9 ms·

Gender pay gap shrinks when companies disclose wages

68 points by LogicRiver 8y ago

xfitm3 8y ago
I found this to be really interesting: "The researchers were especially surprised by the way in which the companies adapted to the regulation – by slowing the growth of men’s wages, not increasing women’s."
- smt88 8y ago
  I'm not sure how else they would behave. Increasing the salaries of all the women would be like admitting to discrimination, wouldn't it? Edit: I mean that instantly increasing the salaries would be like an admission.
  - fastball 8y ago
    How does depressing men's wages not do the same?
    - wvenable 8y ago
      There is a material difference between "paying too much" and "not paying enough". Clearly they want to be on the former side and not the latter.
    - smt88 8y ago
      They're not "depressing men's wages" -- just giving them lower raises. No one's salary suddenly went down. If you've been underpaying women in a discriminatory way while pretending to be a meritocracy, the real fix is to pay women more. But if you suddenly raise salaries for all the women, it proves you were never a meritocracy. To keep up your pretense while also fixing your mistakes, your only option is to slow raises in order to restore fairness over time -- which is what they did. The third option would be to reduce men's salaries, which of course wouldn't be possible.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  This is entirely unsurprising given the mechanism. Disclosure makes companies not want to give anyone a raise as an individual because then everyone else will know about it and want one too. Then mean wages go down, but if more of the raises had been going to men then wages for men go down even more.
- gherig4 8y ago
  I experienced this first hand and as a result I departed for greener pastures. Isn't diversity a great thing when it suppresses wages, no wonder all the big boys are pushing for it.
  - iguy 8y ago
    The article cites a 2.5% reduction in overall wages, and a 2.5% reduction in productivity. (Or one was 2.8, but close enough). Which sounds exactly like what you suggest: the most productive employees used to get other offers, and use them to ask for raises, and now they leave, or just slack off.
  - doesnt_know 8y ago
    The other way to look at it was that men were artificially overvalued and the market is now correcting itself.
  - marvin 8y ago
    This is happening at my place right now. Leadership has dictated that priority is now to even out gender imbalances rather than giving raises. Since the women in our company are heavily skewed towards lower-paying roles (QA, customer support), this means the company will avoid giving raises to the roles that actually are in demand and have strong salary growth elsewhere. Needless to say, those of us with options have started looking. Of course, everyone who gets a competitive offer elsewhere will get a counteroffer, so this policy only applies where it’s convenient.
    - mcv 8y ago
      I don't get this kind of destructive attitude. Surely the sensible thing to do when you want more equality and women are skewed towards lower paying jobs, is to hire more women in higher paying jobs? I'm all for paying people in lower-end jobs better, mind you, but using this as an excuse to hurt salary growth seems like it's intended to discredit the whole idea of gender equality. Well, unless the people involved are provably overpaid, like CEOs tend to be. But somehow I suspect the CEO is still getting his excessive raises.
- bsanr 8y ago
  A pair of scissors labeled "cynicism and greed" poised to shear the head off a crustacean labeled "meaningful societal advancement."
- gnicholas 8y ago
  Did the researchers measure employee departures? If wages stagnated in general, then one would expect that employees who are more desirable/mobile to depart. This would make it seem like wage equality went up, when in reality the people who were previously making more are still doing so — they're just doing it at a different company.
  - iguy 8y ago
    They say "we find no statistically significant change in departure rates of males or females across firm hierarchies." Have not read it closely, but "no statistically significant" need not rule out the scenario that departures drive the whole effect. It's just saying that the error bar from counting departures is large enough to include zero, while the error bars on mean salary are smaller, because everyone has a salary but only a few leave.
- zdragnar 8y ago
  It seems like a given outcome, to me. Suppose that half of your workforce makes 60% of the wages, and the other half make 40%. Suddenly, PR dictates that you need to even that out. Your budget for salaries hasn't increased. Your other costs haven't decreased. Your projected revenues haven't increased. The money to bump the bottom half up has to come from somewhere, and with a fixed salary budget, it comes from the other half's expected raises and new hires. Unless, of course, you have the flexibility to start rewriting all of your budgets, but that still hasn't changed the fact that both revenues and all other costs remain fixed.
  - ganzuul 8y ago
    Seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy in that scenario. Equal wages is supposed to result in improved production... isn't it?
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >Equal wages is supposed to result in improved production... isn't it? No, why would they?
      - ganzuul 8y ago
        Attracts better qualified personnel? More motivation? Some macroeconomic optimization where price and value mismatch results in inflation? I don't know! \o/ Just what my intuition says.
- watwut 8y ago
  Many companies award salaries in fuzzy way where few good negotiators people negotiate themselves larger salaries then similarly performing rest. One would think that salary disclosure helps to close such gap among men themselves bringing average lower.
- dba7dba 8y ago
  Based on what I have experienced in corporate America, this is completely expected behavior.
tapland 8y ago
Conclusions that the companies hired more women because of it are a bit weird to draw since every company that would be a comparison in the country also has to follow the same rules? And ofc it's solved by lowering the growth of male wages :D Business
- fastball 8y ago
  No, they were comparing companies that didn't need to follow the regulation (companies with 24-34 employees) with companies that did (35+ employees). Of course, the problem with this is twofold: 1. Companies with <35 employees is a tiny slice of the population and should generally not be expected to follow normal population distributions. 2. Companies with <35 employees are already behaving differently than larger companies with >35 employees. I do not think that variable was accounted for in any way by the study and that is problematic.
  - hayksaakian 8y ago
    Over 80% of all companies in the USA have fewer than 35 employees https://www.naics.com/business-lists/counts-by-company-size/ https://www.naics.com/business-lists/counts-by-company-size/ i agree with your point #2 the differences between large and small companies are significant enough to outweigh the causal relationship that the OP implies
    - bsanr 8y ago
      I think he was referring to the relative number of workers at companies with more/less than 35 employees. Clearly the average worker, by a large margin, works at companies with 50 or more employees. Even more so when you don't include whatever proportion of businesses counted that are essentially self-employment.
  - iguy 8y ago
    And, from skimming the paper, they have literally divided companies into two groups, <35 and >35. It could be that one giant employer (like a hospital system) is the whole story. A more subtle study would be to look for a discontinuity: expect that firms with 10, 30, 100, 1000 employees will behave differently, but anything which happens sharply at 35 (and changes in this time) can be more confidently attributed to the law. But this is obviously harder to do.
fastball 8y ago
I couldn't find an N of the study. It seems important to me in order to ascertain the statistical significance of this. Were there 10 companies in one group? 100? 1000? Did anyone else see this in the study?
- retypepassword 8y ago
  Based on table 1, it was probably about 4000 companies and 66000 employees total.
baybal2 8y ago
Very logical. Well, it gets to 0 if the pay is fixed. You don't have much companies using that in the West
berry_sortoro 8y ago
Gender pay gap is a myth. If you actually look at same job and hours worked the so called gender pay gap is pretty much not existing! Stop believing this made up BS!
anoplus 8y ago
Not just gender I think. I witness over and over how employees one day realize they were underpaid and get paid immediately. Including myself. Sometimes the company asks the employee to keep it silent so the other ones won't do the same. This is ofcourse unhealthy situation, and too common. You got to win your rights manually.
ve55 8y ago
>From 2003 to 2008, the gender pay gap at the reporting companies shrank 7 percent, from 18.9 percent down to 17.5 percent Is this really a large enough effect size to justify such a headline? >Our findings suggest that regulatory mandates on pay transparency, as a means to overcome biases against women in the workforce, may be effective in closing the gender pay gap. No, they really do not. A potential reduction from 18.9% to 17.5% does not 'close the gender pay gap', and attempting to close such a gap in this manner to begin with just demonstrates a misunderstanding of what confounding variables cause it to begin with.
- dmichulke 8y ago
  I once read an interesting thought experiment about this, adapted to this story it goes like this: We assume: - Greedy capitalist bosses (wanting to pay less for more work) - Same productivity of men and women Now if there's an 18.9% pay gap, then women are on average 18.9% cheaper to employ than men. Greedy capitalist bosses should therefore only employ women, closing the gender pay gap by driving womens' wages higher (and those of men lower). Yet this doesn't happen, so one of the assumptions is wrong or the gender pay gap difference (the 18.9%) is not correct.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    Another assumption that could be wrong is that greedy bosses can accurately determine productivity. If bosses have biases that cause them to underevaluate women's productivity this would also explain the pay difference.
    - dmichulke 8y ago
      Not sure. Even if you had only 1 out of 10 bosses able to determine productivity, that guy'd only employ women, so he'd cover some of the "losses" of the other 9 bosses. Also, you'd probably see a bimodal pay gap distribution per company.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      That would still give a huge benefit to the greedy boss who can "accurately determine productivity" and hires all women for cheaper, which means it would inevitably be copied in the end.
factsaresacred 8y ago
Here's the study: https://wpcarey.asu.edu/sites/default/files/daniel_wolfenzon_seminar_november_9_2018.pdf https://wpcarey.asu.edu/sites/default/files/daniel_wolfenzon... To describe a 7% change as "shrinks" is a bit of a stretch. And to attribute it to solely to the requirement to disclose may be incorrect as there was only a 1.4% difference vs companies that were not required to disclose anything (the 7% figure is vs pre-regulation). So wages rose for women post-regulation, regardless of whether the company they worked at disclosed wages or not. Meaning other provisions in the law also likely played a role in the decrease of the gender gap. The study also references another study that finds: > that firms with higher pay inequality exhibit larger equity returns suggesting that differences in pay inequality across firms are a reflection of differences in managerial talent. All just food for thought. Regulation and transparency can produce interesting outcomes and side-effects without making us any wiser as to the dynamics driving the differences in outcomes.
knowThySelfx 8y ago
Shouldn't remuneration depend on the amount of work done? Gender issue shouldn't come into it.
- lm28469 8y ago
  How do you remove biases from such a process though. Given two employees, same education, same title, same working hours, same productivity (based on managers reports), nothing guarantee that the HR department won't "like" one more than another. Or one might ask for raises more often or with better arguments (having kids, longer commute, getting offers from other companies all the time). Office politics are what they are, politics, as long as you have human in the process you'll have biases. Now if these biases are stronger against certain group it probably should be addressed.
  - chosenbreed37 8y ago
    In addition, the more fuzzy the nature of the work the more room for variations between remuneration. I suspect that the gender pay gap is lower workers in warehouses, factories or fast food restaurants.
    - hopler 8y ago
      The gender pay gap is large in restaurants -- women servers get bigger tips.
- Firadeoclus 8y ago
  Should the price of something depend on the amount of work done? On how much the buyer values it? Or on the amount the buyer has to offer to outbid others? Does an employer just pay for work done, or possibly also for availability, potential, loyalty, goodwill? Edit: That said, I absolutely agree that gender isn't something that should figure in those considerations. At best it's a poor proxy for much more specific differences between individuals.
  - knowThySelfx 8y ago
xref 8y ago
These articles tend to attract comments with dire predictions for US society if people knew each others salaries, so just a reminder Norway always does nationwide salary transparency https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239
- chosenbreed37 8y ago
  > These articles tend to attract comments with dire predictions for US society if people knew each others salaries, so just a reminder Norway always does nationwide salary transparency True. But I think it is worth pointing out that the US is not Norway. There is a significant culture difference for one. Secondly the policy may simply not scale. The US population, workforce, economy is orders of magnitude greater than that of Norway.
zuhayeer 8y ago
Been working on a tool called http://levels.fyi http://levels.fyi to help increase career ladder and salary transparency in the workplace (mainly for tech right now). Would love suggestions on things to add to make it more powerful!
3rdgender 8y ago
"The researchers compared those companies to firms with 25 to 34 employees that didn’t have to release their data" So they are comparing two different types of firms (with > 35 employees and between 25 and 34 employees): Doesn't that invalidate their study right there?
- progval 8y ago
  They did not directly compare the two types of companies, they compared evolution of each type. Of course that's not perfect, but it's good enough
lm28469 8y ago
The problem of gender pay gap is a really hard one to tackle. You have to be a fool to pretend there is no issue, but the number of causes is incredible at the gender, education, industry, company and individual levels. Every time there is a public debate around that topic you end up with two major groups, one saying that women work less or are less productive because of XYZ, the other saying something close to "it's the patriarchy". Striving for equality of outcome is a good first step, but it's attacking the symptoms and not the causes. Just like for politics or employees quotas, you can bend the end of the process to make it look fair and balanced but if the 10 steps before are biased against women (and other groups) you end up with an illusion of parity while the only thing that changed is you now make "positive" discrimination. Making the wages public is a good thing no matter the reason, after all the first step of making a decision is to have access to data. If it helps with pay gaps all the better.
- raducu 8y ago
  How about option 3: men choose to work on jobs that pay more but are more stressful while women chose to work on more social jobs that pay less and value other things more than just pay.
  - lm28469 8y ago
    You'll have to be a bit more precise because right now it's hard to tell if you're trolling or trying to make a point. In any case, the pay gap isn't a thing that can be addressed with a single sentence such as yours. It's a really simplistic point of view to say social jobs are valued other than with a salary. And I'm fairly certain that social workers, teachers and nurses get their share of stress. If anything the "men do manly jobs and women do social jobs" is another symptom of the underlying causes. Sure you can say "that's the way it is" and move on, but if you want to take part in the debate you have to show a minimum of intellectual honesty. Plus it doesn't work for people having the same position in the same company.
    - raducu 8y ago
      Yes it is a very simplistic explanation to why genders tend to gravitate to one job or another. And yes, I'm saying that most, but not all of the disparities are biological and while it's a great idea to encourage women to pick higher paying jobs, we're at a point in time where we'll see diminishing returns in those attempts. For the same position with the same experience, in roughly the same location, I'd be very much surprised if the AVERAGE/MEAN pay gap is more than a single digit percent across an industry. By all means go after those X% numbers, teach women to negotiate more, assert themselves and so on, but I think you'll end up with numbers similar to the ones in this study -- a couple percent improvement. What I'm trying to say is there's no conspiracy against women earning more in the western world.

68 points by LogicRiver 8y ago

I found this to be really interesting: "The researchers were especially surprised by the way in which the companies adapted to the regulation – by slowing the growth of men’s wages, not increasing women’s."

smt88 8y ago
I'm not sure how else they would behave. Increasing the salaries of all the women would be like admitting to discrimination, wouldn't it? Edit: I mean that instantly increasing the salaries would be like an admission.
- fastball 8y ago
  How does depressing men's wages not do the same?
  - wvenable 8y ago
    There is a material difference between "paying too much" and "not paying enough". Clearly they want to be on the former side and not the latter.
  - smt88 8y ago
    They're not "depressing men's wages" -- just giving them lower raises. No one's salary suddenly went down. If you've been underpaying women in a discriminatory way while pretending to be a meritocracy, the real fix is to pay women more. But if you suddenly raise salaries for all the women, it proves you were never a meritocracy. To keep up your pretense while also fixing your mistakes, your only option is to slow raises in order to restore fairness over time -- which is what they did. The third option would be to reduce men's salaries, which of course wouldn't be possible.
AnthonyMouse 8y ago
This is entirely unsurprising given the mechanism. Disclosure makes companies not want to give anyone a raise as an individual because then everyone else will know about it and want one too. Then mean wages go down, but if more of the raises had been going to men then wages for men go down even more.
gherig4 8y ago
I experienced this first hand and as a result I departed for greener pastures. Isn't diversity a great thing when it suppresses wages, no wonder all the big boys are pushing for it.
- iguy 8y ago
  The article cites a 2.5% reduction in overall wages, and a 2.5% reduction in productivity. (Or one was 2.8, but close enough). Which sounds exactly like what you suggest: the most productive employees used to get other offers, and use them to ask for raises, and now they leave, or just slack off.
- doesnt_know 8y ago
  The other way to look at it was that men were artificially overvalued and the market is now correcting itself.
- marvin 8y ago
  This is happening at my place right now. Leadership has dictated that priority is now to even out gender imbalances rather than giving raises. Since the women in our company are heavily skewed towards lower-paying roles (QA, customer support), this means the company will avoid giving raises to the roles that actually are in demand and have strong salary growth elsewhere. Needless to say, those of us with options have started looking. Of course, everyone who gets a competitive offer elsewhere will get a counteroffer, so this policy only applies where it’s convenient.
  - mcv 8y ago
    I don't get this kind of destructive attitude. Surely the sensible thing to do when you want more equality and women are skewed towards lower paying jobs, is to hire more women in higher paying jobs? I'm all for paying people in lower-end jobs better, mind you, but using this as an excuse to hurt salary growth seems like it's intended to discredit the whole idea of gender equality. Well, unless the people involved are provably overpaid, like CEOs tend to be. But somehow I suspect the CEO is still getting his excessive raises.
bsanr 8y ago
A pair of scissors labeled "cynicism and greed" poised to shear the head off a crustacean labeled "meaningful societal advancement."
gnicholas 8y ago
Did the researchers measure employee departures? If wages stagnated in general, then one would expect that employees who are more desirable/mobile to depart. This would make it seem like wage equality went up, when in reality the people who were previously making more are still doing so — they're just doing it at a different company.
- iguy 8y ago
  They say "we find no statistically significant change in departure rates of males or females across firm hierarchies." Have not read it closely, but "no statistically significant" need not rule out the scenario that departures drive the whole effect. It's just saying that the error bar from counting departures is large enough to include zero, while the error bars on mean salary are smaller, because everyone has a salary but only a few leave.
zdragnar 8y ago
It seems like a given outcome, to me. Suppose that half of your workforce makes 60% of the wages, and the other half make 40%. Suddenly, PR dictates that you need to even that out. Your budget for salaries hasn't increased. Your other costs haven't decreased. Your projected revenues haven't increased. The money to bump the bottom half up has to come from somewhere, and with a fixed salary budget, it comes from the other half's expected raises and new hires. Unless, of course, you have the flexibility to start rewriting all of your budgets, but that still hasn't changed the fact that both revenues and all other costs remain fixed.
- ganzuul 8y ago
  Seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy in that scenario. Equal wages is supposed to result in improved production... isn't it?
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Equal wages is supposed to result in improved production... isn't it? No, why would they?
    - ganzuul 8y ago
      Attracts better qualified personnel? More motivation? Some macroeconomic optimization where price and value mismatch results in inflation? I don't know! \o/ Just what my intuition says.
watwut 8y ago
Many companies award salaries in fuzzy way where few good negotiators people negotiate themselves larger salaries then similarly performing rest. One would think that salary disclosure helps to close such gap among men themselves bringing average lower.
dba7dba 8y ago
Based on what I have experienced in corporate America, this is completely expected behavior.

tapland 8y ago

Conclusions that the companies hired more women because of it are a bit weird to draw since every company that would be a comparison in the country also has to follow the same rules? And ofc it's solved by lowering the growth of male wages :D Business

fastball 8y ago
No, they were comparing companies that didn't need to follow the regulation (companies with 24-34 employees) with companies that did (35+ employees). Of course, the problem with this is twofold: 1. Companies with <35 employees is a tiny slice of the population and should generally not be expected to follow normal population distributions. 2. Companies with <35 employees are already behaving differently than larger companies with >35 employees. I do not think that variable was accounted for in any way by the study and that is problematic.
- hayksaakian 8y ago
  Over 80% of all companies in the USA have fewer than 35 employees https://www.naics.com/business-lists/counts-by-company-size/ https://www.naics.com/business-lists/counts-by-company-size/ i agree with your point #2 the differences between large and small companies are significant enough to outweigh the causal relationship that the OP implies
  - bsanr 8y ago
    I think he was referring to the relative number of workers at companies with more/less than 35 employees. Clearly the average worker, by a large margin, works at companies with 50 or more employees. Even more so when you don't include whatever proportion of businesses counted that are essentially self-employment.
- iguy 8y ago
  And, from skimming the paper, they have literally divided companies into two groups, <35 and >35. It could be that one giant employer (like a hospital system) is the whole story. A more subtle study would be to look for a discontinuity: expect that firms with 10, 30, 100, 1000 employees will behave differently, but anything which happens sharply at 35 (and changes in this time) can be more confidently attributed to the law. But this is obviously harder to do.

fastball 8y ago

I couldn't find an N of the study. It seems important to me in order to ascertain the statistical significance of this. Were there 10 companies in one group? 100? 1000? Did anyone else see this in the study?

retypepassword 8y ago
Based on table 1, it was probably about 4000 companies and 66000 employees total.

baybal2 8y ago

Very logical. Well, it gets to 0 if the pay is fixed. You don't have much companies using that in the West

berry_sortoro 8y ago

Gender pay gap is a myth. If you actually look at same job and hours worked the so called gender pay gap is pretty much not existing! Stop believing this made up BS!

anoplus 8y ago

Not just gender I think. I witness over and over how employees one day realize they were underpaid and get paid immediately. Including myself. Sometimes the company asks the employee to keep it silent so the other ones won't do the same. This is ofcourse unhealthy situation, and too common. You got to win your rights manually.

ve55 8y ago

>From 2003 to 2008, the gender pay gap at the reporting companies shrank 7 percent, from 18.9 percent down to 17.5 percent Is this really a large enough effect size to justify such a headline? >Our findings suggest that regulatory mandates on pay transparency, as a means to overcome biases against women in the workforce, may be effective in closing the gender pay gap. No, they really do not. A potential reduction from 18.9% to 17.5% does not 'close the gender pay gap', and attempting to close such a gap in this manner to begin with just demonstrates a misunderstanding of what confounding variables cause it to begin with.

dmichulke 8y ago
I once read an interesting thought experiment about this, adapted to this story it goes like this: We assume: - Greedy capitalist bosses (wanting to pay less for more work) - Same productivity of men and women Now if there's an 18.9% pay gap, then women are on average 18.9% cheaper to employ than men. Greedy capitalist bosses should therefore only employ women, closing the gender pay gap by driving womens' wages higher (and those of men lower). Yet this doesn't happen, so one of the assumptions is wrong or the gender pay gap difference (the 18.9%) is not correct.
- adrianN 8y ago
  Another assumption that could be wrong is that greedy bosses can accurately determine productivity. If bosses have biases that cause them to underevaluate women's productivity this would also explain the pay difference.
  - dmichulke 8y ago
    Not sure. Even if you had only 1 out of 10 bosses able to determine productivity, that guy'd only employ women, so he'd cover some of the "losses" of the other 9 bosses. Also, you'd probably see a bimodal pay gap distribution per company.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    That would still give a huge benefit to the greedy boss who can "accurately determine productivity" and hires all women for cheaper, which means it would inevitably be copied in the end.

factsaresacred 8y ago

Here's the study: https://wpcarey.asu.edu/sites/default/files/daniel_wolfenzon_seminar_november_9_2018.pdf https://wpcarey.asu.edu/sites/default/files/daniel_wolfenzon... To describe a 7% change as "shrinks" is a bit of a stretch. And to attribute it to solely to the requirement to disclose may be incorrect as there was only a 1.4% difference vs companies that were not required to disclose anything (the 7% figure is vs pre-regulation). So wages rose for women post-regulation, regardless of whether the company they worked at disclosed wages or not. Meaning other provisions in the law also likely played a role in the decrease of the gender gap. The study also references another study that finds: > that firms with higher pay inequality exhibit larger equity returns suggesting that differences in pay inequality across firms are a reflection of differences in managerial talent. All just food for thought. Regulation and transparency can produce interesting outcomes and side-effects without making us any wiser as to the dynamics driving the differences in outcomes.

knowThySelfx 8y ago

Shouldn't remuneration depend on the amount of work done? Gender issue shouldn't come into it.

lm28469 8y ago
How do you remove biases from such a process though. Given two employees, same education, same title, same working hours, same productivity (based on managers reports), nothing guarantee that the HR department won't "like" one more than another. Or one might ask for raises more often or with better arguments (having kids, longer commute, getting offers from other companies all the time). Office politics are what they are, politics, as long as you have human in the process you'll have biases. Now if these biases are stronger against certain group it probably should be addressed.
- chosenbreed37 8y ago
  In addition, the more fuzzy the nature of the work the more room for variations between remuneration. I suspect that the gender pay gap is lower workers in warehouses, factories or fast food restaurants.
  - hopler 8y ago
    The gender pay gap is large in restaurants -- women servers get bigger tips.
Firadeoclus 8y ago
Should the price of something depend on the amount of work done? On how much the buyer values it? Or on the amount the buyer has to offer to outbid others? Does an employer just pay for work done, or possibly also for availability, potential, loyalty, goodwill? Edit: That said, I absolutely agree that gender isn't something that should figure in those considerations. At best it's a poor proxy for much more specific differences between individuals.
- knowThySelfx 8y ago

xref 8y ago

These articles tend to attract comments with dire predictions for US society if people knew each others salaries, so just a reminder Norway always does nationwide salary transparency https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239

chosenbreed37 8y ago
> These articles tend to attract comments with dire predictions for US society if people knew each others salaries, so just a reminder Norway always does nationwide salary transparency True. But I think it is worth pointing out that the US is not Norway. There is a significant culture difference for one. Secondly the policy may simply not scale. The US population, workforce, economy is orders of magnitude greater than that of Norway.

zuhayeer 8y ago

Been working on a tool called http://levels.fyi http://levels.fyi to help increase career ladder and salary transparency in the workplace (mainly for tech right now). Would love suggestions on things to add to make it more powerful!

3rdgender 8y ago

"The researchers compared those companies to firms with 25 to 34 employees that didn’t have to release their data" So they are comparing two different types of firms (with > 35 employees and between 25 and 34 employees): Doesn't that invalidate their study right there?

progval 8y ago
They did not directly compare the two types of companies, they compared evolution of each type. Of course that's not perfect, but it's good enough

lm28469 8y ago

The problem of gender pay gap is a really hard one to tackle. You have to be a fool to pretend there is no issue, but the number of causes is incredible at the gender, education, industry, company and individual levels. Every time there is a public debate around that topic you end up with two major groups, one saying that women work less or are less productive because of XYZ, the other saying something close to "it's the patriarchy". Striving for equality of outcome is a good first step, but it's attacking the symptoms and not the causes. Just like for politics or employees quotas, you can bend the end of the process to make it look fair and balanced but if the 10 steps before are biased against women (and other groups) you end up with an illusion of parity while the only thing that changed is you now make "positive" discrimination. Making the wages public is a good thing no matter the reason, after all the first step of making a decision is to have access to data. If it helps with pay gaps all the better.

raducu 8y ago
How about option 3: men choose to work on jobs that pay more but are more stressful while women chose to work on more social jobs that pay less and value other things more than just pay.
- lm28469 8y ago
  You'll have to be a bit more precise because right now it's hard to tell if you're trolling or trying to make a point. In any case, the pay gap isn't a thing that can be addressed with a single sentence such as yours. It's a really simplistic point of view to say social jobs are valued other than with a salary. And I'm fairly certain that social workers, teachers and nurses get their share of stress. If anything the "men do manly jobs and women do social jobs" is another symptom of the underlying causes. Sure you can say "that's the way it is" and move on, but if you want to take part in the debate you have to show a minimum of intellectual honesty. Plus it doesn't work for people having the same position in the same company.
  - raducu 8y ago
    Yes it is a very simplistic explanation to why genders tend to gravitate to one job or another. And yes, I'm saying that most, but not all of the disparities are biological and while it's a great idea to encourage women to pick higher paying jobs, we're at a point in time where we'll see diminishing returns in those attempts. For the same position with the same experience, in roughly the same location, I'd be very much surprised if the AVERAGE/MEAN pay gap is more than a single digit percent across an industry. By all means go after those X% numbers, teach women to negotiate more, assert themselves and so on, but I think you'll end up with numbers similar to the ones in this study -- a couple percent improvement. What I'm trying to say is there's no conspiracy against women earning more in the western world.