair."
That's an argument for unions, not an argument against this law.
Also an old trick of toxic middle management. How do you keep people below you from eating you alive? Treat some of them better than others. They will focus on conflicts among each other instead of holding you accountable.
Wake me up when this increases the compensation of anyone.
Imagine that there is a company that is entirely fair and pays people solely based on their seniority at that company. Currently, that company only has employees of race/gender combination A, with various tenures. If a new employee of race/gender combination B joins the company, the employer will look as if they're underpaying race/gender combination B, even though race/gender combination A and B would be paid the same, given the same seniority.
Because the aggregation discards useful information that would explain the disparity, it can induce in error. There are also other effects such as Simpson's paradox [0] that show disparity when data is aggregated, but has a different effect direction when analyzed in more detail.
Reporting this information is an improvement over no reporting, but I'm not particularly optimistic that it will always be looked at with the proper statistical background to interpret it correctly.
Probably because overwhelmingly straight people made this law. But only certain biases get special treatment. This is a problem with these kinds of rules privileging certain groups in the name of equality. Inevitably other groups who deserve ‘reparation’ will ask, why not me too?
Does that list has to single out Jews when it comes to race as well? What's even an individual's race? Some label the Californian society imposes on individuals or what the individual claims they" identify" as to begin with? Who decides the race of their employees? the employer? Will employees have to disclose it to their employer? Same with sexual orientation, would employees have to come out to their employer in order to make such list?
These laws are inane.
The history of state-mandated lists of gay people cautions against this impulse.
Arguing for LGBT persons in the first half of your comment and then continuing with this is intensely ironic to the point of myself being unsure if that’s actually what you intended.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...