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> For example, I’ve told recruiters about my salary expectations and had them laugh and say “no one gives that kind of [salary/equity/vacation/benefits].” This

> For example, I’ve told recruiters about my salary expectations and had them laugh and say “no one gives that kind of [salary/equity/vacation/benefits].” This has happened to me multiple times, most frequently when the company was offering a below-market compensation package. This happens to men and women. Recruiters suck, it's not a gender bias in most cases, it's that the role attracts a certain kind of person. A lot of this doesn't need to be viewed through the lens of gender. The fact is our industry has a lot of money in it and that attracts all kinds of jerks/sharks/shady people. Men deal with all of this on a daily basis as well. I'm just starting to think we don't spend as much time organizing as a group and instead just put our heads down and take it/fight through it in isolation.

DanBC 10y ago
> This happens to men and women > A lot of this doesn't need to be viewed through the lens of gender. ...and so this is one more example of where feminism helps everyone.
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  Not really, because optimizing for the wrong thing means you can make changes that hurt everybody and mistakenly think you've helped. Take Reddit's move of banning salary negotiations: control over how the surplus of the employment relationship is broken up was taken completely out of the hands of the employee. All employees (including women) are hurt by this, and yet a blinkered model that sees nothing but gender disparity would celebrate this as a narrowing of a gender gap. There are smart ways to address disparate-impact gender gaps, but insisting that feminism is the only lens through which to view a problem is not one of them.
  - chris_7 10y ago
    In a salary-negotiation-banned situation, are you also typically prohibited from exchanging salary for vacation, while maintaining the same perceived total compensation?
wutbrodo 10y ago
What bugs me the most is when employers take advantage of this to shift the playing field to the disadvantage of all workers and the "useful idiots"[1] cheer it as progress for a marginalized subset of workers. One example is Reddit's decision some time ago to make their offers non-negotiable. Letting the employer make 100% of the decision as to how surplus is divided between employer and employee is quite obviously a net negative for employees, but it was spun as a positive move by the CEO due to reducing the disparate impact of women being less likely to negotiate. By contrast, when Google found out that they had a gender skew in promotion rates, they actually looked at the data and realized that the issue was that women employees were promoted at the same rate but put them self up for promotion at lower rates. Instead of taking more control out of every employee's hands, they launched a drive to make managers pay more attention to talented employees and encourage them to self-nominate for promotion. At the time, this closed the promotion-rates gender gap at the relevant levels. Criticism of gender equity initiatives in tech is often taken as criticism of the goal, but much of the time it's simply a criticism of the cynicism and stupidity involved in the implementation. [1] Apologies for the inflammatory language on its face but I'm referencing a specific term that's somewhat less insulting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

DanBC 10y ago

> This happens to men and women > A lot of this doesn't need to be viewed through the lens of gender. ...and so this is one more example of where feminism helps everyone.

wutbrodo 10y ago
Not really, because optimizing for the wrong thing means you can make changes that hurt everybody and mistakenly think you've helped. Take Reddit's move of banning salary negotiations: control over how the surplus of the employment relationship is broken up was taken completely out of the hands of the employee. All employees (including women) are hurt by this, and yet a blinkered model that sees nothing but gender disparity would celebrate this as a narrowing of a gender gap. There are smart ways to address disparate-impact gender gaps, but insisting that feminism is the only lens through which to view a problem is not one of them.
- chris_7 10y ago
  In a salary-negotiation-banned situation, are you also typically prohibited from exchanging salary for vacation, while maintaining the same perceived total compensation?

wutbrodo 10y ago

What bugs me the most is when employers take advantage of this to shift the playing field to the disadvantage of all workers and the "useful idiots"[1] cheer it as progress for a marginalized subset of workers. One example is Reddit's decision some time ago to make their offers non-negotiable. Letting the employer make 100% of the decision as to how surplus is divided between employer and employee is quite obviously a net negative for employees, but it was spun as a positive move by the CEO due to reducing the disparate impact of women being less likely to negotiate. By contrast, when Google found out that they had a gender skew in promotion rates, they actually looked at the data and realized that the issue was that women employees were promoted at the same rate but put them self up for promotion at lower rates. Instead of taking more control out of every employee's hands, they launched a drive to make managers pay more attention to talented employees and encourage them to self-nominate for promotion. At the time, this closed the promotion-rates gender gap at the relevant levels. Criticism of gender equity initiatives in tech is often taken as criticism of the goal, but much of the time it's simply a criticism of the cynicism and stupidity involved in the implementation. [1] Apologies for the inflammatory language on its face but I'm referencing a specific term that's somewhat less insulting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot