Gender Pay Gap

[Omar_Little]

Kamala Harris made a small ripple, not the big splash I believe she intended, with the announcement of a proposed equal pay measure whereby companies would be required to disclose pay data along with a certification that they pay women and men equally or be subject to fines and penalties.

This notion has been debated for decades, and there are numerous studies that consistently show that women in the same jobs as men receive less pay.

I am still flummoxed as too why this still exists. In my company we strive to make sure that all employees are paid a market wage/salary for the role they are in, regardless of gender. Some reasons that people with the same job may have differing pay are as follows:

• location (market pay is also based on the location of your job)
• performance (each persons individual performance should impact their compensation)

Things that shouldn’t impact compensation when people are doing the same jobs:

• tenure (the length of time at the company and your overall experience should not impact your compensation relative to someone else doing the same job.
• education (the number of degrees grad or post grad relative to someone else doing the same job)
• gender
• race
• age
• etc.

I’m sure that there many companies/bosses, etc. that will use the performance criteria to hide discrimination, but this should be fairly easy to ferret out.

I’m not too crazy about legislating this type of compliance. It should make market sense to compensate your higher performers regardless of gender.

[nearwildheaven]

It is massively illegal to deliberately pay women less than men for the same job, and has been since the early 1960s. Besides, if women really were being paid less than men, why would anyone want to hire men in the first place?

I collect old medical books, and have a book on the history of nursing that was written in the 1940s. It had a section on men in nursing, and stated that at that time, their career options were largely limited to private duty, prisons, and mental institutions because most hospital would not hire them, except for explicitly men-only wards, for this exact reason. :eek:

[Omar_Little]

@nearwildheaven

It is massively illegal to deliberately pay women less than men for the same job, and has been since the early 1960s. Besides, if women really were being paid less than men, why would anyone want to hire men in the first place?

So are you implying that the pay gap isn’t real?

[rsat3acr]

I generally agree with the exception of tenure and education. Both do make a difference even in the same job. Two first grade teachers with one year experience one with a BS one with a MS. MS ought to get paid more. Two first grade teachers one first year and one 23 years experience, the experience ought to get paid more. Several first grade teachers, all with a BS and three years experience. A white male, a white female, a black female, a transgender female of mixed race and a 55+ white female after a career change all ought to get paid the same.

[Omar_Little]

@rsat3acr

I generally agree with the exception of tenure and education. Both do make a difference even in the same job. Two first grade teachers with one year experience one with a BS one with a MS. MS ought to get paid more. Two first grade teachers one first year and one 23 years experience, the experience ought to get paid more. Several first grade teachers, all with a BS and three years experience. A white male, a white female, a black female, a transgender female of mixed race and a 55+ white female after a career change all ought to get paid the same.

If the teacher with more experience and more degrees can be replaced with less experience and less degrees, where is the value that the more experienced teacher is bringing? They are not. Individuals with more experience and more education should be seeking jobs with more responsibilities that can leverage their experience and education if they want to get paid more.

[MandaJo]

@nearwildheaven

It is massively illegal to deliberately pay women less than men for the same job, and has been since the early 1960s. Besides, if women really were being paid less than men, why would anyone want to hire men in the first place?

Because there is a perception that men are doing a better job than women regardless of actual performance. Most performance reviews are pretty subjective, and a lot of mediocre managers don’t know who their best performers are. If you basically assume that white men are good workers unless shown otherwise, and that minorities and women are less effective unless shown otherwise, you end up overestimating the contributions of your white dudes.

[Bone]

Sometimes you can hire people not necessarily only for the job they are going to do immediately, but also the work they may do in the future - their potential.

The same pay gap can exist among peers of the same gender as well. If A and B who are both men and do the same job get paid a different amount, why is that less objectionable that C and D who are a male and female, do the same job, and get paid a different amount?

[MandaJo]

@Omar_Little

If the teacher with more experience and more degrees can be replaced with less experience and less degrees, where is the value that the more experienced teacher is bringing? They are not. Individuals with more experience and more education should be seeking jobs with more responsibilities that can leverage their experience and education if they want to get paid more.

In education, specifically, the way a new young teacher becomes an effective teacher is by working closely with the more experienced teacher next door for several years. Collaboration is huge in teaching, and collaboration is much less effective if there isn’t much experience on the team. However, education has not traditionally codified this role–instead, you just pay based on length of employment. I am aware that there are huge problems with that, but if you are coming up with a system to replace it, you need to preserve an incentive for teachers to stay in the profession long enough to become mentors–and recognize that those mentors are contributing more than what they do in their own classroom.

[boffking]

How much of the pay gap is attributable to different career choices? If laborers in oil fields tend to be men, and make more money than daycare workers that tend to be women, does that mean there is a gender pay gap?

[begbert2]

At least a few of the computer programmers that work alongside me have exactly the same job title and nominally the same duties as I do. I don’t know what they make (we’re told not to discuss it), but I’m quite confident that none of us make the same wage as each other, just due to the fact that our position doesn’t have a set wage and we all negotiated our wage separately.

Also, it’s damn near impossible to qualitatively compare our performance, because we’re all working on different things and it’s impossible to objectively rank these things by difficulty. Especially since we’re all somewhat specialized and some things become easier or harder depending on who’s working on them.

Oh, and we’re all male.

How would we be impacted by the proposed change?

[Aspidistra]

@boffking

How much of the pay gap is attributable to different career choices? If laborers in oil fields tend to be men, and make more money than daycare workers that tend to be women, does that mean there is a gender pay gap?

If the daycare workers are providing as much value to society as the oil laborers, and are working just as hard, then yes there certainly is a pay gap. Less simple to fix, but definitely there. Society tends to underestimate not only the work of individual women, but the kinds of work that women tend to do. Because it’s on a broad community level, doesn’t make it any less objectionable.

[Kimera757]

The pay gap is not simply caused by discrimination.

A few years ago, I was working for my current employer, though at a different job. In front of me sat a female employee, one year older than me and (funnily enough) had one year of seniority. This year gave her more training, and she was definitely worth the extra pay. This entitled her to a “salary”* increase of $1,500 more than me. Furthermore she is bilingual, and she was entitled to an additional $800 per year (not a lot). So in total, she was paid more than me and would have been expected to make $2,300 more than me (gross) that year.

Nope.

My team had thirteen members (below the management, that is). There were seven males, including me, and six females, so a roughly equal split. Four of the six female employees did lots of overtime. The other two did none. All seven male employees, including me, worked lots of overtime. The overtime was assigned by our (female) manager, who was required to split overtime requests evenly, and yes, that was audited, so a sexist manager denying female employees overtime hours would be quickly discovered and fired. I did not get all the overtime hours I wanted I wanted as I had to compete with ten other employees. I was paid around $5,000 of overtime (gross pay) that year. The employee sitting in front of me worked no overtime at all.

Obviously I never saw her paycheck, but you can easily figure out someone’s base salary if you know their rank and seniority, since that basic information is publicly available. (It’s never this, as you may have to work part time some of the time, or get temporarily laid off, or work overtime.) I am positive I was paid more than her, by around $2,800 that year, although I was paid less per hour.

An equal pay law that orders the same pay per hour is what I would want to see.

*While it’s called a “salary”, it’s actually paid by the hour. They just give the figure annually, and it only applies if you worked exactly the expected number of hours, full-time. It’s really an amount per hour.

[Aspidistra]

@MandaJo

In education, specifically, the way a new young teacher becomes an effective teacher is by working closely with the more experienced teacher next door for several years. Collaboration is huge in teaching, and collaboration is much less effective if there isn’t much experience on the team. However, education has not traditionally codified this role–instead, you just pay based on length of employment. I am aware that there are huge problems with that, but if you are coming up with a system to replace it, you need to preserve an incentive for teachers to stay in the profession long enough to become mentors–and recognize that those mentors are contributing more than what they do in their own classroom.

How much value a worker is providing to their colleagues is, IME, something that’s woefully under-consideredeverywhere. Instead, workplaces rely on manager evaluations (from managers who often aren’t specialists in the work the worker is actually doing) or “self-evaluations” - the person with the biggest ego wins.

In my current university course, every class I take that has group-work as part of the assessment (that’s “all of the IT-related ones” so far) has some sort of anonymous peer assessment built into the process - who was it that *actually *did most of the work? I have never seen such a thing, formally in the workplace, but I think it would be a great thing.

[Omar_Little]

@boffking

How much of the pay gap is attributable to different career choices? If laborers in oil fields tend to be men, and make more money than daycare workers that tend to be women, does that mean there is a gender pay gap?

:smack:

We’re talking about same pay for the same roles.

[Bone]

@Aspidistra

If the daycare workers are providing as much value to society as the oil laborers, and are working just as hard, then yes there certainly is a pay gap. Less simple to fix, but definitely there. Society tends to underestimate not only the work of individual women, but the kinds of work that women tend to do. Because it’s on a broad community level, doesn’t make it any less objectionable.

That’s not what is typically meant by a gender pay gap. Gender pay gap is same job and different pay for men vis a vis women.

What you are describing is a disagreement on the overall value of labor. We have currency to translate the actual value of that labor into measurable amounts, and if daycare workers are getting paid less than oil laborers, then they are by definition providing less value to society.

[Omar_Little]

@MandaJo

In education, specifically, the way a new young teacher becomes an effective teacher is by working closely with the more experienced teacher next door for several years. Collaboration is huge in teaching, and collaboration is much less effective if there isn’t much experience on the team. However, education has not traditionally codified this role–instead, you just pay based on length of employment. I am aware that there are huge problems with that, but if you are coming up with a system to replace it, you need to preserve an incentive for teachers to stay in the profession long enough to become mentors–and recognize that those mentors are contributing more than what they do in their own classroom.

Is being a mentor, in the more senior teachers’ job descriptions? Are they expected to put in so many hours mentoring their newer counterparts? If so, then they should be compensated more. But if it’s not expected and not articulated as being part of their responsibilities, then no.

[Omar_Little]

@Bone

Sometimes you can hire people not necessarily only for the job they are going to do immediately, but also the work they may do in the future - their potential.

The same pay gap can exist among peers of the same gender as well. If A and B who are both men and do the same job get paid a different amount, why is that less objectionable that C and D who are a male and female, do the same job, and get paid a different amount?

Generally, if a person is deemed to have more potential, it generally should be showing up in their performance. If it isn’t then I’d call bullshit and say it’s just favoritism by their boss, for some unknown reason.

[Banquet_Bear]

@Bone

and if daycare workers are getting paid less than oil laborers, then they are by definition providing less value to society.

…“value to society” is measured only by how much money people get paid? Mothers objectively have less value than politicians? This is by definition? Can you share that definition with us?

[MandaJo]

@Omar_Little

Is being a mentor, in the more senior teachers’ job descriptions? Are they expected to put in so many hours mentoring their newer counterparts? If so, then they should be compensated more. But if it’s not expected and not articulated as being part of their responsibilities, then no.

This is a huge hijack. If you want to talk about teacher pay, I am happy to do that, but this thread is not the place for it.

[MandaJo]

@Bone

Sometimes you can hire people not necessarily only for the job they are going to do immediately, but also the work they may do in the future - their potential.

The same pay gap can exist among peers of the same gender as well. If A and B who are both men and do the same job get paid a different amount, why is that less objectionable that C and D who are a male and female, do the same job, and get paid a different amount?

So do men have more potential because they are less likely, statistically, to need to take maternity leave or leave to stay home with kids?