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Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

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Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#101

Post by jdavis703 »

veganman wrote: post #84
jdavis703 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, in this context it's extremely important. It's well accepted there's a pay gap between males and females. However there are also discrimination and pay differences for people who associate with non-cys gender identities. If you're going to expose wage information, it's important that it's done so not only in the name of efficient markets, but also in terms of social equality.

Isn't that kind of a strawman? I mean then what about race? What about the color of your teeth?

It would also be helpful to know the numbers by race. If eye color discrimination ever becomes a problem people are discriminated on, then that should also be included.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#102

Post by flowerpot »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #13

Just posted this to the other discussion, but it bears just the same. This is just going to be a collection of anecdotes from people who self-select to report because they feel good about where they're at, or because they feel righteously justified in complaining about their situation. Self-selection ruins the data. The responses have to be random to be useful. And the silly thing is that most people who are involved…

I don't agree with that I don't feel like I'm underpaid or overpaid, however, I know of great unjust between gender and ethnicity and all I want is equality for all.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#104

Post by vertex-four »

MichaelDickens wrote: post #80
transman wrote: post #17

As a transgender person, I won't fill it out unless I have the option to opt out of gender identification or select "other" for gender. I'm not alone. http://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/transgender.aspx http://associationdatabase.com/aws/NCDA/pt/sd/news_article/1... http://www.autostraddle.com/facebook-wants-you-to-do-you-add...

I definitely agree with you that surveys should always include an "other" option for gender, but I'm wondering why you don't want to fill it out otherwise? I'm guessing from your username that you're a man, so why don't you want to pick "male"?

So a lot of trans and gender-questioning people, once they get onto the "wtf is gender anyway" question, realise that while their brain likes running on testosterone or estrogen, and they might like or dislike their body in different configurations... eventually they realise that they exist outside the gender binary - they feel that they're neither entirely on one extreme of a "spectrum" of gender, nor the other.

Some people wind up being genderqueer - others genderfluid - and yet more agender. All of these people don't fit in either "male" or "female" categories, and usually tend to fill out forms as either "other" or "I don't want to tell you". It's currently at the point in my country where some banks allow the title of Mx - a title for people who don't fit into the binary.

And of course other people just really don't want to tell people their gender if they don't have to.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#105

Post by robrenaud »

zdragnar wrote: post #97
username223 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why so many staunch advocates for free markets easily opt for the former. It's pretty obvious to me: this information asymmetry between employers and employees benefits employers, letting them lowball some hires. More information would make hiring more fair, but also hurt the bottom line, so they don't want it.

Companies generally don't hire at all if it's going to hurt the bottom line. There might be some exceptions around high profile positions (i.e. CEO) if there's an expectation that media attention and other factors might turn that loss into a profitable long-term investment, but it certainly isn't going to apply to your run-of-the-mill blue collar, middle manager or software developer position.

What hurts the bottom line is the company paying you the maximum that they would be willing to, rather than as minimum for which you'd still accept. Either way they come out ahead, they just come out more ahead in the latter case.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#106

Post by baby »

vertex-four wrote: post #104
MichaelDickens wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree with you that surveys should always include an "other" option for gender, but I'm wondering why you don't want to fill it out otherwise? I'm guessing from your username that you're a man, so why don't you want to pick "male"?

So a lot of trans and gender-questioning people, once they get onto the "wtf is gender anyway" question, realise that while their brain likes running on testosterone or estrogen, and they might like or dislike their body in different configurations... eventually they realise that they exist outside the gender binary - they feel that they're neither entirely on one extreme of a "spectrum" of gender, nor the other. Som…

I feel like this is missing the point that "gender" in a questionnaire is not asking you what you think you are, but what you really are. There is a scientific definition of the word gender that is being ignored here.

And also yeah we could get rid of that kind of questions in "some" questionnaires, but for these kind of mass statistic tools this is interesting for example to see if females are paid less than males. I don't think people are interested in the .1% that is transgender as it will probably be too low to make valid statistics.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#107

Post by batz »

Let's look at what someone would believe to also believe that sharing their salary is a good idea.

1. that if enough people share their salaries, it will cause salaries to revert to the mean, increasing the equality of outcome, independent of inputs.

2. that the data will be real, and not sabotaged or cherry picked.

3. that employers are somehow obligated to pay more than people are willing to work for, presumably just as you make up the difference from shopping at whole foods by paying the ethnic grocer an extra few bucks, because justice, and they're just so grateful, amirite?

4. People with poor negotiation skills, aka those who have less to offer, will make more money.

Yay, sample bias. Now I get to know what people stupid enough to share their salaries earn, which is useless, because if I wanted cogs with minimal value add, I could offshore the work for less.

Seriously, if an HR person ever used that site as a data point for why they made a crappy offer I would say, "yes, I can see that's what you would pay someone with a misunderstanding of how the world works for this job."

Put another way, if you have any doubt about whether someone is overpaid, don't worry, they'll tell you.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#108

Post by DanBC »

lowboy wrote: post #79
DanBC wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a useful criticism. In the UK current best practice (although it's still changing) would be to have two questions: one asking about gender identity and another asking about gender reassignment. Someone born as male who identifies as female should need to tick "other", they should be able to tick "female".

> identifies as female As a point of clarification, this should be "identifies as a woman". Sex (male/female) is a physical characteristic, gender (man/woman) is a social construct. More info from transman's first link: > Sex is assigned at birth, refers to one’s biological status as either male or female, and is associated primarily with physical attributes such as chromosomes, hormone prevalence, and external and i…

EDIT: The text you quote does not say that man / woman and male / female have different uses. There's nothing to say that male / female only refer to sex not gender.

If what you said is true (and it isn't) people would only need two questions on forms:

"Are you male or female?"

"Are you a man or a woman?"

This would make no sense and so we can safely ignore it.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#109

Post by jessedhillon »

coldtea wrote: post #76
nck4222 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(which we can assume are evenly distributed among salaries). Why would you assume that? To me it seems the opposite, that they wouldn't be evenly distributed.

I mean the personalities. I don't think being a "complainer" vs a "feel gooder" personality type changes much based on salary.

Yes and no?

In areas like SFBA where the job market is liquid, people will be less likely to be stuck in a job where offer basics like salary don't match their expectations -- so they'll be more likely to weight other factors like culture and mission when considering how happy they are at their current job. In less fluid markets, people can more easily find themselves in a position where they're disappointed with salary but unable to find a better opportunity.

In those situations, you might be more likely to find people who are either satisfied or dissatisfied with culture, mission, growth etc but are also disappointed with salary.

Re: Show HN: Honest Salary – Help make salaries fair and honest by sharing yours

#110

Post by pizza »

nhumrich wrote: post #69

Am I the only one that feels shaky sharing my salary? I work at a start up and if I share my position and company it won't really be anonymous, as I am the only person at the company with that position. I do agree its nice for people to post their salaries so i know if I'm underpaid. But what if I'm overpaid, or at least played more than most at my company? What will that do to people I work with who find or how much…

If it weren't for status anxiety, I imagine people would prefer to have this information available (rather than assuming everyone is paid fairly).
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