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How the “what’s your current salary?” question hurts the gender pay gap

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Re: How the “what’s your current salary?” question hurts the gender pay gap

#71

Post by Lawtonfogle »

rayiner wrote: post #9
patrickmay wrote: post #2

> Cornell professors Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn found that women were paid 79 cents for each dollar a man was paid. Even after adjusting for type of job, industry, experience, location and education, the gap remained 92 cents for each dollar. This is not supported by the evidence. See, for example, this article by Christina Hoff Sommers ( http://time.com/3222543/5-feminist-myths-that-will-not-die/ ): "No matter…

The quoted economists found an 8% gap adjusting for those factors.

Removing even more factors have found that gap diminish even more. In some cases, looking at young adults with college educations with out children (with some other factors also made equal), they found that women out earned men.

Re: How the “what’s your current salary?” question hurts the gender pay gap

#72

Post by bobwaycott »

russelluresti wrote: post #62

> When it comes to making pay decisions, we anchor too much on someone’s current salary instead of what the job is worth. Imagine hiring two accountants. One (call her Eliza) currently makes $50,000 and the other (Alexander) makes $58,000. And let’s say the average accountant in your company makes $60,000. It feels natural to offer Alexander a salary of $60,000, just like everyone else gets. But for most managers, it…

Given the comments in this thread, it seems this is an insanely difficult concept to grasp. It's like the notion just bounces off Teflon.

But ... but ... but John is working 60 hours a week for his $60K, and Jane puts her foot down and doesn't work more than 40 hours! She's not as committed! She doesn't want it badly enough! She doesn't deserve to be paid $60K when she's working 20 hours less!

So Jane gets punished because John is a dumbass who lets the company steal 20 hours of unpaid additional labor. Can't have John thinking about that, though, so Jane gets a pay cut because she's not "working as hard" as John.

But ... but ... but John just negotiated better/harder/longer/more successfully! It's Jane's fault she's paid less. She's just poor at negotiations.

Bullshit. If ever there was a reason to eliminate salary negotiations, this is one of the stronger cases. Just fucking pay a set wage for each position in the company. Make it known. Enjoy there being no wage tension or envy in the workplace. Be proud you've eliminated any chance that your team members could even entertain the notion you weren't valuing them equally and fairly.

Oh, wait. That's stupid. Instead, let's argue about just exactly how much less women are paid—but as a whole, cos it's really nasty when we start breaking the pay gap down by ethnicity. Cos it's so productive to argue about the rules for quantifying the pay gap than it is to just start and stop at the simple rule that there shouldn't fucking be one.

Re: How the “what’s your current salary?” question hurts the gender pay gap

#73

Post by whatok »

bobwaycott wrote: post #72
russelluresti wrote: post #62

> When it comes to making pay decisions, we anchor too much on someone’s current salary instead of what the job is worth. Imagine hiring two accountants. One (call her Eliza) currently makes $50,000 and the other (Alexander) makes $58,000. And let’s say the average accountant in your company makes $60,000. It feels natural to offer Alexander a salary of $60,000, just like everyone else gets. But for most managers, it…

Given the comments in this thread, it seems this is an insanely difficult concept to grasp. It's like the notion just bounces off Teflon. But ... but ... but John is working 60 hours a week for his $60K, and Jane puts her foot down and doesn't work more than 40 hours! She's not as committed ! She doesn't want it badly enough! She doesn't deserve to be paid $60K when she's working 20 hours less! So Jane gets punished…

> Be proud you've eliminated any chance that your team members could even entertain the notion you weren't valuing them equally and fairly.

Are all team members contributing equally and fairly?

Re: How the “what’s your current salary?” question hurts the gender pay gap

#74

Post by lowmess »

whatok wrote: post #40
lowmess wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when you consider that wages rise and fall in fields depending on the gender makeup of those positions [0]. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-...

Consider this. I have a group of 100 people, 50 male and 50 female. Job x is available in industry y. Job x is highly sought after and all 50 men apply for it. Industry y is traditionally male dominated and for whatever reason, none of the 50 women have previously applied for the job. Through the magical powers of the internet, women are now suddenly interested in the field and not only do the 50 men apply for the jo…

But that's not what the article is talking about, it's talking about male-dominated fields that were once female-dominated and vice versa.

Re: How the “what’s your current salary?” question hurts the gender pay gap

#75

Post by Lawtonfogle »

geofft wrote: post #24
dbbk wrote: post #11

I don't understand this 'gender pay gap' concept at all. Whatever figure my compensation is is, to a large extent, quite arbitrary. Sure there's a general sense of what range I should expect my salary to be in, based on my experience/location/etc, but really the final figure comes down to whatever number gets thrown out and accepted in negotiation. So if you poll half a workforce who are male, and poll half a workfor…

Right, that's not surprising, if you do that poll once . There's a 50% chance of that. If you do that poll repeatedly , over many groups and many industries and many times and many subsets, and in every case the men are paid more (whether 5% or 23%), there is either an actual statistical difference, or Maxwell's social justice demon is out to get you. And if there is an actual statistical difference, the question is…

>Are men more valuable to the market?

And if so, why? Maybe men and women work equally hard, all else being equal, but in a society where a man's income is used to determine his worth as a person to a greater extent that a woman's income is used to determine her worth, a man will spend more time focusing on improving his income, and thus work in ways that provide more value by sacrificing quality of life (while a woman in such a society would focus on increasing what ever attributes the society judges her worthiness based upon). In such a case, there is clearly sexism, but unequal pay is not the cause, only a symptom, and thus equalizing pay will only cover up a symptom of the deeper problem (and perhaps even exaggerating the problem).

Re: How the “what’s your current salary?” question hurts the gender pay gap

#76

Post by eli »

whatok wrote: post #44
eli wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Resumes with male names are ranked higher than identical resumes with female names.

Citation please.

Here are the first two on Google. I'm sure you can find more

http://advance.cornell.edu/documents/ImpactofGender.pdf

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.abstract

Re: How the “what’s your current salary?” question hurts the gender pay gap

#77

Post by eli »

whatok wrote: post #50
mrgoldenbrown wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of them: https://www.google.com/search?q=Resumes+with+male+names+are+...

I know that. I take issue when it is stated as an absolute fact when the most well-known study was done in a very specific field and therefore makes it hard to really extrapolate out to the entire workforce.

I'd definitely be interested to read any studies of other fields that have failed to show a similar effect.

Re: How the “what’s your current salary?” question hurts the gender pay gap

#78

Post by whatok »

lowmess wrote: post #74
whatok wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider this. I have a group of 100 people, 50 male and 50 female. Job x is available in industry y. Job x is highly sought after and all 50 men apply for it. Industry y is traditionally male dominated and for whatever reason, none of the 50 women have previously applied for the job. Through the magical powers of the internet, women are now suddenly interested in the field and not only do the 50 men apply for the jo…

But that's not what the article is talking about, it's talking about male-dominated fields that were once female-dominated and vice versa.

One of the previously male-dominated field that the article mentions is computer programming. There is no other field in the article that has undergone such a fundamental shift from when women used to dominate the field. There were virtually no barriers to entry to the field back then either in the form of requiring a degree or societal norms ingrained from childhood.

Other fields mentioned either require longer hours or were simply more demanding. We can get into what are reasonable hours or demands in a separate conversation but all things equal, employers are going to pay more for someone who works longer and puts up with more demands.

For everything else, when you introduce half the working population to a field that they were once closed off to, wages are going to drop. I am not pretending that it's the only factor but a huge over supply of labor will cause wages to drop; all things equal.

Re: How the “what’s your current salary?” question hurts the gender pay gap

#79

Post by djsumdog »

RodericDay wrote: post #25
djsumdog wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not 77cents: > Even after adjusting for type of job, industry, experience, location and education, the gap remained 92 cents for each dollar. The 77 cent thing is a myth and the 92cent thing isn't even that massive a gap. I have a hypothesis: if you could measure the confidence of both men and women and relate them to job type and income, I bet you'd have a stronger coloration than gender. It's pretty diffic…

Without controlling for job title, how much does the average man make, and the average woman make? I'm under the impression that the 77c figure is related to this "total" disparity, that better accounts for the separate, but related, issue of "predominantly female" fields paying less than male ones.

That's another issue entirely. Also you need to take into account things like maternity leave as well as women who man chose not to work full time, that bring that number down as well.

Re: How the “what’s your current salary?” question hurts the gender pay gap

#80

Post by bobwaycott »

whatok wrote: post #73
bobwaycott wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the comments in this thread, it seems this is an insanely difficult concept to grasp. It's like the notion just bounces off Teflon. But ... but ... but John is working 60 hours a week for his $60K, and Jane puts her foot down and doesn't work more than 40 hours! She's not as committed ! She doesn't want it badly enough! She doesn't deserve to be paid $60K when she's working 20 hours less! So Jane gets punished…

> Be proud you've eliminated any chance that your team members could even entertain the notion you weren't valuing them equally and fairly. Are all team members contributing equally and fairly?

C'mon. You assume they are/will when you hire them. When/if you discover they are not, you don't cut their pay, you fire them.

It seems you're trying to angle for some defense of Peter earning more than Paul because the former contributed "more". Contributing to a team isn't a metric that should be set by an overachiever. Everyone—especially every overachiever (including myself)—should disabuse themselves of the notion that others aren't contributing equally when they're really just not over-contributing. And evaluating contributions is already a difficult and subjective task.

A better approach is offer the over-achievers a promotion. New position, new responsibilities perhaps, and a new salary. Attainable equally by anyone else who wants it.

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