7 ms·

Eliminate the Gender Pay Gap by Banning Salary Negotiations

19 points by JrobertsHstaff 11y ago

_random_ 11y ago
Appointing her as a CEO was such a great idea. Reddit thrives on censorship and social justice.
return0 11y ago
I don't understand why the media focuses on her as a promoter of equality. She has proven herself biased and overly militant which gives credence to those who say the loudest feminists don't really care about women.
striking 11y ago
But doesn't the gender pay gap come from choosing lower-paying jobs rather than explicit discrimination? The first one makes more sense to me, not just because there's a US government case study on it, but because if it were an act of discrimination, every boss would have to be in on it a la Nash Equilibrium. Otherwise women would be the only hires, economically, because they'd be the cheapest source of labor.
- lkbm 11y ago
  > But doesn't the gender pay gap come from choosing lower-paying jobs Not entirely: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm > rather than explicit discrimination? Why does it need to be explicit? Most discrimination is due to unconscious biases, both in our responsive to negotiation tactics from men v. women, and in our initial "gut feeling" about how valuable an employee someone will be. Humans aren't rational logic machines, as much as we like to pretend we are. > if it were an act of discrimination, every boss would have to be in on it a la Nash Equilibrium. Prima facie, this seems like it should be true, but there's also a positive correlation between height and income. The Nash Equilibrium hasn't solved this. Why? Even if you have no answer, denying the fact because you can't explain it isn't a great option. The usual explanation, which seems bared out by the data, is that subtle, unconscious bias (not explicit, conscious bias) is pervasive enough that in an imperfect market with transaction costs. If someone could choose to be immune to this bias, and thus be 100% non-discriminatory, that would be an advantage, but it's not as simple as just choosing not to be biased, nor is it simple to then demonstrate that fact to the entire labor market.
  - pkaye 11y ago
    Genuine question... since the pay gap exists as shown in this data, why don't employers prefer to hire much more women than men since they can be paid 10% less on average?
  - Tycho 11y ago
    Does the height bias extend to entry level jobs and not just managerial positions?
  - striking 11y ago
    But can you argue that an implicit bias is responsible for a gap of up to 23%? 23% is way too high to be a result of a totally heretofore unnoticed implicit bias. By controlling for many environmental factors, the gap is in a range of 4.8% to 7.1% [1]. Not that that's excusable, but it shows the world isn't ending for women. [1]: http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20... (page 1)
nateabele 11y ago
Because plans like this have worked out so well in the past. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_United_States#The_rise_of_employer-sponsored_coverage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_United...
Rainymood 11y ago
When I read stuff like this >EU pushes 40% quota for women on boards [1] My jaw just like ... drops. Just image the OUTRAGE that would be caused if the headline was this >EU pushes 50% quota for women in coal mines I am all for equality, but just handing everything to women on a silver platter, and making rash decisions because they are a different gender is just stupid policy making imo. >"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." (Goodhart's Law) [2] [1] http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/65f494e6-f5e7-11e1-a6c2-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3ay6fJsEv http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/65f494e6-f5e7-11e1-a6c2-00144... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- lkbm 11y ago
  >When I read stuff like this "EU pushes 40% quota for women on boards" My jaw just like ... drops. Just image the OUTRAGE that would be caused if the headline was this "EU pushes 50% quota for women in coal mines" [Edited because my first attempt at quotes was screwing up] There might be a difference between demanding equal representation in governance and equal representation in low-level labor. In both cases I want the best person for the job to have the job, but in one case, the job involves representing the interests of a diverse group. > I am all for equality, but just handing everything to women on a silver platter If we were handing things to _a woman_ on a silver platter, that'd be a problem. This is more along the lines of insisting that every state, even lousy ol' Arkansas, empty Wyoming, and teeny tiny Rhode Island each get at least three seats in Congress.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    It's the job of board members to represent the interests of a diverse group of shareholders. Do male and female shareholders somehow have different interests - men want shareholder value maximized while women want something else?
    - zo1 11y ago
      It's a false problem (or manufactured?). I personally think that discrimination of the sort that started this movement has long been eradicated for the most part. That's why the goal-posts have now moved on past actual cases of discrimination and more into grey areas such as "micro-aggression", "representation-quotas" and the like. Consequently, I'm not comfortable making sweeping conclusions about institutionalized racism/sexism, merely from quotas and fancy-new-age feminism terms that take male-female dynamics to extremes in order to justify wrong-doing.
Coding_Cat 11y ago
Yeah, it's a great plan.. If you're a CEO. This would not lead to women being paid more, but everyone being paid less and having less negotiation-power when looking for another job or promotion.
- mrdrozdov 11y ago
  It depends on the company. Many have a budget that says to pay their employees X dollars in aggregate. Assuming that everyone has the same position, then with negotiations certain people would get a little more and others a little less, but the company still spends about X dollars. With no negotiating, everyone gets the same piece of the pie, but the company is still dishing what they were before. The company might actually be able to spend more (I'm being crazy optimistic here) because it's much more predictable what any individual would cost.
tetrep 11y ago
This seems like it would leave a company with two options: 1. Losing employees who are better than others (i.e. deserve and want a larger salary) at the same job 2. Create a new role for every minute difference in skill level to allow better employees to earn more than their peers. Neither of those seems to be too terribly good. I think making all salaries public-by-default and using that as a basis for negotiation would be far better for equal pay as everyone would know what they were capable of earning by looking at what their peers are payed. IMO banning salary negotiations is just a move to save money; we can't pay you more because we don't discriminate against women.
- mrdrozdov 11y ago
  I'm not too sure. In my experience, salary negotiations will earn you a few percentage points at most. It does make it easier for a potential employee to decide between two companies (this is what the other company offered, can you match it?), but it's a relatively small number compared to difference in promotion level and team. If we're talking about software engineering, these positions tend to have 5 or so levels plus different teams. Salary is tied to team and level. I don't think what Ellen is doing will directly make a huge impact on the gender gap because the problem in software engineering is more about underrepresentation of women. Perhaps what it will do is prevent a problem where all or most of the men in the same position were being just a wee bit more than the women at Reddit, which seems like a believable situation.
hackerboos 11y ago
There are things you can do to help harmonise pay between men and women. Giving men equal paternity leave to women for example. I'm not a big believer in quotas as I think it can cause companies to choose people of a lesser skill set just because of their sex. That's not to say there aren't competent female engineers, managers etc. there are, it's just that, there's not enough of them and we need to be taking steps to encourage women into these industries.
- kuschku 11y ago
  In Germany, men can take equal paternity leave as women. And it is used sometimes, actually. And these quotas just say that "30% of each gender should be in corporate boards" or that "negotiating a custom pay should be illegal" – the negotiation part also discriminates against people who aren’t good at negotiations, therefore provides a different pay for people based on a totally unimportant metric.
  - mafribe 11y ago
    men can take equal paternity leave as women. And it is used sometimes, actually. But that is missing the point. Paternity leave should be split in half, so commercial risk of pregnacy falls on both sexes in the same way.
mrdrozdov 11y ago
Why is this topic being surfaced now by the Washington Post? Ellen made this decision over a month ago.
- return0 11y ago
  Gender equality is classic good clickbait.
Dewie3 11y ago
> Such policies do come with some risk. A ban on negotiations leaves a lot of power in the hands of employers, who may not be making equal salary offers to men and women in the first place. But the article doesn't mention how Reddit is planning to tackle that problem. So I remain vary about whether this is just a way to empower the employers, while getting some nice PR to boot. > In an effort to encourage equity and trust, a growing number of companies reveal the salaries of all their employees, sometimes even posting them online. Somehow, it seems like this way to "empower the employees" also makes them more exposed, which is not a form of empowerment. Sure it makes them more informed, but not being able to choose to disclose their salaries or not is not a form of empowerment.
golemotron 11y ago
Maybe if you are Google you have enough inertia that you can afford to bypass talent than wants more than you are willing to offer. Others will just lose in competition for skilled workers. People will go where they can negotiate a better deal. The market will make this strategy self-limiting.
dpweb 11y ago
"Many people in the equal-pay debate argue that inferior negotiating skills are at the root of the gender pay gap." Has not been my experience in pay matters and how is this different than the idea that women are not well suited to programming or math? Women are poor negotiators?
- forgottenpass 11y ago
  how is this different than the idea that women are not well suited to programming or math? In this case, the sexism is benevolent. (On the surface at least. Do you think such a salary policy will serve to increase or decrease their overall labor costs?)
  - jasonlotito 11y ago
    Increase in the long run, of course.
- return0 11y ago
  I wonder if the pay gap only has to do with gender. Do all men get the same salary?
- benihana 11y ago
  As a white man this is so condescending. There's this insinuation that I was born into the world brimming with confidence and endowed with some natural ability to negotiate. I had to learn the rules of this "men's game" and fail in this like everybody else. But I don't get to say I'm discriminated against when I fuck up a salary negotiation and get paid less. I just have to suck it up and do better next time. Like literally every game I play.
Friedduck 11y ago
The idea that you can institute a policy that will account for all of the variables that underly someone's performance is absurd. I recently left a company that started monkeying with policies like this (they they would make exceptions for, for favored employees.) Develop an environment where your team can thrive. Provide opportunities for growth. Train those that show an aptitude. Listen to people. Pay attention to the values that you espouse and the resulting culture, and make adjustments where they're at odds with your goals. Putting a policy in place where everyone is at a lowest common denominator is one of the quickest ways I can think of to destroy initiative in a company.
- snvzz 11y ago
  No Child Left Behind: The after-"education" edition.
golemotron 11y ago
I think we should all be alarmed that people are developing policies that purposely handicap one class of people in order to create better outcomes for others.
Hermel 11y ago
Maddox on how every company can instantly save 23% on wages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDj_bN0L8XM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDj_bN0L8XM
- forthefuture 11y ago
  I would have gone with "Real Wage Gap = 5-7%", but it's a good video nonetheless.
benihana 11y ago
"At the bargaining table, women are in a no-win situation." Word. Instead of teaching them techniques to help them win, let's just do the easiest thing possible and make blanket rules so that everybody is in a no-win situation. Equality.
- jayvanguard 11y ago
  Re-read your sentence. If everyone has the same rules it is equal. There is no "no-win" if it is a level playing field. The company still must compete based on salary in the broader marketplace.
  - mattmcknight 11y ago
    The lack of the ability to negotiate is a lose-lose situation for everyone, where an initial salary bid can cause an employee who would join your company for the right price to join another company because you initially underbid another company. I offer someone $125k. She gets an offer for $135k from another place. She comes back and tells me that she likes our company better, but she likes that salary more and will be joining them unless we match the offer. If negotiation is forbidden, the company loses out on the person they want and the person loses out on the company they want, just because the initial bid was off. That's a lose-lose-win (so technically not a no-win), since the company that made an initial higher offer gets the candidate, but the candidate is less happy than she could have been. The company may not have been aware of the momentary price of that skill set in the market, or the particular demand that individual has created for her unique set of talents. You have to realize that just saying "no" to an offer is a form of negotiation when considered as part of the larger game.
    - tzs 11y ago
      I suspect this would lead to people finding work arounds. "I'm sorry. We really want to hire you, but we pay $125K for application programmers, and cannot negotiate that. We cannot match your $135k offer. I do see, though, from your resume that you also have git experience. I think you meet our requirements for application engineer, which has a non-negotiable salary of $140k. Would you like to apply for that?"
learnstats2 11y ago
This is the right goal but the wrong way of doing it. Key section of this article: "A ban on negotiations leaves a lot of power in the hands of employers, who may not be making equal salary offers to men and women in the first place. The solution is transparency."
- geebee 11y ago
  I hope transparency gains traction. Salaries for University of California workers are all public and searchable in a database, and the sky hasn't fallen. Same for many state workers. In general, I'd say before anything else, try transparency. Make sure that nobody has an informational advantage over anyone else. One problem with this is that it can put a company at a disadvantage to competitors if they're the only ones making salaries public. For instance, a private university can figure out exactly what Berkeley is paying a promising researcher, but Berkeley can't get equivalent info from a private university (in spite of massive federal subsidies and tax break for private universities). I liked the bit about the startup posting salaries, but if you're the only one doing this, it might put you at a disadvantage. Some kind of legislation might be good here.
  - learnstats2 11y ago
    Transparency has disadvantages, but it creates company loyalty because employees know that the company is treating them fairly (and the poaching company implicitly isn't). Early results (see article) suggest that transparency is better, even with the disadvantages you describe.
steven2012 11y ago
This is a terrible idea and only persists the "lowest common denominator" policies of people who want to hold back better people through laws. Instead why not have "job agents" that negotiate on your behalf?
Almaviva 11y ago
"The traits that both men and women associate with good negotiators are tied up with ideas of masculinity — such as rationality, assertiveness and self-assurance" Maybe those qualities are also helpful in a job itself, if not in general? Particularly in a senior position of leadership? I don't think you can have both a standard that's different for what skills a woman should need learn to succeed, and at the same time have equality. This seems self-evident.
- beberlei 11y ago
  The gender pay gap exists between males and females performing exactly the same job. That senior positions earn more than junior ones, management more than others is obvious.
  - Almaviva 11y ago
    How are they performing exactly the same job if males are systematically more assertive, self-assured, and rational?
breischl 11y ago
This seems almost comically narrow minded. Like it or not, negotiation is unavoidable. It's how two actors come to an agreement. Even if negotiation is banned for determining salaries, there are other negotiations to be done: how much vacation you get and when you can take, when you can work remotely (if at all), who gets which projects and which roles in them, who gets the better desk, who gets to go to the conference. Plus you have to negotiate with other companies about contracts, joint ventures, prices, schedules, and so forth. And the rest of life is a negotiation too, for the price of a car, rent, the price for the house, the cost of house repairs, where to go on vacation, and on and on right down to where are we going to lunch and who's picking up the tab. This is well-intentioned but the solution is not in the realm of possibility, like trying to solve broken bones by banning gravity. Everyone will have to negotiate about many things, no matter what the law says. You can either learn to do it to the best of your ability, or pretend it doesn't exist and thus just suck as it.
nemik 11y ago
I find this policy incredibly sexist and am very surprised it came from a woman. If the cause of this was women's supposed inferiority at negotiating, does Reddit prevent women from having sales roles where good negotiation on behalf of the company is important? How about as attorneys expected to negotiate for the company, are women excluded from those jobs?
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  I don't think negotiating ability is the issue, I think that the idea is that women are empirically less inclined to salary negotiation, for whatever reason. Since salary negotiation inclination (or ability, though I don't think that's the underlying reason here) isn't the job, isolating it from pay is a way to pay fairly (not just pay women fairly either, while on average there may be a gender difference here, there are also individual difference within the same gender on this axis).
golemotron 11y ago
Am I reading this correctly? It says that we need to ban salary bargaining because women are unalterably worse at negotiation. This means that companies are justified in not hiring women to do negotiation - sales, purchasing and acquisitions. Social justice is eating itself.

Appointing her as a CEO was such a great idea. Reddit thrives on censorship and social justice.

I don't understand why the media focuses on her as a promoter of equality. She has proven herself biased and overly militant which gives credence to those who say the loudest feminists don't really care about women.

striking 11y ago

But doesn't the gender pay gap come from choosing lower-paying jobs rather than explicit discrimination? The first one makes more sense to me, not just because there's a US government case study on it, but because if it were an act of discrimination, every boss would have to be in on it a la Nash Equilibrium. Otherwise women would be the only hires, economically, because they'd be the cheapest source of labor.

lkbm 11y ago
> But doesn't the gender pay gap come from choosing lower-paying jobs Not entirely: http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.htm > rather than explicit discrimination? Why does it need to be explicit? Most discrimination is due to unconscious biases, both in our responsive to negotiation tactics from men v. women, and in our initial "gut feeling" about how valuable an employee someone will be. Humans aren't rational logic machines, as much as we like to pretend we are. > if it were an act of discrimination, every boss would have to be in on it a la Nash Equilibrium. Prima facie, this seems like it should be true, but there's also a positive correlation between height and income. The Nash Equilibrium hasn't solved this. Why? Even if you have no answer, denying the fact because you can't explain it isn't a great option. The usual explanation, which seems bared out by the data, is that subtle, unconscious bias (not explicit, conscious bias) is pervasive enough that in an imperfect market with transaction costs. If someone could choose to be immune to this bias, and thus be 100% non-discriminatory, that would be an advantage, but it's not as simple as just choosing not to be biased, nor is it simple to then demonstrate that fact to the entire labor market.
- pkaye 11y ago
  Genuine question... since the pay gap exists as shown in this data, why don't employers prefer to hire much more women than men since they can be paid 10% less on average?
- Tycho 11y ago
  Does the height bias extend to entry level jobs and not just managerial positions?
- striking 11y ago
  But can you argue that an implicit bias is responsible for a gap of up to 23%? 23% is way too high to be a result of a totally heretofore unnoticed implicit bias. By controlling for many environmental factors, the gap is in a range of 4.8% to 7.1% [1]. Not that that's excusable, but it shows the world isn't ending for women. [1]: http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20... (page 1)

nateabele 11y ago

Because plans like this have worked out so well in the past. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_United_States#The_rise_of_employer-sponsored_coverage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_United...

Rainymood 11y ago

When I read stuff like this >EU pushes 40% quota for women on boards [1] My jaw just like ... drops. Just image the OUTRAGE that would be caused if the headline was this >EU pushes 50% quota for women in coal mines I am all for equality, but just handing everything to women on a silver platter, and making rash decisions because they are a different gender is just stupid policy making imo. >"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." (Goodhart's Law) [2] [1] http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/65f494e6-f5e7-11e1-a6c2-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3ay6fJsEv http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/65f494e6-f5e7-11e1-a6c2-00144... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

lkbm 11y ago
>When I read stuff like this "EU pushes 40% quota for women on boards" My jaw just like ... drops. Just image the OUTRAGE that would be caused if the headline was this "EU pushes 50% quota for women in coal mines" [Edited because my first attempt at quotes was screwing up] There might be a difference between demanding equal representation in governance and equal representation in low-level labor. In both cases I want the best person for the job to have the job, but in one case, the job involves representing the interests of a diverse group. > I am all for equality, but just handing everything to women on a silver platter If we were handing things to _a woman_ on a silver platter, that'd be a problem. This is more along the lines of insisting that every state, even lousy ol' Arkansas, empty Wyoming, and teeny tiny Rhode Island each get at least three seats in Congress.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  It's the job of board members to represent the interests of a diverse group of shareholders. Do male and female shareholders somehow have different interests - men want shareholder value maximized while women want something else?
  - zo1 11y ago
    It's a false problem (or manufactured?). I personally think that discrimination of the sort that started this movement has long been eradicated for the most part. That's why the goal-posts have now moved on past actual cases of discrimination and more into grey areas such as "micro-aggression", "representation-quotas" and the like. Consequently, I'm not comfortable making sweeping conclusions about institutionalized racism/sexism, merely from quotas and fancy-new-age feminism terms that take male-female dynamics to extremes in order to justify wrong-doing.

Coding_Cat 11y ago

Yeah, it's a great plan.. If you're a CEO. This would not lead to women being paid more, but everyone being paid less and having less negotiation-power when looking for another job or promotion.

mrdrozdov 11y ago
It depends on the company. Many have a budget that says to pay their employees X dollars in aggregate. Assuming that everyone has the same position, then with negotiations certain people would get a little more and others a little less, but the company still spends about X dollars. With no negotiating, everyone gets the same piece of the pie, but the company is still dishing what they were before. The company might actually be able to spend more (I'm being crazy optimistic here) because it's much more predictable what any individual would cost.

tetrep 11y ago

This seems like it would leave a company with two options: 1. Losing employees who are better than others (i.e. deserve and want a larger salary) at the same job 2. Create a new role for every minute difference in skill level to allow better employees to earn more than their peers. Neither of those seems to be too terribly good. I think making all salaries public-by-default and using that as a basis for negotiation would be far better for equal pay as everyone would know what they were capable of earning by looking at what their peers are payed. IMO banning salary negotiations is just a move to save money; we can't pay you more because we don't discriminate against women.

mrdrozdov 11y ago
I'm not too sure. In my experience, salary negotiations will earn you a few percentage points at most. It does make it easier for a potential employee to decide between two companies (this is what the other company offered, can you match it?), but it's a relatively small number compared to difference in promotion level and team. If we're talking about software engineering, these positions tend to have 5 or so levels plus different teams. Salary is tied to team and level. I don't think what Ellen is doing will directly make a huge impact on the gender gap because the problem in software engineering is more about underrepresentation of women. Perhaps what it will do is prevent a problem where all or most of the men in the same position were being just a wee bit more than the women at Reddit, which seems like a believable situation.

hackerboos 11y ago

There are things you can do to help harmonise pay between men and women. Giving men equal paternity leave to women for example. I'm not a big believer in quotas as I think it can cause companies to choose people of a lesser skill set just because of their sex. That's not to say there aren't competent female engineers, managers etc. there are, it's just that, there's not enough of them and we need to be taking steps to encourage women into these industries.

kuschku 11y ago
In Germany, men can take equal paternity leave as women. And it is used sometimes, actually. And these quotas just say that "30% of each gender should be in corporate boards" or that "negotiating a custom pay should be illegal" – the negotiation part also discriminates against people who aren’t good at negotiations, therefore provides a different pay for people based on a totally unimportant metric.
- mafribe 11y ago
  men can take equal paternity leave as women. And it is used sometimes, actually. But that is missing the point. Paternity leave should be split in half, so commercial risk of pregnacy falls on both sexes in the same way.

mrdrozdov 11y ago

Why is this topic being surfaced now by the Washington Post? Ellen made this decision over a month ago.

return0 11y ago
Gender equality is classic good clickbait.

Dewie3 11y ago

> Such policies do come with some risk. A ban on negotiations leaves a lot of power in the hands of employers, who may not be making equal salary offers to men and women in the first place. But the article doesn't mention how Reddit is planning to tackle that problem. So I remain vary about whether this is just a way to empower the employers, while getting some nice PR to boot. > In an effort to encourage equity and trust, a growing number of companies reveal the salaries of all their employees, sometimes even posting them online. Somehow, it seems like this way to "empower the employees" also makes them more exposed, which is not a form of empowerment. Sure it makes them more informed, but not being able to choose to disclose their salaries or not is not a form of empowerment.

golemotron 11y ago

Maybe if you are Google you have enough inertia that you can afford to bypass talent than wants more than you are willing to offer. Others will just lose in competition for skilled workers. People will go where they can negotiate a better deal. The market will make this strategy self-limiting.

dpweb 11y ago

"Many people in the equal-pay debate argue that inferior negotiating skills are at the root of the gender pay gap." Has not been my experience in pay matters and how is this different than the idea that women are not well suited to programming or math? Women are poor negotiators?

forgottenpass 11y ago
how is this different than the idea that women are not well suited to programming or math? In this case, the sexism is benevolent. (On the surface at least. Do you think such a salary policy will serve to increase or decrease their overall labor costs?)
- jasonlotito 11y ago
  Increase in the long run, of course.
return0 11y ago
I wonder if the pay gap only has to do with gender. Do all men get the same salary?
benihana 11y ago
As a white man this is so condescending. There's this insinuation that I was born into the world brimming with confidence and endowed with some natural ability to negotiate. I had to learn the rules of this "men's game" and fail in this like everybody else. But I don't get to say I'm discriminated against when I fuck up a salary negotiation and get paid less. I just have to suck it up and do better next time. Like literally every game I play.

Friedduck 11y ago

The idea that you can institute a policy that will account for all of the variables that underly someone's performance is absurd. I recently left a company that started monkeying with policies like this (they they would make exceptions for, for favored employees.) Develop an environment where your team can thrive. Provide opportunities for growth. Train those that show an aptitude. Listen to people. Pay attention to the values that you espouse and the resulting culture, and make adjustments where they're at odds with your goals. Putting a policy in place where everyone is at a lowest common denominator is one of the quickest ways I can think of to destroy initiative in a company.

snvzz 11y ago
No Child Left Behind: The after-"education" edition.

golemotron 11y ago

I think we should all be alarmed that people are developing policies that purposely handicap one class of people in order to create better outcomes for others.

Hermel 11y ago

Maddox on how every company can instantly save 23% on wages: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDj_bN0L8XM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDj_bN0L8XM

forthefuture 11y ago
I would have gone with "Real Wage Gap = 5-7%", but it's a good video nonetheless.

benihana 11y ago

"At the bargaining table, women are in a no-win situation." Word. Instead of teaching them techniques to help them win, let's just do the easiest thing possible and make blanket rules so that everybody is in a no-win situation. Equality.

jayvanguard 11y ago
Re-read your sentence. If everyone has the same rules it is equal. There is no "no-win" if it is a level playing field. The company still must compete based on salary in the broader marketplace.
- mattmcknight 11y ago
  The lack of the ability to negotiate is a lose-lose situation for everyone, where an initial salary bid can cause an employee who would join your company for the right price to join another company because you initially underbid another company. I offer someone $125k. She gets an offer for $135k from another place. She comes back and tells me that she likes our company better, but she likes that salary more and will be joining them unless we match the offer. If negotiation is forbidden, the company loses out on the person they want and the person loses out on the company they want, just because the initial bid was off. That's a lose-lose-win (so technically not a no-win), since the company that made an initial higher offer gets the candidate, but the candidate is less happy than she could have been. The company may not have been aware of the momentary price of that skill set in the market, or the particular demand that individual has created for her unique set of talents. You have to realize that just saying "no" to an offer is a form of negotiation when considered as part of the larger game.
  - tzs 11y ago
    I suspect this would lead to people finding work arounds. "I'm sorry. We really want to hire you, but we pay $125K for application programmers, and cannot negotiate that. We cannot match your $135k offer. I do see, though, from your resume that you also have git experience. I think you meet our requirements for application engineer, which has a non-negotiable salary of $140k. Would you like to apply for that?"

learnstats2 11y ago

This is the right goal but the wrong way of doing it. Key section of this article: "A ban on negotiations leaves a lot of power in the hands of employers, who may not be making equal salary offers to men and women in the first place. The solution is transparency."

geebee 11y ago
I hope transparency gains traction. Salaries for University of California workers are all public and searchable in a database, and the sky hasn't fallen. Same for many state workers. In general, I'd say before anything else, try transparency. Make sure that nobody has an informational advantage over anyone else. One problem with this is that it can put a company at a disadvantage to competitors if they're the only ones making salaries public. For instance, a private university can figure out exactly what Berkeley is paying a promising researcher, but Berkeley can't get equivalent info from a private university (in spite of massive federal subsidies and tax break for private universities). I liked the bit about the startup posting salaries, but if you're the only one doing this, it might put you at a disadvantage. Some kind of legislation might be good here.
- learnstats2 11y ago
  Transparency has disadvantages, but it creates company loyalty because employees know that the company is treating them fairly (and the poaching company implicitly isn't). Early results (see article) suggest that transparency is better, even with the disadvantages you describe.

steven2012 11y ago

This is a terrible idea and only persists the "lowest common denominator" policies of people who want to hold back better people through laws. Instead why not have "job agents" that negotiate on your behalf?

Almaviva 11y ago

"The traits that both men and women associate with good negotiators are tied up with ideas of masculinity — such as rationality, assertiveness and self-assurance" Maybe those qualities are also helpful in a job itself, if not in general? Particularly in a senior position of leadership? I don't think you can have both a standard that's different for what skills a woman should need learn to succeed, and at the same time have equality. This seems self-evident.

beberlei 11y ago
The gender pay gap exists between males and females performing exactly the same job. That senior positions earn more than junior ones, management more than others is obvious.
- Almaviva 11y ago
  How are they performing exactly the same job if males are systematically more assertive, self-assured, and rational?

breischl 11y ago

This seems almost comically narrow minded. Like it or not, negotiation is unavoidable. It's how two actors come to an agreement. Even if negotiation is banned for determining salaries, there are other negotiations to be done: how much vacation you get and when you can take, when you can work remotely (if at all), who gets which projects and which roles in them, who gets the better desk, who gets to go to the conference. Plus you have to negotiate with other companies about contracts, joint ventures, prices, schedules, and so forth. And the rest of life is a negotiation too, for the price of a car, rent, the price for the house, the cost of house repairs, where to go on vacation, and on and on right down to where are we going to lunch and who's picking up the tab. This is well-intentioned but the solution is not in the realm of possibility, like trying to solve broken bones by banning gravity. Everyone will have to negotiate about many things, no matter what the law says. You can either learn to do it to the best of your ability, or pretend it doesn't exist and thus just suck as it.

nemik 11y ago

I find this policy incredibly sexist and am very surprised it came from a woman. If the cause of this was women's supposed inferiority at negotiating, does Reddit prevent women from having sales roles where good negotiation on behalf of the company is important? How about as attorneys expected to negotiate for the company, are women excluded from those jobs?

dragonwriter 11y ago
I don't think negotiating ability is the issue, I think that the idea is that women are empirically less inclined to salary negotiation, for whatever reason. Since salary negotiation inclination (or ability, though I don't think that's the underlying reason here) isn't the job, isolating it from pay is a way to pay fairly (not just pay women fairly either, while on average there may be a gender difference here, there are also individual difference within the same gender on this axis).

golemotron 11y ago

Am I reading this correctly? It says that we need to ban salary bargaining because women are unalterably worse at negotiation. This means that companies are justified in not hiring women to do negotiation - sales, purchasing and acquisitions. Social justice is eating itself.