I think this whole thing can be summed up pretty easily.

If women are paid less than men for the same work, it's necessary that they are paid less but it is not sufficient to prove any kind of discrimination. Also, anyone who doesn't attempt to address the differences between men and women is dumb or disingenuous. It's pretty obvious, or should be, that women have different motivations and obligations than their male counterparts.

Just toting a random statistic is moronic. These are the same people that bought eugenics hook, line, and sinker. World and human nature never changes.

turtletom - There have been lots of studies that control for these sorts of things.

You don't need to remain ignorant.

I'm surprised people are still arguing about this. The bigger question is how to resolve the problem. Start sending people to prison when they are caught paying women less than men. Every company owner knows how much everyone makes. Just because a woman doesn't like to be as aggressive about negotiating her salary doesn't mean you should be allowed to take advantage of her.

The right-wingers are so ridiculous on this. They say that it will get better eventually. The problem is that they are never the ones who try to make it get better. They are the ones who will fight it every step of the way just like they fought to keep slaves and segregation, etc.

To assume that their is the possibility of a world with complete equity in pay, and really equity in any part of society, is so laughably absurd that the idea shouldn't even be entertained. If your vision of utopia is a place where non-equity of pay is an imprisonable offence than you obviously don't know much world history.

I hope your not an academic because you obviously lack a great deal of critical thinking skills. I could come up with countless reasons why this paradox exists without it being discriminatory. Considering there is data that supports the fact that men work longer hours and are more likely to come into work on days off, work overtime, etc. that the offer includes the assumption, and probably practical experience, that men have a greater willingness to work and therefore are more valuable as employees. What about the possibility that, depending on the age of the women, that she is likely to become pregnant/ start a family and this would decrease her value as an employee?

Also, there are studies showing that unmarried women without children, i.e. women who have no role or a small role in any kind of family life making them similar to most men, are actually paid higher than their male counterparts.

Post them. Let's take a look!

Clearly, your vision of utopia is where white men get everything and everyone else must do their bidding. Too bad for you that the world has moved on from that vision.

Can't tell if serious. If so, this is out there in crazy-land.

So a criminal court is going to be looking at whether a male employee, call him M, was more qualified than a female employee, call her F, when M was promoted? Jail the manager-employee who made the decision? Jail the HR VP? Jail the CEO?

Are you kidding?

If not that, what metric are you proposing?

And expanding the number of titles people can have doesn't do anything to solve that. It just advertises the amount of money that people are making. Someone who takes the initiative to figure out why some people make more than others might sort it out and make appropriate demands, but these are mostly the people who would have done it otherwise.

True, you lose some negatives and you pick up all sorts of new ones. Why not instead just fix the problem in a way that doesn't create any new issues?


The difference is that one broadcasts your salary to everyone in the office. That's both uncomfortable to a lot of people, and opens up the door for people to get pissed over something they don't really even understand. If it was the only way to inform people about how much their productivity is worth then i guess you might want to consider that an option, but there're better ways.


What's the question?

There're a lot of people/companies who offer career services, and one aspect of that is salary negotiation. Set national standards for the knowledge/experience a person needs to hold that title so no one gets ripped off by charlatans, make sure their compensation is aligned with their clients, and then find a way to open up the lines of communication so that salaried employees are aware of the benefits.

Maybe to compliment this you could require that performance reviews to be made available to employees so they're you're able to get a realistic assessment of what your skills are worth without having to rely on a reference from your manager (which creates a conflict of interest).

Abba, you realize this is an actual thing that a bunch of companies are doing, right?

Your objections are basically nonsense. But, whatever.

The lame arguments against paying women a fair wage are unsurprisingly ludicrous and misogynistic.

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No it doesn't. It leads to feeling uncomfortable with voicing the idea that you are worth more than your coworker or the idea that you are accusing your employer of trying to take advantage of you by paying you less than you are worth or less than he actually would be willing to.

Since liberals, on average, are smarter than conservatives, and since negotiating ability is correlated with intelligence, the conclusion is that their not negotiating hard is not due to a lack of skill.

There're a lot of companies who without government compulsion choose to be eco friendly too. Is that an argument against regulation or consumer protection?

I agreed that publishing salaries is better than nothing.
I'm just also saying that there're better solutions that actually have a realistic chance of being legislated.

Publishing salary data does significantly less to help the most vulnerable people because the ones who aren't negotiation now are the same ones who won't know what to do with that data. It would also probably piss a lot of people off but leave that out of the equation for now if you want.

If you require that companies give their employees copies of comprehensive performance reviews and nudge them towards a career counseling service they'll be in a significantly better position to demand their worth.

Um, I'm not advocating for regulation/consumer protection that prohibits negotiating... I'm also not advocating for publishing salaries or any other legislative solution*.

And even in terms of just the negotiating aspect, it feels like you don't even really understand the problem. Take for example Sklansky's post that often times its not even about a lack of negotiating skill but due to discomfort with the whole idea of negotiating.

* That's not to say I'm against all legislative solutions, just that before tackling that it would be nice to get people to admit there's actually a problem.

The one time a hard and fast rule against negotiating would be silly is when an employee has been offered a a similar job by a competitor that pays more money. Shouldn't he or she be allowed to inform their present employer that they will leave if it is not matched?

I think a hard and fast rule against "trying" to negotiate is always silly. Just because a company has a policy of not negotiating doesn't mean you should punish people for asking... they just have to explain and enforce the policy in response.

As an employer I think its almost always a mistake to try and match an offer an employee has gotten from another company. But aside from that, there are still meta issues at play. You may lose a good employee that you would have liked to have kept - but it also doesn't incentivize your other employees to go out job hunting to get raises.

Lol, an ad hom attack. Is this all you got big shot or do you care to deal with actual arguments? This isn't even a good ad hom because, if you assume that a wage gap is indicative of discrimination, than I would be a Jewish supremacist, an Asian supremacist, or a gay male supremacist. Not a white male supremacist. All of whom make more, on average, than joe blow the white guy. I could also be a Nigerian supremacist as well considering most Nigerian immigrants make more than joe blow white guy.

There is nothing wrong with disparity in an economic system.

turtletom?

Cite?

I'd also add that when we have the studies showing the lower response rates for applications that certain groups get we're forced to consider that their negotiating position is weaker. If you get significantly fewer offers there's far more pressure on you to get the job you're negotiating for.

this tone and content of your posts makes it seems like you believe you are well versed in this area. are you suggesting you have read the research and reached a different conclusion or perhaps you have only read what you have read and formulated your own conclusions

the people saying women are equal to men yet simultaneously need to create special rules to level the playing field in negotiation (lol think about it) are using an extremely low resolution measurement. some women certainly negotiate better than men. we are talking about a 6-12 cent wage gap which negotiation only makes up a fraction of that gap. on top of that we know some women negotiate better than most men. realistically, the hypothetical negotiation gap is less than a penny. now people want to create a bunch rules and lock people up to correct this. the solution is exponentially worse than the hypothetical problem

so my point is, pitting women vs mens skills in negotiating is a very low resolution picture. women do worse in negotiation generally. a far more accurate picture is people with high trait agreeableness do worse in negotiation. that includes more women (and men on the far left) but it actually targets those with a negotiation disadvantage far better than some sexist perception of the world that just sees men vs women

iq is very important but its not a sole factor. the most successful people are high iq and high conscientiousness. again, a higher resolution representation of success than just high iq. just like a better representation of negotiation skills at the work place would be trait agreeableness and not gender, even though trait agreeableness is more prominent in women

Is there any need to read further than "perhaps you have only read what you have read"?

You can't argue with a good tautology.

I don't need to do research to know that if someone is, for example, selling their car privately, a buyer who notices that the seller is in dire circumstances and can't wait for a fair offer, is less likely to try to chisel the price down far below what the car is worth if that buyer is agreeable/female/ liberal. But that doesn't mean that they aren't just as aware of the opportunity to do that as the disagreeable/male /conservative. Rather they are simply reluctant to use all the weapons of a tougher negotiator because they don't think its the right thing to do.

thanks for sharing david but im not sure if any of that is relevant. i don't think people in the work place or those justice warrioring on their behalf believe that the reason they are not negotiating a raise is because "they don't think its the right thing to do". being bitter and resentful to the "1%" and "the man" is actually built in to their core beliefs of "success" being a result of oppression (unless its their own)