In the cases involving our division, I don’t recall there being any press or publicity whatsoever. No newspaper articles, no press releases, nothing. I don’t think individual complaints generate much press unless the behavior is so scandalous that it is tabloid material or some kind of egregious behavior is captured on video.
The first step in a discrimination lawsuit is to go to the EEOC. Then you wait for them to decide whether there is a prima facie case that they would even want to investigate. I think someone has already pointed out that the employee does not have any way to get their hands on documentary evidence of what other people are being paid and why. In the company I worked for, we kept extremely lean personnel files in any case. The big kahuna is the performance evaluation, which is largely subjective.
When oh when will giant corporations ever have an equal playing field with the awesome power of a worker filing a discrimination lawsuit? The system is rigged in favor of the little guy, I tells ya.
I’m in the middle of a huge statistical analysis project at work. We are looking at all the different kinds of employees our company has and trying to get them into roles - its an IT project (we do this sort of thing for identity management projects and determining what sort of computers and applications should be in a “standard” set for any cohort).
We simply don’t break out job type in our HR systems adequately. There are grades and titles and classifications, but those don’t necessarily track to what you do. For instance, my title is “Engineer” - but I’m the first to say I’m a LOUSY engineer - I’m a project manager and process analyst.
So one of my early jobs out of college, I’d been temping. The company I was temping at wanted to hire me. They asked what I needed (which was $14k - this was a while ago - and that was what I was making - plus with good benefits - you don’t get those temping - and security - I’d still be way ahead). They laughed and paid me $18k.
BTW, years later I discovered the guys were making more than I was at that company (different job, same firm) Went to HR and ended up with a 20% raise for not suing, which put me on the same footing with the guys. But that was a very sexist old fashioned company where a lot of the management was older and they still had a “what are women doing in the workplace” culture. I had managers tell me that they didn’t promote women - why bother, women quit when they had babies. This would have been around 1989.
But, but, but, I thought there was no discrimination in the workplace! Those managers have to do the totally rational thing and pay people exactly what they’re worth, with no consideration of their personal prejudices, friendships, and other impossible things! Otherwise, they would be irrational, and no one is irrational.
I personally believe that there is still some discrimination against women in the workplace and I know that the status of the “myth” has little to do with the Lilly Ledbetter Act, but I still wonder what the actual evidence is that discrimination till exists to any significant degree.
Here is one (biased perhaps) argument that the evidence of significant discrimination at this point in time is weak indeed.
It would be nice to actually have the study that documented differential pay for the same productivity in the same job. Until then it is hard to say with certainty that current pay differentials may not reflect cultural baggage that men and women employees on average bring to the table rather than discrimination: men may tend to judge their self-worth more by job performance as measured by take-home pay, women more by a more holistic view of quality of life; men may be more likely to sacrifice family needs for the job, women may feel more of a family and societal obligation; etc.
Do we know enough to say whether or not it is a myth?
Serious question, here. I can’t see any downside to making pay charts available and the upside is that we can immediately shine light on any potential discrimination.
As it happens, my own company is involved in a related situation now. We accidently hired a completely incompetent woman based on her paper credentials. After about a half year of trying to work with her and let her “get up to speed” it was beyond obvious that there was no hope that she would ever be a productive worker. But HR wouldn’t let us fire her unless we went through a very protracted process, involving a drawn-out official probationary period, with multiple “warnings”, and documentation that she had been “given every opportunity to succeed”. (Towards the end of the process her immediate supervisor quit, and we had to start the entire process over again from scratch.)
And the reason for all this is because they are afraid that she will sue. I’ve been told that she used certain “code words” in discussions with people that lead to this suggestion.
FTR, I imagine the core of her lawsuit, if she does sue, will not be about gender discrimination but about discrimination based on ethnic background or the like. This itself has actually complicated the issue, because in my estimation and that of some others, the crux of her problem is that her command of the English language is not strong enough for her to understand what people are telling her in many cases, and perhaps more importantly, for people to know whether she actually understands what they are telling her in a given instance. But HR is afraid that this will be interpreted as discrimination, and wants us to avoid discussing the language issue with her. (I think they are mistaken from a legal perspective, since her language problem affects her ability to do her job, but there it is.)
My FIL’s department had problems for years with an obnoxious and incompetent gay guy. Had he been straight, he would have been sacked, but they were convinced that he would sue if they fired him so they put up with him.
Bottom line is that employers are very fearful of lawsuits, even when they are confident that the lawsuits are groundless. As I said above, it’s bad publicity, costs money to defend, and sometimes the results are a crapshoot, depending a lot on the makeup and attitudes of the jury and skill of the lawyers more than on the actual facts of the case.
I’m sure a lot of people who share the perspective of Frostillicus about the supposed enormous power of corporations will scoff at this type of thing. But since the mindset I’ve described is that of people who actually have something at stake, and who pay close attention to such matters, it gets extra weight, IMHO.
It’s hard to measure productivity for most professional jobs.
One problem with saying that “X% is not explained by known factors” is that there are also a lot of unknown factors. And known factors that are not looked at.
As an example, I once saw a study that showed that men spend far more of their time commuting to work than women, on average. That itself would explain some of the difference in pay, since the pay for the same jobs in the suburbs is generally less than the pay in the big city. But you don’t generally see that factored into these studies.
The most important consideration, IMO, is something you touched on in your final paragraph, but not broadly enough.
It’s not just men’s “self worth” or women’s “holistic view”. Society expects different things from men and women. Women too (as well as other men) place a much bigger emphasis on earning power in judging the social status (& marriage potential) of men than society (male & female) places on women. If you are a woman working as a secretary, married to a guy making decent money and living an upper middle class existence, you are a success. If you are a man in a comparable situation you are a loser. A woman’s occupation as a checkout clerk will not hinder her dating prospects in the way that a guy’s occupation as shelf-stocker will.
In addition, society still places the primary responsibility for supporting a family on the father/husband. This is not true to nearly the same extent that it used to be, but it’s still there. If there’s not enough money, the father/husband is the guy who let his family down and couldn’t live up to his responsibilities. (Conversely, child care is considered more of a woman’s responsibility - I’ve seen a study showing that juries tend to be harder on women who leave their children in cars than on men, and it’s for this reason.)
(There used to be an administrative assistant in my office who had been a sales head with six people working under her, until she decided she wanted out of the rat race. A man does not have that option.)
As a result of all this, men will always be - on average - driven to work harder and do “whatever it takes” to make money more than women, at whatever field they are in. Problem is that there’s no real way to measure it, for the most part.
This is going to be one that is difficult to do studies on that you cannot poke holes in, because the data is hard to get at and harder to standardize.
My personal observation of working in the workforce (as a male Asian working for about forty years, having advance from entry level to upper-middle management) that discrimination against women is white collar jobs has been reduced a lot over the last twenty years, except at the very highest levels. In the companies I have worked for, even women in executive positions (Vice President, Director) make significant intrusions into their work schedule for family-related issues, and men don’t. At the company I am working at right now, remote assignments (either relocating for one or two years, or “commuting” to another city Mon/Fri) is the exclusive domain of men. Of 62 people who are set up in temporary housing 61 are men. The one woman is only there 2-3 days a week, and she picks the days weeks in advance according to her husband’s travel schedule. These assignments often end in a major promotion. I am an involved Dad, and wouldn’t take one of those assignments even if it came with a big raise. But I understand that this limits my career advancement.
Now some women will argue that these assignments are over-weighted in determining promotions, and in fact are over-weighted deliberately so that men will be advantaged. But this smacks of moving the goal posts to me.
In fact I have definitely experienced some sort of reverse discrimination. When I sought FMLA, I was told that I was a designated key employee because of my high income (I work in corporate for a large retailer, so we have tons of low wage part time workers, everyone who is anyone is in the top 1%, never mind 10%, so half the whole corporate staff could be “key employees”). But women who are higher paid than I am have received FMLA. I could have made an issue out of it, but then I would be labelled a whiner. Same thing with leaving at 5:00 because I have to pick up my daughter. If we are having a meeting, the women VPs will leave at 5:00 with nary a peep our of anyone, but I get asked right away if I can get my wife to pick her up, so that I can stay until 6, 7, 8 or 9 to get the job done. I only need to leave once or twice a month for this reason. Most of the time, my wife, who is an engineer at about the same career level as me, can get out of work on time for this. This is what being a “family friendly” company amounts to I guess. It really means mom friendly.
I don’t have any exposure to what the blue collar workforce experiences. Maybe things in the fire-house or union hall are still generally hostile towards women.
The companies that I’ve worked in either don’t have pay grades or have pay grades that overlap substantially. So an “engineer” that’s been around for a while might make more money than a younger, recently promoted, up-and-coming “senior engineer”. At some places, they may have only four positions: analyst, associate, vice president, managing director, and that covers everyone from the kid right out of school to the business heads just below the executive board. Managing director could be anyone from a very bright quant to the head of European trading.
Knowing what everyone made, in my view, would cause havoc and revolt, and companies would rather deal with the occasional discrimination lawsuit than the resulting chaos.
However, if you can get your congressman to require that pay be posted as a substitute for the LL act, more power to you!
In real life, many, many more people are hired and fired than file discrimination lawsuits. Of those that file the lawsuit, few are successful, fewer still are successful for any serious amount, and still fewer end up making the papers. It’s still a concern for employers, of course.
Here’s a cite that supports you. Note however the quote from Salvatore. (In the case I discussed above, HR is intending to offer this woman some severance, which she will need to sign a waiver in order to get.)
And the type of company. And actually I do admit that I was presenting only one side of the picture.
I have worked for several companies in the last twenty years. Some are more bureaucratic and process oriented than others. In one case, HR saw their role as “making it happen” after the line managers had made their decisions, and of helping us use the right code words so we did not get into trouble. Once we decided that someone needed to be managed out, they would help us document performance issues. The idiotic thing was that everyone knew that once you went into the performance improvement process you never came out. And there was no ongoing documentation of peformance for all employees, only the “problem” ones, so there was no body of data to go back to to find out if the designation of “problem” employees was based on objective criteria. Performance reviews were very subjective, and formal objective setting was pretty much non-existent.
In another company, HR micromanaged the review process. The HR managers made sure that in annual performance reviews there are enough specific, measurable, time-bound targets that people had to meet, and if these changed that they were communicated to the employee. It was a pain in the arse but terminating an underperforming employee was relatively easy and safe. This was a company in which when a top performing black salesperson was the first to be put on the RIF list (on the basis of soft skills criteria) and a bottom performing white one was slated to be promoted to sales manager (because that was supposed to require a different set of skills than actually selling) HR threw down a penalty flag. I was the business manager for the unit, and it seemed to me that what the line managers wanted to do would result in a slam dunk racial discrimination case, and HR saved them a ton of grief. On the other hand HR added a lot of overhead to the management process, and slowed things down a lot, which can be a killer in a sales organization.
I don’t know which one is “better” but the ability to sustain a discrimination lawsuit against one type of company would be a lot better than the other. Perversely, it would be a lot easier to sue the one that set up all the documentation processes, rather than the cowboy culture one. But guess what? The process oriented company didn’t experience those kind of issues as much in the first place.
Oh certainly it would be difficult to get good data, but so long as the study was limited in scope not impossible.
I’ll use my profession as a test case - I’m a physician (pediatrician). Not so hard to go into university or large group practice settings and call up figures for gross charges generated within particular specialties and compare it to annual salaries. Probably not so hard to do that for lawyers in large practices as well. True in some fields there are no good proxies for productivity but in some there are. Now getting any large corporate entity to participate in such a study … that might be more difficult.
There are other unknowns out there as well. Females tend to be overrepresented in lower paying fields of employment (so called “women’s work”) - are females attracted to lower paying fields (for whatever reason such as other aspects of the profession that are attractive or merely opportunity) or do jobs become lower paying because they are female predominated? So again to use my profession - will pediatrics (or OB/GYNE) become less well compensated (on a pay per case or visit basis) now that they are becoming increasingly female dominated professions? Is there any evidence of that occurring relative to male medical bastions like orthopedics? Are there other professional fields that are becoming female predominated like these two medical ones are that could be looked at as well?
I think you just talked yourself out of the feasibility of the study yourself. Even for a single profession (doctors) if you can show that women are paid less than men on averge, but this is explained by the fact that they specialize in less lucrative fields, feminists will just turn around and say that the fields are less lucrative because they are dominated by women.
I must have heard a dozen times in the last twenty years, that the secretarial position was a relatively well paid one until it came to be dominated by women. Of course in the modern world the supply of people who want to be secretaries is huge. As education to high school and beyond became ubiquituos the number of minimally qualified people to fill office jobs became huge. Most people would rather work in an office than in a laundry or on a roof. So they bid down the price. But none of this is innocent if you already have your mind made up. It is all a giant conspiracy.
Mom “friendly,” huh? How friendly is it really? By expecting (and only allowing for) women to take of work for family reasons, it has placed women in a position where they have to be the primary caregivers. It isn’t friendly to men or women in my opinion, and only perpetuates the problem of discrimination. Men are in a position, career wise, where they cannot advance unless they have someone at home to care for them and their children. There have been studies that show unmarried men are unable to advance in their careers also; why wouldn’t they be able to be, when many of the married men have someone at home who will pick up all their slack so they can work 50+ hours a week? Women technically can work as hard as men and advance themselves, but if they are married and have children, someone has to do the slack-picking up. And it usually ends up being women, because they can, because employees expect it, and men are more discriminated against for taking off for personal reasons, as you said. So between a married couple, the burden gradually shifts to the woman, her career suffers, and, to add insult to injury, later people will point at her and say, “See! This is why women get paid less! They take off all the time!” Eventually even women who devote themselves totally to work, (either by marrying a man who will forgo his own advancement for hers, or by not getting married and having kids) are being discriminated against because “everyone” knows women don’t work as hard.
This is why LL Act is just one part of the solution, and feminists advocate for societal wide changes in gender expectations, etc.
I myself think that any field dominated by women will automatically become less lucrative. But not necessarily because of discrimination and certainly not because of any conspiracy. It’s because, as above, women are - in aggregate - less driven by the need for money than men. So they drive the price down.
Not that women don’t want to make as much money as they can, of course. But supply meets demand at a different point on the graph for them than it does for men.
But that presupposes that none of these gender expectations have any inherent basis. That’s a very big assumption.
But I actually don’t your claim about feminists advocating change is true altogether (to a large degree of course). People advocate for women having the same opportunities as men. I don’t see anyone advocating for women to have the same responsibilities.
How familiar are you with modern feminist thoughts and priorities? I see a lot of this type of advocacy.
Also, why is the assumption that gender expectations are inherent any less of a large assumption than thinking they aren’t, especially when I was able to easily outline how societal expectations could create the situation we see?
You may be right about more obscure feminist publications. I was thinking of what makes it through the MSM.
I tend to think it’s more of an assumption to assume that society developed in an unnatural way than otherwise, but it makes no difference in any event. Even if both assumptions are equally tentative, that counts against yours more than against the opposite. Because you are looking to base societal changes and legal policy on this assumption.
