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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
by 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 agoI'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 agoHow does depressing men's wages not do the same?
- wvenable 8y agoThere 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 agoThey'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 agoThis 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 agoI 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 agoThe 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 agoThe other way to look at it was that men were artificially overvalued and the market is now correcting itself.
- marvin 8y agoThis 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 agoI 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 agoA pair of scissors labeled "cynicism and greed" poised to shear the head off a crustacean labeled "meaningful societal advancement."
- gnicholas 8y agoDid 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 agoThey 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 agoIt 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 agoSeems 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 agoAttracts 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 agoMany 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 agoBased on what I have experienced in corporate America, this is completely expected behavior.