how about i quote myself stating a wage gap exists itt 3 or more times instead?

how about i quote myself 20+ times describing how the far left fail to articulate any complete ideas or thoughts?

ok now that we have all that out of the way, you stated the wage gap is a problem. please describe the size of the wage gap. why it exists. and finally you can articulate your claim of this problem

if married women are harmed by the wage gap then it should be easy to paint a picture with easy to find labor force participation stats? go ahead and make a fool out of me einstein

and for the 100th (?) time my magic 8ball will correctly predict i get nothing in response other than empty labels and zero ability to articulate your position

From the NYT article well named cited:

"Linda Babcock, an economist at Carnegie Mellon and co-author of the book 'Women Don’t Ask,' has found that one reason for the disparity is that men are four times more likely to ask for a raise than women are, and that when women do ask, we ask for 30 percent less."

How do you control for that?

And why should any man be discriminated against, whether in hiring, promotion, or raises, because women, on average, don't ask and don't ask for enough? That would be unfair.

Our position is well articulated. Look above for the link-y things and go read those. Every. Single. One. points out that the wage gap exists. Sure, different assumptions give you different answers. But you know what they don't show? That it doesn't exist.

So, you can lol about quoting yourself and such - but all you do is type a bunch of nonsense and avoid actually citing anything.

i already posted that women and men on the far left are generally more agreeable in nature. studies show that trait agreeableness leads to weaker negotiating skills

what we should do is, find people with weak negotiating skills and then give them an automatic raise. once we are done that, we can move on to the next form of oppression. we can fix a womens wage gap, short mans wage gap, agreeable personality wage gap, then we can move on to bald men wage gap, and then abandoned by the father wage gap, etc etc etc until we eventually can calculate the oppression down to the individual and we have communism

albert,

a wage gap exists. i stated this long before you decided this is some sort of sticking point. i have said it in multiple posts you are responding to. almost all of those studies you are referring to demonstrate the 77 wage gap obama and hilary publicly promoted was a lie

you made claims and i posed specific questions and challenged you to actually articulate your point. did you just articulate something? no? weird, its like i have magic powers. or perhaps ideologues are extremely predictable

It's not clear to me in what scenarios you are concerned about discrimination against men associated with that factor.

If by "control for that" you mean try to ameliorate it's impact on the wage gap, I don't think it's something that can be done legislatively, but there is reason to believe that gendered norms and beliefs contribute to the fact that women are less likely to negotiate, and that the way compensation discussions are framed can have an effect. See for example section 4.2 in the NBER study (p. 42):

So, it is possible (I won't say certain based on a single experiment...) that very small cultural changes in the way companies manage compensation, like making it clear that compensation is negotiable, could reduce this problem. I don't think that would be discriminatory to men.

The salience of gendered perceptions about women who are more aggressive in comparison to men who are more aggressive is a good example of why I say that feminist consciousness raising re: the wage gap is about more than just conscious and intentional discrimination, but it's also not really something that can be fixed by law. It's something I think that changes slowly as people become more aware that those attitudes don't make sense.

this is a great idea. i also think car salesman (car salesperson?) should have a sign next to the picture of their family stating that the price of the car is negotiable

So what's this myth?

It feels like a lot of tech companies are actually going down the route of not making compensation negotiable at all.

There's pros and cons, but for the vast majority of jobs the ability to negotiate salary isn't a particularly useful skill for the job in question. So its kind of silly to reward that skill more than skills that actually are useful.

No, I meant, how could you measure a wage gap, controlling for assertiveness in salary negotiation. Meaning compare men who ask for raises a lot to women who ask for raises a lot, or men who don't to women who don't.

If men ask for more money on average, and that's why they have more money, on average, I assume we wouldn't want to do anything legal about that. Teach women to negotiate if that's what you want to do, but don't enforce some affirmative action against men, at least until you have shown that the gap exists even after controlling for most (reasonably close to all) of the meaningful variables.

That said, the law in Britain is that companies with over 250 employees must publish their wage gap. I consider that law basically harmless, so I am not worried about that.

I have been assuming that the wider discussion is/will be about what to do about a wage gap - meaning what legal measure to take to "correct" such a gap - meaning what advantages can we give women over men to correct the situation. Once you start talking about that, I become concerned.

But suppose that you are quite sure that your employer would pay you more if that was what it took to keep you from leaving? (And to take it further, suppose it was pretty obvious that if you asked for a raise and were fired for doing that you could easily get another similar job with a competitor that paid at least as much.)

One problem with that theory is that it ignores men's ability to pay as a component of the relationship itself. Theories of men paying as a demonstration of overall fitness are more compelling as they have a basis in evolution theory.

Another problem with your theory is it doesn't analogize well with other behaviors associated with gender roles, like opening doors or pulling out chairs for women. Women are perfectly capable to doing these things themselves, but the compulsion for men to do those things remains.

I am going to answer my own question. Companies can have a non negotiating rule and make it clear that merely asking for an unscheduled raise subjects you to being fired. But they also admit that an exceptional employee can ask and possibly not get fired even if he or she is turned down.

Kind of curious as to how someone of your perspective would enforce anti-discrimination legislation.

I don't see why not, if it is found to be a significant difference. The idea is we don't want to lose potential by way of stereotypes or prejudices. If a company is aware of an unfair bias against short people it might be more likely to promote a short person, better qualified than a taller consideration, who might have been overlooked otherwise. The company is better off. Short person is better off. Win win.

The current protected classes pretty much correspond to groups against which a significant historical bias is known to exist and to have been propagated by law. Less pronounced or less systematic biases don't tend to cause as much social strife, the quelling of which is really what motivates the creation of protected classes. If balding men had a case strong enough to get people on their side then maybe they could be a protected class as well. I don't see that happening but theoretically it should be able to happen. If we made a rule arbitrarily cutting off the expansion of protected classes we would severely compromise the practical foundation of our freedoms.


It wasn't too long ago, the 20th century, that the justification for disallowing women the right to vote was that it would give married men two votes. That's oppression, and it's from that history which we form theories about why there is a wage gap. Allowing women the vote caused a lot of resentment and was divisive. So did the attendance of black students at previously all white educational institutions. Resentment is not usually a good enough reason, in and of itself, not to do something. The question is whether or not the principle and outcomes are desirable, not whether some backward people resent it.

There's lots of ways to implement "no negotiating" policies that still handles these sorts of issues. One way I've seen it done is that salary is tied to titles/positions. The company chooses what they're going to pay for each title - and that's where they make their decision about how they're going to pay relative to the market.

So let's take an example of a company that wants to pay market rates and not offer individual raises. If someone is getting paid significantly less than their market rate it just means they don't have the correct title. So they get promoted.

In some ways its just semantically different than 'negotiating salary'. But it has a few significant differences - including that the diversity of people across a title/position is much more visible. And its more obvious to people that have a hard time 'negotiating' to see what the expectations are of a particular position and when they should get it. In most cases a title/position is more visible than a salary.

I have no idea why we would take it further or why any company would fire someone for asking for a raise.


Ok...

I don't really buy into the idea that a social convention needs to remain because you can come up with some evolutionary meaning behind it. It's just a form of evolutionary psychology that's largely unfalsifiable and says nothing about how future behaviour ought be.

Why aren't conventions about opening doors and pulling out chairs the same? Why would society be worse if you opened doors for everyone, or if women sometimes offered you a chair?

I don't think you buy into the posts you're currently making to be honest.

Edit: And this is a bit of a red herring anyway. Even if you want to pay an unequal share in your personal relationships, this doesn't translate into the idea that you should be reimbursed by your employer.

The short answer, at least with the large standardized data sets from which the usual statistics are derived, is that you don't. Rather, other kinds of experiments and research support the hypothesis that there are gendered differences in negotiating and that this could explain part of the gender wage gap. But its impact on the gap is not measured, and it remains a hypothesis rather than something demonstrated from the data. It's a plausible hypothesis of course, but it's hard to say how significant its impact is.

I can imagine a longitudinal research project that would tie the usual data collection on wages and other human capital factors with an interview/survey process to assess negotiating skills, but I don't think that has been done.

I'm not aware of anyone proposing any sort of legislation to ban negotiating, at least not in the US. I think that would be a bad solution, but I'd point out that it's not necessarily discriminatory according to the usual definition of the word. It would certainly be disadvantageous to people who benefit from negotiating skills, but even under a "disparate impact" measure of discrimination I don't think that's sufficient to call such a policy discriminatory.

The best analogy that I can think of is the way unions negotiate wages. The NBER study authors point out that countries with mostly unionized labor, or centralized control of wages by government, have a more compressed range of wages across workers, and that this tends to reduce the wage gap because it benefits workers at the lower end of the wage spectrum -- who are disproportionately women -- by setting wage floors (p. 50). I don't particularly favor this sort of solution (although I am in favor of minimum wage increases on general grounds!) but I don't find it to be inherently discriminatory, any more than I find progressive taxation or minimum wages in general to be discriminatory.

The British law is, I believe, a pretty good model. But I would also say that it's not just a question of finding useful legislation. Like many feminist issues, the wage gap is also about changing culture, not just changing laws.

It's the so-called naturalistic fallacy. But I also think it dramatically over-estimates the extent to which social conventions about who pays for dates or holds doors open are a result of evolution to begin with.

Hence my comment about that kind of evolutionary psychology. It's trivial to imagine some reasons for why a social convention, moral, or behaviour, could have an evolutionary basis. It's not so easy to show that's actually the case, and it says nothing about what we should do.

Increasing cultural awareness is harmless. Teaching women to negotiate better is harmless or, more likely, helpful.

I am concerned that the next step is to punish companies with a larger wage gap - like a fine or something. If that was done, the company will "correct" the gap immediately, which would result in punishing men.

Another option would be, instead of punishing the company with the gap which leaves it up to the company whether and how to "fix" the gap, a next law could enforce the stricture against men directly at those companies.

Just curious how it would result in punishing men.

Simple affirmative action.

A man and a woman both apply for an internal job promotion. The man is slightly more qualified, but the woman gets the job because the company has to correct the "gap." The question remains, how much more qualified does the man have to be to get the job. At some level of higher qualification than the woman, the man would get the job. But this would be perpetrated across hundreds of companies and thousands of hiring and promotion and raise and bonus decisions.

Do you want a new title for every possible discrepancy between peoples work history? Should it include a productivity multiplier? A quality grade of their work? Flexibility to take on overtime hours when needed? Also consider that their willingness to pay depends a lot on what they think your alternatives are. If they know it would be a huge inconvenience for you to change companies they aren't going to budge nearly as fast as if you have a competing offer on the table and are willing to walk the next day. You can't really publish salary data (or their specific title that directly ties to a salary) without factoring in all of the things that determine that salary/title. It would create a lot of confusion and animosity.

Better than that just have it so that people who've been in a company for more than x years have some kind of tax incentive to speak to a certified career planning specialist who'll lay out your options.

If there are a list of good reasons why the company is paying women less than men, won't the company in question be able to publish that?

Why would you need that?


First, let's dispense with the notion that we're in some free-market paradise where everyone is earning what they should. That's not what happens.

Second, companies moving away from negotiated salaries are making the conscious choice to trade some pros/cons for a different set of pros/cons. For example, you lose some flexibility in paying individual people more but also gain some flexibility in paying people more in accordance with their actual relevant skills than with their negotiating skills.


Nonsense. People know other people's job title/role all the time. Nothing changes if the salary is set by position or if the salary is negotiable for each position.



What?