Sure there’s wage gaps in these areas. But is primarily at companies that don’t practice good market based compensation practices. It is driven by good ole boy practices of promoting friends, giving annual pay increases when ignoring performance. Peanut butter spreading raises based upon the performance of the overall company, and not based upon individual performance. Which is way to common in the corporate world.
I accept that idea but I don’t see how it applies to Hollywood actresses. I do see that you are obsessed with Hollywood actresses being the great victims of this world. Now for your information, the vast majority of actors and actresses get paid scale, exactly the same. As for the rest, I have never heard of studio making two versions of a movie, one with a man in a role and a woman in the same role, releasing both, yet the man was paid more. Equal work means the exact same work, with the exact same standard of productivity. It happens unfortunately, it is tolerated by very few people, and actionable in this country, and it is addressed every day when discovered. At the same time thousands and thousands of women, probably millions, are denied the opportunity to perform the same work as men in order to receive higher pay. Too bad they aren’t rich Hollywood actresses that you would care about.
Meh. I got a bonus for getting an advanced degree.
I’m cool with a company saying “We will increase your salary by 1% every year that you are still with the company” I’m not sure why you consider that a travesty or something.
It’s a lot better than when I was working in the 70s and got a raise for getting engaged and then another raise when I got married. It worked the opposite way for women.
The problem today is about opportunity, the high end of the wage scale has a lot of old guys like me who had far more opportunity than women did, and now through the simple passage of time are perceived as more valuable. It’s reasonable to reward employees based on years of service and loyalty to the company, but what happens to women who are just as productive but denied the opportunity to put in that much time?
There’s no practical way to resolve to all the historical issues but we can make sure that going forward that we do have equal opportunity for everyone, and companies have to consider the appearance of these historical problems in how they lead to a current difference in pay scales that is not justified under the past way of doing business.
Sure. But consider the following example:
Bob and Alice both start with Company A at the same time. They each work for 3 years, and every year they both get a 1% raise for being with the company for that year. Now, Alice leaves to have and raise a baby. She’s gone for 4 years. In the meantime, Bob has been getting 1% raises every year.
Alice now comes back to work at the same job she had when she left at the salary she had when she left. Bob is still working that same job. At this point, Bob’s salary is higher due to the 1% raise he got every year for those 4 years he was working.
Are people saying Alice should get a raise to make her salary the same as Bob’s?
Some are. I’m not. Using the concept of ‘equality’ in this argument is a distraction, all things rarely are equal. OTOH the measure of productivity is often arbitrary and in situations where women have less representation based on past discrimination often ends up with men being perceived as more productive without real basis.
Perhaps part of the solution is companies paying more based on overall performance than trying to pick off individual differences in performance.
I don’t object to people getting paid more for time of service, even though it may be in part a better deal for men as a result of past discrimination, but I don’t have a problem with companies changing their policies so that is a more minor part of how compensation is determined.
It honestly sounds to me like the OP is proposing national cross-industry unions, where wages are set by an on-high all-powerful authority based on criteria of its own choice. It…doesn’t sound realistic.
And regarding conditioning the women to come in and demand higher salaries, you’re forgetting the other half of the question - the people doing the hiring need to agree to their demands. It’s a negotiation, and societal conditioning has happened to both parties.
And there’s ample evidence that society is conditioned since time immemorial to fuck over women.
This has not one but two side effects. One: many employers consciously or unconsciously will set a lower mental ‘bar’ for what they’re willing to offer a woman. They may be justifying it for various realistic or sexist reasons -maternity leave, office drama, pms, women having non-analytical brains. Or maybe they’re just doing it because they think they can get away with it - they think women won’t fight as hard, won’t negotiate as aggressively. But regardless of the reason many employers are inclined to pay women less.
The other side effect is that women are aware this is happening, and are well aware that pushy women have a tendency to get slapped down. They have more on the line than the prospective employer; they need to do what they can to appear hire-worthy. And they have good reason to expect that that includes not seeming like an argumentative pushy bitch. Them being unwilling to push as hard has well-founded justification.
And I don’t know how we can change that, other than to essentially unionize everything and set wages by fiat.
My dad used to work for this very large national bank as an operations manager, and in the late 1990s, was tasked with investigating the gender wage gap that was going on at this bank. His job was to find the bias or whatever was causing this to happen.
Long story short, they didn’t find any. HR, even by 1998, had flattened out all of the hiring manager’s discretion in pay rates. Everything was set on years of relevant experience, and flat raises. A few of the credit positions had a bonus structure on them, but it was strictly performance based (how well is your portfolio of loans doing, etc.).
What caused about 60% of the women in the bank to get paid less than their male counterparts were time off for maternity leave, or time away from the work force. They lost the years of experience when they returned to the work force. The study he directed looked at the performance of people returning from maternity/paternity leave and found that (obviously) they under-performed in relation to the employees that didn’t take a LOA.
The other 40% got paid the same as the men. They never left for maternity leave. The highest paid two employees he was looking at were actually women that made 20% more than their male counterparts because they were credit gold, they had less than 1% loss on their portfolio. They also never took maternity leave or left the work force for a time to raise children.
I am not saying that a pay gap doesn’t exist, but at my dad’s large national bank there wasn’t one he could find. He really, really tried too.
I’m glad you got your raises.
OTOH, I have been specifically advised not to use “I need the money” as a reason either to hire me, or to give me a raise. I was told, always, to argue “you need me for this job, and here’s why” followed by a tedious list of my past successes at other companies, or “I have been producing at a high enough level that the company should want me to continue” followed by a tedious list of my past successes at this company.
And since hiring and salary negotiations are essentially sales jobs, I have employed the strategy with success. The Dale Carnegie principle of sales is that you convince the buyer that it is in his or her best interests to buy.
My first big raise (and I don’t like negotiating any more than the next guy) was doing the “here are all the reasons I should get an above-standard raise. I could get more somewhere else, but it is worth a somewhat lower raise to keep me because I would rather stay”. They said No. About a month after that, I gave my four weeks notice to go work at another place that paid significantly more. (This was in the days of Y2K, where if you could spell “Y2K” and fog a mirror you could get hired.)
My next was at my six-month review. I did the same thing, listing all I had done and saying “the client seems happy, too”. Sure enough, the client was happy, and so I got another significant raise. Same thing about six months back - the company I work for went to the client I work for saying “here are the things Shodan has been doing that are above his pay grade - how about a bump” and I got another rise.
But in none of those instances nor in any other did I ask for a raise because I needed it, or because I couldn’t pay my mortgage, or anything like that. My employer isn’t concerned about that, and frankly I wouldn’t expect them to be. These things are motivated by perceived demand - but it is the perceived demand of the employer, not the employee.
Regards,
Shodan
Three problems with the “wages indicate value to the economy” argument.
Tiny problem: Your argument assumes people are actually doing their jobs to their fullest ability. Slackers are generally not instantly fired, despite lapsing their labor’s value. Many, many companies have people of varying ability working for the same wage, because it’s way easier than adjusting a standard wage situationally.
Medium problem: It’s “company”, not “economy”. There are people who get paid to do things that are bad for the economy. (Obvious examples: criminals, predatory lenders, whichever politician you don’t like.) However unless your company is completely screwed up it will indeed be paying people to do things the company values. (Presuming people are doing their jobs.)
Major problem: Your argument is ignoring the concept of underpayment. If everyone were paid their actual worth then the entire profits of the company would be distributed as wages in proportion to the value produced by the person. Outside of self-employed persons and very small partnerships this never happens, because the people in charge like money and if you handed back all the extra money you got by hiring Fred there’s no point in hiring Fred. Also, and very importantly, market forces allow wages to be set far below value produced, because if Fred asks for anywhere near what he’s worth you can hire the less-demanding Joe (or José) instead.
So yeah, the notion that wages reflect value produced in any reliable way is flat-out insane - whether you’re talking about society, the economy, or even the company. Wages reflect how much money the person makes, and that’s all.
(It’s not surprising that republicans like the idea that wages reflect value - it makes rich people literally better than everybody else on a moral level. This is something that rich people like, and rich people dictate the values of the republican party.)
Hold on now – when it comes to individual employees, I think it is very inaccurate to attribute their salaries to “the economy” determining their worth. In reality, their employer makes decisions based on what they can get away with.
Or, to put it a different way, look at the rather gaudy chrome sculpture of a dog that just sold for $91 million. There appear to be quite a few art critics who think it isn’t even that good of a piece. But “the economy” didn’t determine that the accurate value of the sculpture was $91 million – that’s just what one person was willing to pay for it. Just because one person is willing to pay a certain amount, doesn’t really speak to whether “the economy” as a whole has come to the conclusion that there would be a vigorous market for the dog if it were put up for sale again next week, and that it would again fetch something near $91 million, more or less.
So since an employer really holds most of the cards in determining what employees ought to be paid, it’s not accurate to conflate the spending decisions of that employer with the $20 trillion economy we live in. So, the employer may make decisions that aren’t based on market forces – like a latent prejudice against women because they get pregnant, or the manager’s own mother was a raging bitch, or having no rationale at all for the salary except for what they can get away with. Likewise, the employee may have extraneous concerns that preempt a more aggressive salary negotiation, like lack of union membership, lack of opportunities, need to be near the kid’s school, etc.
So speaking as a very small part of “the economy,” and knowing that many people feel just as I do, I reject that an employer’s decision to screw working women in favor of working men is a decision that is generally attributable to all participants in the economy. Nobody asked me what Sally should make, or what nurses should be paid, etc.
I’m extremely non-confrontational, so I’ve only gotten two big raises: the first when the company did an industry assessment and noticed that some of us were being grossly underpaid, and corrected that to some degree to reduce the chance we’d bail (prior to this happening I’d been grumbling a lot about my low wage; this stopped the grumbling), and the second time when a friend of mine actually did try to hire me away at a much higher wage, and when I mentioned this to my bosses they went into panic mode and offered me a 20% raise to get me to stay. (By which I mean they asked me flat out what the smallest wage would be that would get me to turn down my friend’s offer, and being way, way too accommodating (and honest), I told them and an hour later they offered it to me.)
So yeah - how much you get has nothing to do with what you need. It has everything to do with how much you demand - and how much they’re willing (and able) to pay you. (With the alternative being firing and replacing you - so don’t go too crazy.)
Probably not in the way you seem to think it is.
Anything in particular?
Here are some things for you to read.Menwork longer hours than women.
Menwork more dangerous jobs and are 10 times more likely to be killed on the job.
The menslabor participation rate is 10 points higher than the femalelabor participation rate.
That’s kind of a distinction without a difference.
The price of the sculpture was set at the point where perceived demand met perceived supply. Maybe the art critics thought it wasn’t worth $91 million. That is pretty much the same as saying they might be willing to pay $90 million, or $50 million, or $19.95 plus free shipping. And that’s the case for everyone else in the market - nobody else was willing to pay $91 million, but somebody was willing. So “the market” did determine the accurate value of the piece - it was set at the point where somebody outbid everybody else. If the art critics, or anybody else, didn’t agree that $91 million was what it was worth, then they communicated that by not buying the chrome dog.
The notion that the buyer couldn’t turn around and sell it tomorrow misses the point - everybody else thought it wasn’t worth $91 million. Maybe they will change their minds - but that’s a different market, because perceived demand has changed.
I think you are basing this on the notion that there is some objective number that can be assigned to the sculpture, or to anything else, that says what it is “really” worth. There is no such number. It is worth whatever you can convince someone else to pay for it, and if he is the only buyer, that doesn’t really affect anything.
If you think Sally is underpaid, you can boycott the company, or seek Sally out and give her a tip, or even found your own company and pay Sally what you think she should earn. Then everyone else who participates in the market that bids for whatever Sally produces decides if buying from you, or not buying from Sally’s skinflint company, is a good decision for them overall. By not doing that, you are deciding that the opportunity cost of buying from underpaid Sally is lower than the opportunity cost of paying her more.
Economics is largely the study of what people want, considering all known factors. Not what they should want, not what they say they want - what they decide they want when it costs them something.
Everybody want to be paid more than they are. People in hell want ice water. Doesn’t mean they get it.
Correct. The price point of your labor, anyone’s labor, is the point at which how much you think you are worth meets how much they think you are worth.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m glad your company has lots of money to spread around. During the period of double digit inflation it was easy to differentiate using pay. We had targets for everyone, based on performance, and tried moving people to those targets.
On the other hand, during periods of low inflation where the raises were 1 or 2 percent, it was not that easy.
Offering mediocre starting salaries means you get mediocre performers. If the job market is tight and there is not a lot of difference in worker productivity that’s fine. However if you are in an industry where you can get someone twice as productive for 10% more, you’re crazy not to. I worked in places like that. You can tell based on how many of the offers you make get turned down.
:smack:
Those have nothing to do with being paid the same wage for the same job.
What country do you live in?
Where is the 50th percentile considered mediocre?
If you haven’t looked lately the job market in the US is tight.
Obviously I’ve never gone into my bosses office saying I need more money because I have bills to pay. My point was that, like begbert2, I don’t like confrontation and it’s stressful to go sit down one on one with someone powerful and convince them that you’re worth more money. If I weren’t motivated by an actual need for money I’d probably never do it. I don’t think I’m unique in this regard. In fact, I think employers count on employees being timid. Which brings me to…
The problem here is that very few people actually know what they’re worth. I’m lucky in that my hours are billed to a client, so I know exactly how much my employer is getting for my labor. Most people don’t have that luxury, and there’s a great deal of information asymmetry between employer and employee.
When my wife was switching jobs, she timidly thought about asking for X, which was a big bump over her previous salary. I told her, fuck that, ask for X times 1.5. She didn’t think she was worth that much, but she asked around and found out that others were making around that. She came pretty close to what she asked for in the end.
My point is that she didn’t know that X was too little, and she didn’t really have a huge incentive to ask for more – hers is a second income, after all. If she had accepted X, we wouldn’t be out on our asses or anything. If she hadn’t spent a lot of time researching salaries and psyching herself up, it’s not like the company would have said, “Oh, you’re asking for too little, we’re paying male applicants much more than that.”
Is that normal, knowing what your company bills the client for your labor?
I mean, my hours are billed to the US government, but I have no idea what my company is charging them for me. Should I?