Eliminate the Gender Pay Gap by Banning Salary Negotiations | Hacker News Reader

Eliminate the Gender Pay Gap by Banning Salary Negotiations

washingtonpost.com

When I read stuff like this

>EU pushes 40% quota for women on boards [1]

My jaw just like ... drops. Just image the OUTRAGE that would be caused if the headline was this

>EU pushes 50% quota for women in coal mines

I am all for equality, but just handing everything to women on a silver platter, and making rash decisions because they are a different gender is just stupid policy making imo.

>"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." (Goodhart's Law) [2]

[1] http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/65f494e6-f5e7-11e1-a6c2-00144...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

>When I read stuff like this "EU pushes 40% quota for women on boards" My jaw just like ... drops. Just image the OUTRAGE that would be caused if the headline was this "EU pushes 50% quota for women in coal mines"

[Edited because my first attempt at quotes was screwing up]

There might be a difference between demanding equal representation in governance and equal representation in low-level labor. In both cases I want the best person for the job to have the job, but in one case, the job involves representing the interests of a diverse group.

> I am all for equality, but just handing everything to women on a silver platter

If we were handing things to _a woman_ on a silver platter, that'd be a problem. This is more along the lines of insisting that every state, even lousy ol' Arkansas, empty Wyoming, and teeny tiny Rhode Island each get at least three seats in Congress.

It's the job of board members to represent the interests of a diverse group of shareholders. Do male and female shareholders somehow have different interests - men want shareholder value maximized while women want something else?

It's a false problem (or manufactured?). I personally think that discrimination of the sort that started this movement has long been eradicated for the most part. That's why the goal-posts have now moved on past actual cases of discrimination and more into grey areas such as "micro-aggression", "representation-quotas" and the like.

Consequently, I'm not comfortable making sweeping conclusions about institutionalized racism/sexism, merely from quotas and fancy-new-age feminism terms that take male-female dynamics to extremes in order to justify wrong-doing.

To make your analogy really work, we would have to require women to vote for women directors and men to vote for men directors. But as another commenter noted, I question whether the interests of men and women are really all that divergent.

We're way, way, way past that. I used to think like you, until I started realizing just how institutionally misogynistic corporations and business is. At how low the numbers are. Corporations have had decades to reform and yet the number of women on boards or CEOs or leadership positions is still ridiculously low. The glass ceilings still exists. Generations have passed and the problem hasn't corrected itself.

There is no reason the number shouldn't be near 50%. Women are as capable as men. It's nowhere near 50%.

So, the only solution is positive discrimination.

Your jaw may drop, but the companies of the world had their chance and all they've demonstrated is that the present system is quite obviously, without argument and without anything at all you can say to counter it, complete and utter misogynistic. What other conclusion can you draw? Occam's razor suggests the system is to blame. It it weren't, the numbers would reflect the male/female employment percentages, but they don't, they're still heavily skewed towards men.

So either you choose the "qualified" candidates, who are "qualified" by an obviously misogynistic system. Or you positively discriminate.

Does your jaw still drop? Or do you understand why it is necessary now?

What if it's not the company's fault?

What if the root cause is well before the person ever gets near the hiring process? What if it's, for example, education? The amount of men/women who get pushed into field X or Y?

So we blame schools now. But, hold on, is it the schools' fault? Couldn't it be the parents'? They're pretty damn responsible for how a child will view the world, and if the person is pushed at a young age to look at the world a certain way, they will probably see themselves and their future a certain way as well. How many little girls have you heard say "when I grow up, I want to be a coal miner!"?

... is it the parents' fault though? Could it be the companies advertising lifestyle product targeted at men/women girls/boys, shaping social expectations around those?

My point is we don't really know. Gender inequality in statistics is caused by the sum of lots of factors, few of them which can actually be directly affected. Forcing companies to hit a certain target simply causes people to be hired because of the color of their skin of the shape of their genitals. Massively counterproductive if you want equality...

There is no reason the number shouldn't be near 50%...What other conclusion can you draw?

No reason? No other possible conclusion? You should argue the opposite position and try to pass an ideological turing test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_Turing_Test

Here are some sources to get you started on your research: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/114055529676/my-verdict-on-gend... http://www.amazon.com/Why-Sex-Matters-Darwinian-Behavior-ebo...

Nope, no other reason.

As I said, there's been decades, the process and culture so is obviously skewed in favour of men.

Pretend otherwise all you like. One day you'll realise that deep down you honestly thought men were better than women at business. Which is utter bollocks, it's simply corporate culture is heavily biased and needs a good kick up the ass.

That Scott Adams post is stupid by the way, he even starts talking about the gender bias at the end but frames it as 'societal'. If a woman takes a break from her career to have a kid and then cccomes back 2 years later, why has her career stalled? Societal norms, says Scott Adams, not gender bias at all!

Do you get it yet? The whole of business is set up to favour men. Until the 'societal norms' change to be fairer to women so they can actually have a chance to become leaders and senior management while still being allowed to have a family, it won't be a fair society.

We're seeing it happen in the UK parliament now women only short lists have vastly I creased the women MPs, the working life of an MP is changing to become women friendly because it's been forced on them.

The same thing has to happen in business.

> There is no reason the number shouldn't be near 50%. Women are as capable as men. It's nowhere near 50%.

It's the year 2015 and Buddhist monks are still widely under-represented in the upper echelons of the job market. Is that likely to be about discrimination?

That women are as capable as men isn't the only factor. That's very reductionist and simplistic. People also make choices, and many people don't want to invest time into becoming board members, musicians, or what have you.

I'm NOT saying that this is only a matter of choice, and not about discrimination. I'm just saying that reducing it to one variable is too simplistic; just as simplistic as if I said that the gender ratios of the job market is purely about individual choices[1]. And your post only seems to be about representation argument, and makes no mention of any concrete, direct discrimination.

[1] In the sense that people have reasonable freedom to compete and make choices based on their preferences. Not in the trivial sense that they just make the "choice" to give up on a system that is discriminatory.

>It it weren't, the numbers would reflect the male/female employment percentages

So should this apply to every industry?

In Europe most woman don't make as many hours as men and I think this in part reduces their chances to entering the upper echelons of management.

A women-in-business non-profit found that Fortune 500 companies with most women board members consistently outperformed those with fewest [1].

Market forces should therefore cause the numbers of women board members to increase accordingly, however, "change has occurred at a sluggish pace" [2].

The 40% EU objective stipulates that "qualification and merit will remain the key criteria" and will hopefully challenge unconscious biases that may be behind the sluggish progress [3].

[1]: http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/bottom-line-corporate-perf...

[2]: http://www.ey.com/US/en/Newsroom/News-releases/Women-are-joi...

[3]: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-12-1205_en.htm

'A women-in-business non-profit found that Fortune 500 companies with most women board members consistently outperformed those with fewest...Market forces should therefore cause the numbers of women board members to increase accordingly, however, "change has occurred at a sluggish pace"'

Correlation!=causation.

From my observation, the correlation most likely runs the opposite direction. Board members of any type have quite limited impact on the management of a company. They fire the CEO if the numbers are bad, but otherwise, they are pretty much just along for the ride. They certainly are not involved in the kind of product decisions where having a female opinion could plausibly make a difference (and any company that has made it to the Fortune 500 status certainly knows how to solicit the opinion of women and customize their products accordingly).

However, I have personally seen "hot" companies, who are getting a lot of media attention, deliberately add female board members in order to avoid the negative press of having an all male board. One CEO of such a company described how the prospective board member put them through the ringer - she had a lot of demand to on boards, so she could be quite choosy about which company she joined.

    women-in-business non-profit

Now that's an unbiased source.

In any case, if "Fortune 500 companies with most women board members consistently outperformed those with fewest" then you have a sure-fire way of making money, and you should invest everything you have, becoming wealthy along the way.

But doesn't the gender pay gap come from choosing lower-paying jobs rather than explicit discrimination? The first one makes more sense to me, not just because there's a US government case study on it, but because if it were an act of discrimination, every boss would have to be in on it a la Nash Equilibrium. Otherwise women would be the only hires, economically, because they'd be the cheapest source of labor.

> But doesn't the gender pay gap come from choosing lower-paying jobs

Not entirely: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm

> rather than explicit discrimination?

Why does it need to be explicit? Most discrimination is due to unconscious biases, both in our responsive to negotiation tactics from men v. women, and in our initial "gut feeling" about how valuable an employee someone will be. Humans aren't rational logic machines, as much as we like to pretend we are.

> if it were an act of discrimination, every boss would have to be in on it a la Nash Equilibrium.

Prima facie, this seems like it should be true, but there's also a positive correlation between height and income. The Nash Equilibrium hasn't solved this. Why? Even if you have no answer, denying the fact because you can't explain it isn't a great option.

The usual explanation, which seems bared out by the data, is that subtle, unconscious bias (not explicit, conscious bias) is pervasive enough that in an imperfect market with transaction costs. If someone could choose to be immune to this bias, and thus be 100% non-discriminatory, that would be an advantage, but it's not as simple as just choosing not to be biased, nor is it simple to then demonstrate that fact to the entire labor market.

Genuine question... since the pay gap exists as shown in this data, why don't employers prefer to hire much more women than men since they can be paid 10% less on average?

Does the height bias extend to entry level jobs and not just managerial positions?

But can you argue that an implicit bias is responsible for a gap of up to 23%? 23% is way too high to be a result of a totally heretofore unnoticed implicit bias. By controlling for many environmental factors, the gap is in a range of 4.8% to 7.1% [1]. Not that that's excusable, but it shows the world isn't ending for women.

[1]: http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20... (page 1)

Maddox on how every company can instantly save 23% on wages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDj_bN0L8XM

I would have gone with "Real Wage Gap = 5-7%", but it's a good video nonetheless.

"The traits that both men and women associate with good negotiators are tied up with ideas of masculinity — such as rationality, assertiveness and self-assurance"

Maybe those qualities are also helpful in a job itself, if not in general? Particularly in a senior position of leadership?

I don't think you can have both a standard that's different for what skills a woman should need learn to succeed, and at the same time have equality. This seems self-evident.

The gender pay gap exists between males and females performing exactly the same job.

That senior positions earn more than junior ones, management more than others is obvious.

How are they performing exactly the same job if males are systematically more assertive, self-assured, and rational?

I don't understand why the media focuses on her as a promoter of equality. She has proven herself biased and overly militant which gives credence to those who say the loudest feminists don't really care about women.

Appointing her as a CEO was such a great idea. Reddit thrives on censorship and social justice.

This is a terrible idea and only persists the "lowest common denominator" policies of people who want to hold back better people through laws.

Instead why not have "job agents" that negotiate on your behalf?

Because plans like this have worked out so well in the past. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_United...

There are things you can do to help harmonise pay between men and women. Giving men equal paternity leave to women for example.

I'm not a big believer in quotas as I think it can cause companies to choose people of a lesser skill set just because of their sex. That's not to say there aren't competent female engineers, managers etc. there are, it's just that, there's not enough of them and we need to be taking steps to encourage women into these industries.

In Germany, men can take equal paternity leave as women. And it is used sometimes, actually.

And these quotas just say that "30% of each gender should be in corporate boards" or that "negotiating a custom pay should be illegal" – the negotiation part also discriminates against people who aren’t good at negotiations, therefore provides a different pay for people based on a totally unimportant metric.

     men can take equal paternity leave as women. And it is used sometimes, actually.

But that is missing the point. Paternity leave should be split in half, so commercial risk of pregnacy falls on both sexes in the same way.

This is the right goal but the wrong way of doing it.

Key section of this article:

"A ban on negotiations leaves a lot of power in the hands of employers, who may not be making equal salary offers to men and women in the first place. The solution is transparency."

I hope transparency gains traction. Salaries for University of California workers are all public and searchable in a database, and the sky hasn't fallen. Same for many state workers.

In general, I'd say before anything else, try transparency. Make sure that nobody has an informational advantage over anyone else.

One problem with this is that it can put a company at a disadvantage to competitors if they're the only ones making salaries public. For instance, a private university can figure out exactly what Berkeley is paying a promising researcher, but Berkeley can't get equivalent info from a private university (in spite of massive federal subsidies and tax break for private universities).

I liked the bit about the startup posting salaries, but if you're the only one doing this, it might put you at a disadvantage. Some kind of legislation might be good here.

Transparency has disadvantages, but it creates company loyalty because employees know that the company is treating them fairly (and the poaching company implicitly isn't).

Early results (see article) suggest that transparency is better, even with the disadvantages you describe.

This seems almost comically narrow minded. Like it or not, negotiation is unavoidable. It's how two actors come to an agreement.

Even if negotiation is banned for determining salaries, there are other negotiations to be done: how much vacation you get and when you can take, when you can work remotely (if at all), who gets which projects and which roles in them, who gets the better desk, who gets to go to the conference. Plus you have to negotiate with other companies about contracts, joint ventures, prices, schedules, and so forth. And the rest of life is a negotiation too, for the price of a car, rent, the price for the house, the cost of house repairs, where to go on vacation, and on and on right down to where are we going to lunch and who's picking up the tab.

This is well-intentioned but the solution is not in the realm of possibility, like trying to solve broken bones by banning gravity. Everyone will have to negotiate about many things, no matter what the law says. You can either learn to do it to the best of your ability, or pretend it doesn't exist and thus just suck as it.

I find this policy incredibly sexist and am very surprised it came from a woman. If the cause of this was women's supposed inferiority at negotiating, does Reddit prevent women from having sales roles where good negotiation on behalf of the company is important? How about as attorneys expected to negotiate for the company, are women excluded from those jobs?

I don't think negotiating ability is the issue, I think that the idea is that women are empirically less inclined to salary negotiation, for whatever reason. Since salary negotiation inclination (or ability, though I don't think that's the underlying reason here) isn't the job, isolating it from pay is a way to pay fairly (not just pay women fairly either, while on average there may be a gender difference here, there are also individual difference within the same gender on this axis).

Yeah, it's a great plan.. If you're a CEO. This would not lead to women being paid more, but everyone being paid less and having less negotiation-power when looking for another job or promotion.

It depends on the company. Many have a budget that says to pay their employees X dollars in aggregate. Assuming that everyone has the same position, then with negotiations certain people would get a little more and others a little less, but the company still spends about X dollars. With no negotiating, everyone gets the same piece of the pie, but the company is still dishing what they were before. The company might actually be able to spend more (I'm being crazy optimistic here) because it's much more predictable what any individual would cost.

Maybe if you are Google you have enough inertia that you can afford to bypass talent than wants more than you are willing to offer. Others will just lose in competition for skilled workers.

People will go where they can negotiate a better deal. The market will make this strategy self-limiting.

The idea that you can institute a policy that will account for all of the variables that underly someone's performance is absurd. I recently left a company that started monkeying with policies like this (they they would make exceptions for, for favored employees.)

Develop an environment where your team can thrive. Provide opportunities for growth. Train those that show an aptitude. Listen to people. Pay attention to the values that you espouse and the resulting culture, and make adjustments where they're at odds with your goals.

Putting a policy in place where everyone is at a lowest common denominator is one of the quickest ways I can think of to destroy initiative in a company.

No Child Left Behind: The after-"education" edition.

Am I reading this correctly? It says that we need to ban salary bargaining because women are unalterably worse at negotiation.

This means that companies are justified in not hiring women to do negotiation - sales, purchasing and acquisitions.

Social justice is eating itself.

This seems like it would leave a company with two options:

1. Losing employees who are better than others (i.e. deserve and want a larger salary) at the same job

2. Create a new role for every minute difference in skill level to allow better employees to earn more than their peers.

Neither of those seems to be too terribly good. I think making all salaries public-by-default and using that as a basis for negotiation would be far better for equal pay as everyone would know what they were capable of earning by looking at what their peers are payed.

IMO banning salary negotiations is just a move to save money; we can't pay you more because we don't discriminate against women.

I'm not too sure. In my experience, salary negotiations will earn you a few percentage points at most. It does make it easier for a potential employee to decide between two companies (this is what the other company offered, can you match it?), but it's a relatively small number compared to difference in promotion level and team. If we're talking about software engineering, these positions tend to have 5 or so levels plus different teams. Salary is tied to team and level. I don't think what Ellen is doing will directly make a huge impact on the gender gap because the problem in software engineering is more about underrepresentation of women. Perhaps what it will do is prevent a problem where all or most of the men in the same position were being just a wee bit more than the women at Reddit, which seems like a believable situation.

I think we should all be alarmed that people are developing policies that purposely handicap one class of people in order to create better outcomes for others.

"Many people in the equal-pay debate argue that inferior negotiating skills are at the root of the gender pay gap."

Has not been my experience in pay matters and how is this different than the idea that women are not well suited to programming or math? Women are poor negotiators?

how is this different than the idea that women are not well suited to programming or math?

In this case, the sexism is benevolent. (On the surface at least. Do you think such a salary policy will serve to increase or decrease their overall labor costs?)

Increase in the long run, of course.

I wonder if the pay gap only has to do with gender. Do all men get the same salary?

As a white man this is so condescending. There's this insinuation that I was born into the world brimming with confidence and endowed with some natural ability to negotiate. I had to learn the rules of this "men's game" and fail in this like everybody else. But I don't get to say I'm discriminated against when I fuck up a salary negotiation and get paid less. I just have to suck it up and do better next time. Like literally every game I play.

Why is this topic being surfaced now by the Washington Post? Ellen made this decision over a month ago.

Gender equality is classic good clickbait.

"At the bargaining table, women are in a no-win situation."

Word. Instead of teaching them techniques to help them win, let's just do the easiest thing possible and make blanket rules so that everybody is in a no-win situation.

Equality.

Re-read your sentence. If everyone has the same rules it is equal. There is no "no-win" if it is a level playing field. The company still must compete based on salary in the broader marketplace.

The lack of the ability to negotiate is a lose-lose situation for everyone, where an initial salary bid can cause an employee who would join your company for the right price to join another company because you initially underbid another company.

I offer someone $125k. She gets an offer for $135k from another place. She comes back and tells me that she likes our company better, but she likes that salary more and will be joining them unless we match the offer.

If negotiation is forbidden, the company loses out on the person they want and the person loses out on the company they want, just because the initial bid was off. That's a lose-lose-win (so technically not a no-win), since the company that made an initial higher offer gets the candidate, but the candidate is less happy than she could have been.

The company may not have been aware of the momentary price of that skill set in the market, or the particular demand that individual has created for her unique set of talents. You have to realize that just saying "no" to an offer is a form of negotiation when considered as part of the larger game.

I suspect this would lead to people finding work arounds. "I'm sorry. We really want to hire you, but we pay $125K for application programmers, and cannot negotiate that. We cannot match your $135k offer. I do see, though, from your resume that you also have git experience. I think you meet our requirements for application engineer, which has a non-negotiable salary of $140k. Would you like to apply for that?"

Well then you'd have to mandate equality of who gets offered application engineer vs application programmer, or you'd be back in the same position as you started from..

> Such policies do come with some risk. A ban on negotiations leaves a lot of power in the hands of employers, who may not be making equal salary offers to men and women in the first place.

But the article doesn't mention how Reddit is planning to tackle that problem. So I remain vary about whether this is just a way to empower the employers, while getting some nice PR to boot.

> In an effort to encourage equity and trust, a growing number of companies reveal the salaries of all their employees, sometimes even posting them online.

Somehow, it seems like this way to "empower the employees" also makes them more exposed, which is not a form of empowerment. Sure it makes them more informed, but not being able to choose to disclose their salaries or not is not a form of empowerment.

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