I just found out a female relative quit her job because she found out the men she worked with were being paid more.
Now my question is, is this legal? How can she prove gender discrimination? In fact, how would a woman (or man) prove this?
The way I see it many small companies pay people more or less based on all kinds of things. You might be the bosses relative. You might have a special skill. They might want a person with a certain “look” to be out front. All kinds of reasons. But the BIGGEST one is how much have you negotiated for.
In my experience when you apply for a job and the company doesnt have a set salary ladder (like say for government jobs) you tell them what you want to make and you negotiate a salary. I have lost out on jobs because I say, wanted to make $12 an hour and they said they would only pay $9. I’ve also quit a job for another that paid better.
So if this is the case;
How could a woman sue for gender discrimination if the salary she is making, she negotiated and agreed to at the beginning?
Instead of suing wouldnt she be better off just negotiating for a higher salary?
I also do not know the mechanics of a case like this. Can an employer be forced to turn over payroll records?
Most discrimination cases base on statistics. If all the men make more than all the men (or mostly that is the case) and there’s no explanation like seniority, education, experience, etc. - then the question will be “why?”. that’s why often these cases are hard to win - you have to show the reason is clearly gender discrimination.
I suppose if someone tried the “that’s what they asked for…” excuse, then the question would be “why didn’t you move them up after their first review”? Which brings you full circle to “why do the women make less than the men for essentially the same work”?
Remember this isn’t criminal, as in “beyond reasonable doubt”. It’s civil, “preponderance of evidence”. So if for example, the woman made less than the men, and she asked for a raise, and you turned her down, then explain why she still makes less than the men. If your excuse doesn’t hold water, if the difference seems substantial, etc. etc. … It may end up costing the employer.
But this is why there are tribunals and judges. Nothing is definite, unless the employer says on tape “… because you’re a woman.”
Most people either don’t know that they can negotiate salary in a job offer or don’t feel comfortable doing so.
It might be a bit of a tangent to your question but this is one of the main reasons why employers tell their workers not to discuss salary amongst each other. It lets them get away with this easily.
In most jobs and most states, you can be fired for basically anything that isn’t discrimination against a protected class or forbidden by contract, company policy, or labor agreements.
Technically they can fire you for any reason if you work in an “at will” state.
But to prove gender discrimination would be challenging as you would need to either prove a statistical trend or find correspondence indicating such. Not that it couldn’t be done. In fact, I used to do this sort of work and it’s really as easy as getting a data dump of their PeopleSoft or similar system and running some queries, charts and graphs.
Such policies are generally illegal for employees other than managers. The consequences for violations are low though, so many employers out of ignorance or high risk tolerance will violate the law.
Do they really? It’s been shown time and again that women get paid less than men for the same job. Are you really trying to say that men always put out more work, at a better quality, were hired earlier, work longer hours, etc?
I don’t know any details about the OP’s relative and her job, but the gender wage gap is real.
The gender wage gap is very real, but in an equal pay lawsuit the aggreived worker isn’t trying to prove the gender wage gap; she (or he, but lets run with she) is trying to prove that she was paid less on account of her gender. If the male comparator that she points to is, in fact, more senior, or more productive, or works longer hours, or whatever, she has a problem, because on the face of it his extra pay may be accounted for by his seniority, productivity, hours of work. The onus is on her to show that it’s on account of gender.
Exactly. You are not trying to prove a gender gap. You are trying to prove that this employer pays less on the basis of gender, where all other factors are equal or comparable. That is a lot more tricky. What you think Charlie at the next desk is producing may not be the result that the boss sees, rightly or wrongly. You can’t sue because Charlie got paid more than Jane despite producing less, you have to show the boss *knew *Charlie was producing less and still chose to pay him more - all other factors being equal… and that Charlie was not an isolated exception.
Discussing your salary is not one of those things. The NLRA guarantees employees the right to discuss their pay without retaliation. However, your employer is within their rights to tell you not to talk about your pay while on the clock, since you should be working instead.
That said, proving that you actually got fired for discussing your pay, as opposed to them simply deciding they don’t like you, can be very difficult.
The gender/equal pay issue is a hard one to wrap my head around. While I recognize it exists I’m not really sure why.
Wages, I assumed, are dictated by supply and demand. While the employee always wants to be paid the maximum for their service, the employer always seeks to pay the least they can for that service. So by supply and demand the wage is dictated by how many workers with skill set x are available vs how many are actually needed.
How gender becomes a factor in there I have no idea.
If an employer can find a supply of females willing to accept $60K for 20 open positions why in the world would they agree to pay a male $70K for doing the same job?
Way back when, CNN Money had a piece written by a women who had been or was a C-level. It was on or around the time when a law was to be passed that basically would say that all positions above manager would have federal oversight in regards to pay or some such.
And yes, I do realize that all these news outlets are politically biased.
But, her research or experience, stated that although there is a gender pay-gap, it’s less than 5%. To narrow that down further you’d need larger data sets.
When I was a contractor, there was a report that in the DC area that GS women were making like 84% of what GS men made, or something, which caused a bit of hysteria in the office. They hired, at six-figure expense, to have a company come in as an objective third-party and review hiring practices, and pay, etc. And… they found nothing.
The reason being that to get a GS job, it’s not-trivial. They have a few rounds of interviews and they have an objective methodology to grade people. I saw the spreadsheets too, it was over a dozen things they graded people on which ultimately determined if you’d get hired and decided your pay band.
I have a feeling that if the companies that use their POC at a media outlet, to you know, drum up some business. If they were to have more than three or five things they graded people we’d have a more realistic figure.
There’s a whole list of suggested reasons for the problem.
(As usual, any generalizations about genders are just that - generalizations. There are plenty of people who vary from the norm by give or take a sigma or three.)
For example, men are more aggressive - when searching for a job, when demanding a raise, when jockeying for promotions and opportunities. Indeed, society has negative connotations for women who are too aggressive. A demanding male boss is tolerated and sometimes admired for their “strength” - while a woman is considered a “bitch” if she is too harsh in exercising authority. So an aggressive personality is a negative for a woman.
The top tier until recently has been 99% men. Like hires like, unless the talent is exceptional. White men who like to share beers or fine whiskey will be more comfortable with, tend to hire and promote similar hooch-swilling white men.
Women do end up with the short end of the stick in child care and maternity leave. They may miss a year or more of their career just when it needs full attention, and then may not be able to put in the level of overtime, work at home, etc. that men do, due to antiquated family care roles; not to mention study after study shows that even when both couples work, the woman ends up doing most of the housework as well. So men can spend more time working on their careers.
Traditional women’s jobs are rated lower. The old common wisdom is that a factory worker or a construction worker is paid more than a secretary, typically - because jobs women do always have; even though perhaps the intellectual skills required for a secretary (especially today) probably exceed those needed for men’s menial labour. How do you compare job categories that are apples and oranges and say one is underpaid?
In general, women have different interests than men. So for example, as the bias lessens, women are taking more and more of the spots in medical school; while my observation in IT is that there were a decent number of women working in the field, but they didn’t exhibit the same passion for it as men. (I worked in a department that was maybe half female programmers and system analysts- yet in the 1980s and early 1990’s when home computing was a rare hobby, most of the men had home computers and the women did not. ) Yet computers are a relatively recent field, so there should be no serious bias about who to hire.
Women are harassed in some cases in non-traditional roles. (The Canadian military and the RCMP are working through these issues now). Similarly, during school an college, women were/are discouraged from selecting STEM careers whether by peer pressure, or guidance from adults, ridicule, pressure to conform to gender roles, etc. or social impressions at a time when social pressure is a significant formative factor. And surprise, the “male” jobs are the better-paying ones.
There’s the controversial issue too (IIRC the president of Yale was forced out over mentioning it?) that the difference between two X chromosomes vs. one X in genetic expression, means that male intellect tends to be distributed farther out from the norm, the sigma is higher - there are more smarter men, somewhat (and more stupid ones too) than women.
And to follow on that, there are plenty of theories about men vs. women and assorted abilities, an oddly enough those promoted by men tend to suggest men are better at **** than women, whatever you fill in the blank with.
but in the end - men control the pay rates and some biases are not even conscious ones.
Actually, once things like seniority, college degrees, time of occupation, part time vs Full time etc are factored in, the difference is fairly small. About 5% or so.
Recently here at the local college, a woman that teaches MSHA compliance just received a salary increase of $13000 (from $47000 to $60000) annually, when it came out that her male compatriots doing the same job were making that much more than she was.
She had been in the position longer, and was the ONLY person in the post with real, honest-to-goodness mining experience (a massive benefit when teaching about mine safety). Yet when it came to cutting a paycheck, the men made significantly more, just for being men.
Sorry, I can’t find the quote now, but I read a story several years ago about a female executive who had recently retired. She and a male exec had essentially identical responsibilities and they both supervised the same sizable staff. It didn’t sound like a usual situation but it apparently worked for the company. Anyway it turned out that she and male exec got along great-no out of the ordinary conflicts, no significant pay differences, the management worked out well. She finally left the company happy and well paid. She was interviewed about gender pay gaps because of the unusual circumstance where she rated and approved pay rates for part of the group and the male did the same for the other part (don’t remember what the ratio was). Her comment was that after several years there was a noticeable pay gap between the male and female employees in the group. A gap that was created and maintained by both of the execs without any intent to discriminate. In fact they both worked to avoid creating a gap. The reason was simple and one she only recognized after she had left the company: when a male employee would request a pay raise due to performance and a female employee would request a similar pay raise due to similar performance, both execs found that they took advantage of the team spirit and less aggressive attitude of the female and paid the males more because they felt they had to pay that to keep them on the team. The females got shortchanged simply because of the perception that they were more likely to accept less without leaving. In spite of conscious efforts to eliminate any gaps this constant pressure that neither exec recognized at the time resulted in a gap.
5% is not small, not when there’s no rational basis for it. How do you think men would react if tomorrow they on average they all suddenly had their wages cut by 5% just because they have a Y chromosome? I guarantee the headlines about the wage slash would not include the word “small” and would instead focus on men’s completely justified upset.
Sure, 5% is not negligible. But compared to the 77% talked about? It is small.
Hey, sexism exists. Not as much as yesterday, sure. But it is still there. Something to work towards getting down to 0. But let us start at the real number of 4-5% not 23%.