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Originally Posted by pokerodox
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.
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.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pokerodox
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.
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.
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Originally Posted by pokerodox
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.
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.