//edit: Well shit, TIL: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/10/equifax-breach-fallout-y...
However, I can't imagine the compliance nightmare that would exist around a process that lets HR people look up people's equifax information. If they get a full report, it could contain information about disabilities, national origin, ethnicity, religion, and enough information to construct knowledge about sexual orientation.
However, all that information is pretty worthless for most decisions. Aside from it being illegal to use that information for hiring decisions (in most situations), the equifax stuff isn't super accurate. I've looked myself up and it gets a lot of information wrong, most other people I know who have looked themselves up in have also found major inaccuracies.
Users include 82% of all F500 companies and they have 225 employment records.
My company uses it :(
http://redtape.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/30/16762661-exclusi...
This is a pretty shocking news article regarding the last time Eqifax was in the news about this a few years ago. At that time (like now) they were selling the data to all kinds of companies.
“Developer employee cheatsheet: WTF is Salary Benchmarking?“
https://codeformore.com/developer-employee-cheatsheet-wtf-sa...
You give permission to your employer to query those sorts of databases when agreeing to a "background check" as a condition of being hired.
Ever filled out a credit card application? Most of them ask for your current salary. This is before the credit check is done.
My guess is the credit card companies are passing that information back.
Of course, any time I put my salary in one of those applications it's correct in a range of $50K+. If they have those numbers, they are really inaccurate.
At Equifax, though, information about random people isn't customer data. It's the product. They give it to anyone who asks for money. Do they have any motivation to say J random employee can't just look up everybody's data? Why? Letting you have free access to what they charge everyone else for would just be a perk, right?
Likewise for credit scores--why else would a lender report data to Equifax if Equifax wasn't purchasing that data, either directly or as part of a larger contractual arrangement.
It violates FCRA at the very least.
Obviously it gets really tricky to prove someone did or did not use protected information in their hiring/firing decision, so it's clearly safest for HR to avoid having any of that.
And I have worked at places where HR could unilaterally veto a given employee based on certain criteria (education, background check, etc).
Usually the data is reported by the employer themselves.
You can query the employment data without querying the full Equifax report.
Don't employers already get most of that from doing in person interviews? Even through phone screens you can gather most of that information.
Some of that information can be obvious, as in the case of visible disability and occasionally ethnicity. But it's not permissible to inquire in any case. And speaking from the side of the interviewee, such questions would immediately bring the interview to a not overly friendly close, both because the answers are none of any prospective employer's business, and because no company so insensate to liability concerns is likely destined to end up anywhere I care to go.
The reason people avoid asking (and tell others to avoid the same) is to avoid accusations or the appearance of using that sort of information in their hiring decision. You really have no defense if you ask about ethnicity and then decide not to hire that person, it's logical that you were asking about ethnicity because you wanted to use that information in your decision.
"Don't ask don't tell" is a good policy.
Once you actually have the job it's STILL just as illegal to use this information in promotions/firing decisions. However, it comes up in casual conversation all the time. People don't fret about asking a subordinate where they were born in casual conversation.
No, they aren't. First, it's questionable whether sexual orientation is a federally protected axis of discrimination, and, second, it's illegal to discriminate on protected axes (except where they are bona fide qualifications, or some other exception to the general rule exists), not to enquire on them (HR will generally avoid enquiry not necessary for a clearly legal purpose to mitigate the risk that that will be viewed as evidence of discrimination, not because it is illegal in and of itself.)
Employment credit checks are perfectly legal.
Then they turn around and sell all that data while telling the participating companies what a wonderful service they are providing them by offloading this task from traditional HR.
It's crazy.
https://www.theworknumber.com/samples/The-Work-Number-Employ...
As you can see its much more than 'just' your salary. It includes (amongst other things):
Union Affiliation; Salary breakdown (Base, OT, Commission, Bonus); Dates of pay increases; Medical Insurance (coverage, Policy #, Provider name, Annual cost); Any Workers Comp claims; Breakdown of your paycheck (401k contribution, taxes payed, garnishments, etc)
Just imagine the national outrage if some employer was shown to be directly selling this information to someone about their own employees. Yet a third party is doing just that and many companies are complicit. It is absolutely outrageous!
'hmmm maybe I don't want to hire Joe Shmo, after all he did join a union in the past. He might try to unionize our plant'
'looks like Joe also has some garnishments, doesn't sound like someone we want on our team. Probably has a troubled past.'
'well looks like Joe made 70k last year, but a lot of that was from working OT. I think we can get away with offering him 60k and promising him a lot of OT "opportunities"'
Welp.
Well, you certainly don't have to give your "real" income. Aspirational income is fine.
But (on credit card applications) I've always put a 6-figure income in when asked. Even as a college student with an income of $0.
Also, your accounts would be closed if they found out that you lied on your application. American Express, in particular, is known to conduct financial reviews and shut down accounts who can't prove their income.
Do you have a source for this? Or can you define "many" some more?
(Slightly over a quarter of households in the US have a household income over $100K as reported on tax returns. Household income for the purposes of credit application can be meaningfully higher than for adjusted gross income tax return concerns.)
it's 26.3% of households with incomes over $100K. I saw another estimate of 125 million households, so it could well be ~33 million households with >=$100K household income.
(I'm not so much quibbling with numbers as trying to get across that "it's a lot of people")
Even after you're 21 you're supposed to only include someone else's income if you have access to it. If your parents don't give you a stipend then you aren't supposed to include their income.
>ROCHESTER, NY—U.S. Attorney William J. Hochul, Jr. announced today that David P. Gaylord, 51, of Rochester, New York, pleaded guilty to bank loan application fraud before the U.S. District Judge Charles J. Siragusa. The charge carries a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison a fine of $1,000,000.
>Assistant U.S. Attorney Tiffany H. Lee, who is handling the case, stated that in 2006, while residing in the Western District of New York, the defendant submitted various credit card applications to Advanta Corp., Bank of America, and Family First Federal Credit Union. Gaylord knowingly provided false information regarding his income in order to obtain lines of credit from the banks and credit union. The defendant indicated that his income was anywhere between $90,000 to $122,000 when, in 2006, he reported to the Internal Revenue Service that his income was approximately $12,488. Gaylord ended up leaving outstanding balances on the various lines of credit and filed for bankruptcy.
They aren't totally unaccountable, there is some regulation, notably the Fair Credit Reporting Act, as well as other laws that regulate data brokers.
Americans, in general, are much more comfortable with private for-profit industries handling these sorts of matters over governments.
Anyways, there's absolutely no laws that salaries should be kept secret, your employer can post that information anywhere it wants. In fact, government employees salaries are expressly public information. The reason why employers limit access to salary data is because it keeps salaries lower, it gives them an upper hand in salary negotiations due to information asymmetry. That's why the salaries of professional athletes are public information, they have unions who make sure this information is available.
For me it's a good thing this information is available. I pay lower interest rates, lower insurance premiums, have more access to credit, have no trouble renting before I bought a house.
No instead they hire contractors for that purpose.
Also, "and — if applicants ask — must give them a pay range for the job they are seeking"
So start offering what the job is worth.
Never take that for granted.
Actually I don't like this kind of law at all, because it causes random enforcement or in the worst case enables selective enforcement.
The law benefits male employees just as much as it benefits women. Lawmakers and PR teams just like to spin everything as addressing the gender gap to appeal to society-wide damsel in distress syndrome.
When you start a new job, it's not uncommon for your new employer to offer you a salary that's X% higher than your old one, using that as a base. If your old salary was lower due to discrimination, you'd start with a lower base, and would get less in the new job than someone who was not previously discriminated against.
I wouldn't necessarily call this exploitation since I think there's a broader issue in play, but it's not exactly like everybody, except this one isolated discriminated segment, is just thriving. And in particular I thinking framing this as an issue of discrimination works as a red herring against the aforementioned broader issue. That issue being that general increases in productivity and the percent of qualified individuals are resulting in a downward pressure on wages. The rapid growth in outsourcing, increases in foreign workers, free trade, and other such things also work to compound these issues.
I do not believe there is any clear solution, but I think it's a shame that the focus is rarely placed on this issue. And when it is, it's often more in the context of jingoism than the issue itself.
But the economy doesn't really work that way, it's the opposite. When the economy is doing well, fewer people complain... it doesn't matter if my neighbor makes more than me as long as I'm improving at a decent clip.
But when the economy does less well, it's only reasonable for everyone to look at the inequities.
But just because fewer people complain about inequities in a good economy doesn't mean that we should forget about them and solely focus on the economy overall. Curing inequities is a moral goal in its own right.
And a bit of a tangent here but the "it doesn't matter if my neighbor makes more than me as long as I'm improving at a decent clip" is also a bit dubious. One social study that has repeated and reproduced countless times is that people are happier being the king among rats than a pauper among kings. People ought care about themselves objectively. In reality we measure ourselves relatively. Kind of a bad trait for a species seeking to make global progress, but again - that's all a tangent that's way out there!
As for my own view, the way to "cure inequities" is to ensure equal opportunity. It turns out time and again the medicine is rather worse than the disease when we start working to ensure equality of results. I'm actually in favor of this law since I see no positive result from employers asking for employee past earnings. What's offered to somebody should not be based on what they earned in the past like some sort of soft caste. It also takes another burden off applicants. However, I would be rather shocked to see this have any meaningful effect whatsoever. An employer is going to have a high price and a low price. I don't see removing one tidbit of information making all that of substantial changes to either, or the applicant's ability to more effectively hit the high. But I would absolutely love to be proven wrong.
When stocks are up and wages are flat, it means that those with wealth get wealthier and a faster rate than those without wealth. Inequality worsens, and advancement is based not on what one is doing, but on what they started with. Not exactly equal opportunity.
My analogy of "we're raising the minimum wage to help women/<insert minority>" still stands.
Also there's evidence to suggest that the gender gap is a myth http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...
That is due to discrimination. Discriminating against someone who is socially awkward and can't negotiate isn't any different than discriminating against someone for their gender. Both factors are things people can't generally control. One might even go so far as saying it is worse than discriminating based on religion, given the general view of religion being a choice one can actively change.
Historically we have been fine with such discrimination, but it wasn't too long ago the true was based on all the forms of discrimination we now view as wrong.
Actually, it's very different, precisely because most people can control social awkwardness, and further, a socially awkward person by definition can be difficult to work with others, which is a major component to just about any job.
This is a wild generalisation at best. I know many people with crippling social awkwardness that they would give anything to be able to control to any degree but they can't.
> a socially awkward person by definition can be difficult to work with others
This I will concede is more true than not.
Data shows women tend to do much less negotiation than men. If you didn't negotiate your first salary that can compound for the rest of your career even if you negotiate later salaries.
I could see companies low-balling when they don't have salary information, but then going up if they find out they're not matching/beating the candidates current salary, which would effectively be the same thing as today.
If I merely ask how much I ought to offer and provide the applicants data then it would seem no law is breached.
Probably not reliably; the numbers are still small and there are way too may potential confounding factors.
This makes the law seem even more ridiculous to me. Do we really need the government stepping into the hiring process like this and micromanaging? It feels like they treating us like children incapable of tying our own shoes or something
Why is it more ridiculous? We already have laws against discrimination based on gender. If the issue isn't being solved, while being hands off, it seems natural to try something different.
> It feels like they treating us like children incapable of tying our own shoes or something
Well it does seem employers are incapable of eliminating the gender wage gap so perhaps the treatment is appropriate. Not that I blame them.. being unbiased is extremely difficult and requires a conscious effort.
The $0.79 on the $1 shit has been debunked a million times yet is still persists for some reason.
The last good study I read showed a gap of something like 5% which was in the statistical margin and was largely accounted for by negotiation tactics.
For an anecdote I (a male) earn less than many other men in my same job, and same experience level. Why because I am TERRIBLE at salary negotiation, (or any other price negotiation, i.e I prefer the CarMax pay what the sticker says model to the haggle over every last $1 model)
At the same time, I have been involved in the hiring of both male and female employees in the IT world, never once at any time I have ever seen, heard or been a part of discussions where a person would be offered to get a lower salary simply because of their gender.
Every hiring process I have ever been involved in the Pay scale is always set long before we even have any applicants. We have a budget, wages for each position are set based on the budget the gender or personal circumstances of the person have no factor in it. We have to find someone that not only fits the job requirements, but also the salary requirements. That can be a challenge, and we have had to pass on candidates simply because we could not meet their salary demands.
Your employer may have strict pay bounds set, but a lot of places don't. The pay can vary highly between candidates, especially if the candidates are weak negotiators. If you disclose your current salary, you're a weak negotiator, but employers put a lot of pressure on you to disclose it. I tend to tell employers that I'm not allowed to disclose my salary, which ends that part of the conversation, but most people don't know to do this.
This law benefits you just as much as it does women.
As far as disclosing pay, I alway deflect it and treat the question as them asking me what my salary expectations are, which likely ends up doing the same thing, but I dont think I have ever told a company what my salary was at a previous job
My current employer never asked, they said "this job pays X per year" did get a small increase over that first offer but not alot.
At this point in my career though (17 years in) I focus less on raw salary and more on working environment, I would rather take a lower salary to have a care free easy environment than make 15% more but have a high stress high demanding employer. Been there done that... not for me.
I'm sure you're very smart and know better than all[1] the current[2] research[3].
[1] https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/publication-download/...
[2] https://www.accenture.com/gb-en/gender-equality-research-201...
[3] https://www.strath.ac.uk/business/research/research/highligh...
[2] - there are no sources or data analysis in their report, it's just infographics. Even then, their definition of the gender pay gap is similar to [1]:
"The report flags a clear risk, however: the choices that young women undergrads are making now are setting them up to enter the workforce with fewer digital skills, less mentoring advice and lower interest in pursuing high-paying jobs, compared with their male peers. "
"Adding to this imbalance is the fact that women are much less likely than men to have paid work (50 percent and 76 percent, respectively). This contributes to a hidden pay gap that increases the economic inequities between women and men. Based on the hidden pay gap, our research shows that for every $100 a woman earns, a man earns $258. Since women are usually responsible for the bulk of unpaid work, such as child care and housekeeping, the effects of the hidden pay gap for them are immense."
[3] - link to report is dead
Number 1 is not comparing Equal Work and experiance, infact one of their summary bullet points is how part time women earn less than Full Time men... ummm yea. Part time people earn less than Full Time people.. That is not a earth shattering fact nor it is a symptom of sexism
They also point out that Part time women earn MORE than part time men...
Further most of the study looks at Overall wages in general with out comparing actual job roles to job role. This is a general misdirection often used by people that want to invent sexism where there is none. The fact that women often choose careers in fields that are traditionally lowering paying like Social Work, or Teaching is not a symptom of sexism
Number 2 is not a study
Number 3 is 404 page not found
This is the truth. When I finished my CS degree and started looking for work, I had a recruiter tell me I shouldn't expect any pay over my previous job, and since my previous job was a software testing internship for $12.75/hr, I shouldn't expect more than $15/hr or so. I said "Yeah, no. I'm not taking a software engineering job for barely over $30k/year." He insisted that's how the industry works, even though my previous job was just an internship and wasn't even an engineering position.
I basically told him to pound sand, especially after he told me that at that position, I'd be expected to work 45-50 hours/week. Sure, I needed work, but I wasn't destitute.
I don't think its mandated by law, but thats's how the system works anyway.
Unless you disclose your prior CTC no one will call you for your interview.
Start ups are a different case.
The second best response is 'your offer is better, but inspires zero loyalty. If you want me to stay for longer than it takes for your competitors to get back to me with an offer, you'll improve that offer.'
Sure, but if women have a harder time getting promoted then they also have a harder time getting the same job and experience. Thus, even if women are being paid the same when they have the same job and experience, the discrimination still exists and they are still as a group prone to being paid less. Perhaps we should name it something more appropriate than wage gap though since the nuance is lost.
http://www.businessinsider.com/women-are-less-likely-to-get-...
Most research I've seen show that it's the women who are failing to take initiative in asking for raises, rather than the employer purposefully holding them back.
Yet the pretext of these laws is always under the assumption it's the employer actively doing something to block it instead of passively not offering it to people who don't ask (for whatever cultural or biological reason), likewise the women are not active but also passive in this situation.
Additionally you made the same jump in logic to assume women aren't getting the same jobs, the study was limited to promotions and this can't be easily assumed either.
This isn't about blaming the victim either but if you're going to micromanage it at least have to clear motivations and end goals that are being controlled for...
Agreed.
> Most research I've seen show that it's the women who are failing to take initiative in asking for raises, rather than the employer purposefully holding them back. Yet the pretext of these laws is always under the assumption it's the employer actively doing something to block it instead of passively not offering it to people who don't ask (for whatever cultural or biological reason), likewise the women are not active but also passive in this situation.
I don't get that impression but that's a fair point.
> Additionally you made the same jump in logic to assume women aren't getting the same jobs, the study was limited to promotions and this can't be easily assumed either.
Is it unreasonable to assume that someone with a higher position and more responsibilities would have an easier time landing a higher position job at another company? Or perhaps I'm not understanding what you're saying?
> This isn't about blaming the victim either but if you're going to micromanage it at least have to clear motivations and end goals that are being controlled for...
Fair point.
Because a certain group of people insists that the original $0.77 on the $1 statistic DID control for career choice and the like...even though it didn't. Any claims to the contrary are obviously misogynistic lies continuing the patriarchy. \eyeroll\
I've always said...if the pay gap really WAS that big, then why would employers bother to hire men?
The proposed answer is that the employers are sexist. Even large corporations don't always act rationally.
That did in fact happen and was being done by economists. This was about 35 years ago though, so I have no idea if the effect is still in place
It persists because it's a real average.
And uh, it's not the case that the pay gap has been disproven in many industries.
Let's step aside the point of generalizing one anecdote to be representative, however. Can we really assign the disparity solely to microaggressions against women? Would we feel the same if the split were 75/25,or 51/49? What is the threshold of equality with respect to noise?
No. Did I suggest that? I don't think I did. All I mentioned was structural disparity, which is likely multivariate. Microaggressions is a strange thing to jump to from the conversation, compared to say, the effect of video game marketing on preferences, the attitudes of parents and guidance counselors, or parental fears about internet predators and private PCs for children.
I don't have data readily available on this, but there weren't that many women declaring CS to start with, and I kind of expect that if we divided CS freshmen men into 'has written a program before' and 'has not', attrition rates for women would track the 'has not' fairly closely.
> Would we feel the same if the split were 75/25,or 51/49?
I don't know where the bright line is, and there probably isn't one. If it exists, it'd probably exist be between those to ratios. But the fact is it's more imbalanced than either ratio suggested, which should probably motivate policy changes more strongly.
> Can we really assign the disparity solely to microaggressions against women? Would we feel the same if the split were 75/25,or 51/49? What is the threshold of equality with respect to noise?
Why don't you use your powerful male thoughts to do some basic bayesian modeling and come up with some proposals? Many people have so maybe you can borrow their work, if that sounds like too much effort.
But hey, to do an analysis we need some data! Let me provide you with a recent and impartial source: https://nsf.gov/statistics/2016/nsb20161/#/
Here's a fun one: Stats suggest in the US that men:women declare majors ~3:1 across all engineering disciplines but ~2:1 in computer science at the outset. However, when we look at graduation rates proportional to the whole of their class in 2016 we saw: computer sciences (17.9%), engineering (19.3%), physical sciences (39%) and mathematics (43.1%).
Computer science has an abnormally high attrition rate despite a increased chance of declaration for major. Other similarly complex and abstract disciplines such as mathematics (which CS leans upon heavily to get any real work done) do not have such a falloff.
So gosh. Where do YOU draw the line? Care to show us the work for how you derived it? I'd love to know.
I could probably get numbers for major vocational education startups. I think I might go pursue that. Since many of those are online, they'll have less noise from on-campus harassment.
You took the thread into a tedious, pointless flamewar and broke the rules by being uncivil as well. We ban accounts that do these things, so please read the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow them from now on.
https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/maid-and-housekee...
Median salary for a janitor: $28,064
http://www1.salary.com/Janitor-Salaries.html
Janitors tend to be male. Housekeepers tend to be female. It is similar work with a different name. This is really common. It has been documented that when a job becomes a predominantly female job, society tends to pay less than when it was a male job.
The crux of the issue here is that no matter how you slice it and dice it, on average, women make less money than men. Arguing that it isn't really due to sexism and that women just have interests in fields that happen to pay less is a pretty crappy justification for a well documented, unarguable fact.
Except it is not really the Same Job. Janitors tend to be the job title for Commercial, Industrial, and Business crews that do far more than just some light cleaning. For example the janitorial staff at my company operates medium duty equipment (Zamboni Style Scrubbers, polishers, large compactors, etc), has specialized training in hazard waste disposal, and does light maintenance tasks such as painting
Housekeepers are an occupation that is mainly Residential the involves primary light duty cleaning with limited exposure to non-household type chemicals
Calling the 2 jobs "similar" shows your ignorance of the occupations
>Arguing that it isn't really due to sexism and that women just have interests in fields that happen to pay less is a pretty crappy justification for a well documented, unarguable fact.
I believe I have, and will continue to argue these points, as they are not actually facts. That are ignorant statements with no basis in reality
It has been documented that when a job becomes a predominantly female job, society tends to pay less than when it was a male job.
The crux of the issue here is that no matter how you slice it and dice it, on average, women make less money than men.
We can debate all the live long day exactly why women tend to make less than men, but that is an established fact. Furthermore, when teaching was a male profession, it paid better than after it became a female profession. This is such an established phenomenon there is a term for it: The Pink Collar Ghetto.
Your original remark top which I was replying was this:
Why are you not asking why out of 100 janitors, or 100 trash collectors there are only 1 women?
I love how every time this subject somes up it is always how there is a lack of women in tech, never pluming, janitorial, auto mechanics, etc. Only Tech.
And I am telling you women already do similar work to janitors. It just has a different name and pays less. You are moving the goal posts. Your position seems to boil down to "No matter what you say, I am fine with women making less money than men and I will justify it to the end of time."
So, I regret trying to engage you. This does not seem to be a good faith argument and your remarks come awfully close to being personally insulting to me.
One of the reasons people talk a lot about the lack of women in tech is that it is a highly desirable job. You know that. You know that janitorial work and plumbing is not nearly as cushy, attractive or well paid as IT. You are de facto objecting to any concern expressed about "Why are the cushiest, best paid and most prestigious jobs held almost entirely by men?" and tossing in a lot of flak to distract from that question.
What a revealing sentiment. It speaks to your desire not to engage people here, or share insight or build consensus, but rather a desire to score debate points.
What's more, your entire argument is about addressing tangential (and debatable) inconsistencies and not actually addressing the larger point. If you think observers are blind to this, you're dead wrong.
If you really want to argue that there isn't a wage gap, scoffing and sniping won't work. The overton window, as they say, has shifted. The burden's on you now to provide an alternate hypothesis and shift the consensus.
Consider what this website is for. Folks with math, science or computer education are going to demand a higher standard than sniping around the edges of an argument attempting to discourage the debate.
Oh, you have a proof? Can I see the analysis and its methodology that prove this? What techniques were used? What data sets we're incorporated. How did this model interpret attrition?
> Outside extreme left authoritarian circles,
Sorry, but this doesn't work for leftists or arch conservatives on Hacker News. You make an assertion, you gotta back it up. No appealing to "these bad people" politics here. It's quite off-topic, and speaks the aforementioned lack of sincerity in your engagement with people here.
> To narrow the focus more to what we seem to normally come to "Why are there not very many female programmers", that is not a symptom of employment sexism, that demographic is not going after those jobs. Now we can debate the reason for this, often tracing it to High School or other teenage development factors, not to employment sexism.
So, this really isn't the wage gap your aiming talking to. This is that silly, unsourced, appeal-to-fringe-evolutionary-biology argument Damore posited.
But as I've pointed out in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15509045), your appeal to a home&hearth bias sabotaging pipines is not really supported in the data. NSF's data shows better enrollment in CS but more attrition, a phenomenon that is striking considering we don't see it in equally difficult and computer-engaged fields.
Ultimately this is a common argument that says, "Women just prefer less valuable work. They love being cheap or unpaid labor." It's a very just-so argument that let's anyone paint a bullseye around any wage gap and say, "Women just prefer it this way who knows why but it sure is lucky for us!" It's striking in the CS world given the staccatto series of sexual harassment and discrimination claims and suits that 2016 and 2017 bring us. Women are saying, in public and in court, that it's not so. But curiously, listening to them brands you "authoritarian left" and "anti-male."
You claim to be a Libertarian in your writing here. Are you sure though? Unfair systemic bias goes against the heart of the libertarian ideals. If you don't have a commitment to meritocracy, what do you stand for?
It seems to me like you're deliberately avoiding the wealth of data showing a 3-7% in-band pay gap between women and men in our industry. Why?
Sorry, you cannot respond to a request for proof with a "well you prove me wrong then!" You entered this conversation with the positive claim divergent from the consensus. The burden is on you.
And again, this shows a profound bias in your thinking. You pre-discard any and all evidence. You're here to demand people assume your point of view, not to have a conversation or expose truth. You're here to browbeat people.
> The reason for women are on lower paying job roles can be debated but it is outside the topic of a pay gap.
So demonstrate, with the data, that women's pay follows the same distribution as men's pay. This is not proving a negative, you made a positive claim. You can prove it. Lots of data is public. Go present the evidence and your analysis and demand people refute it. You cannot simply assert it by force of will and expect it to be taken seriously when so many studies exist on page 1 of google that suggest otherwise have survived scrutiny.
> What this conversation is about is an employer paying a female lower wages for the exact same job simply because she is female.
And yet every refutation you have offered takes this substantiated claim as already disproven then searches for a hypothesis for why the average exists. That's bad analysis.
> Again you have conflated 2 things.
I am trying to focus on the wage gap but you've repeatedly broached alternative hypothesis. I'm just trying to keep up.
> You seem to want to expand this discussion to more than just a gender pay gap
Given the substantiation of the existence of a pay gap, I question the value of listening to hollow and unsubstantiated refutations which as a preconception dismiss any evidence as "misinterpreted."
I think you're being intellectually dishonest here. I think you want to disprove the pay gap because you don't like it. But you lack the techniques or motivation to do so, so you are trying to push that forward via pure force of will, inverting the burden of proof as if the null hypothesis is not a testable and verifiable claim.
I've given you a great deal of my time and been as gracious as I know how to be about calling you on these tactics. I will not reply further unless you bring concrete data to the thread. Good luck & good day.
http://www.factcheck.org/2012/06/obamas-77-cent-exaggeration...
"that’s the median (midpoint) for all women in all jobs, not for women doing “the same work” or even necessarily working the same number of hours. Furthermore, the raw gap for all women is not quite as large when looking at weekly earnings rather than yearly earnings."
"Female bookkeeping clerks and stock clerks actually made slightly more than their male counterparts, for example. Registered nurses made nearly 96 percent, elementary and middle school teachers made 91 percent, secondary school teachers made 94 percent, and police officers made 99 percent."
"however wide or narrow the gap, discrimination by employers isn’t responsible for all of it. In fact, a women’s pay specialist in Obama’s own Department of Labor — even as she was arguing that pay discrimination is not a “myth” — said research shows discrimination accounts for less than half of the raw pay gap."
"flatly wrong to say that women are paid 77 percent of the pay of men for the “same work.” And the fact that women’s median annual earnings are 77 percent of men’s isn’t all or even mostly due to discrimination, as the ad implies."
Or a Study by the CONRADD Group https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/public-policy/hr-public-policy...
" Statistical analysis that includes those variables has produced results that collectively account for between 65. 1 and 76.4 percent of a raw gender wage gap of 20.4 percent, and thereby leave an adjusted gender wage gap that is between 4.8 and 7.1 percent.... Additional portions of the raw gender wage gap are attributable to other explanatory factors that have been identified in the existing economic literature, but cannot be analyzed satisfactorily using only data from the 2007 CPS. Those factors include, for example, health insurance, other fringe benefits, and detailed features of overtime work, which are sources of wage adjustments that compensate specific groups of workers for benefits or duties that disproportionately affect them. Analysis of such compensating wage adjustments generally requires data from several independent and, often, specialized sources.
"The size and pattern of quantitative results found in those studies and their coherence with the corresponding quantitative results in this study indicate that the results in this study describe wage differentials experienced by people who actually interrupted their careers, rather than wage adjustments imposed broadly on groups of workers with specific attributes"
Basically they conclude that there is a small pay gap, that is often attributable to other factors then gender discrimination such as employers that offer more family benefits longer vacations and have more lack sick time policy often pay less as well. In additional to many women taking more time off for leave after having a child than a man does, this interruption in work experience has a negative impact on earning potential
Time has some good sources
http://time.com/3222543/wage-pay-gap-myth-feminism/ "No matter how many times this wage gap claim is decisively refuted by economists, it always comes back. The bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure or hours worked per week. When such relevant factors are considered, the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing."
Not a study but I think it is a good read on the subject (https://fee.org/articles/truth-and-myth-on-the-gender-pay-ga...) and more or less lays what I have been attempting to say, that there likely is sexism but it is not at the employer level at least not when it comes to wage setting
"All the economic studies say is that differences in skills, experiences, and preferences between men and women explain the clear majority of the gap. What such studies do not address is the degree to which the differences in men’s and women’s skills and knowledge (their “human capital”) is due to sexism before they come to the labor market. Nor do such studies ask whether differences in preferences or job experience by gender are also due to sexism or other aspects of socialization.
For example, if girls are told from a young age that girls aren’t very good at math and science, and are thereby discouraged from majoring in those areas and earning higher salaries as a result, those factors will contribute to the 80% figure. But notice, that’s not because employers are discriminating. If sexism pushes women into lower paying fields, that doesn’t mean that they are necessarily being paid less than men for the same work in that field. What’s causing their lower wages is sexism in places other than the markets. "
You are focusing on the aggregate earning gap when you take all the wages of all women, and then compare them to the wage of all men.
While that might have value in social science on some wider scale, in the this topic today it has none as we are talking about a law that prevents potential employers from asking about previous wages and how that can "help solve the pay gap", that type of pay gap does not exist female programmers do not earn significantly less money than male programmers at the same company, with the same experience. The problem is not a employer pay gap, but the fact there are not as many female programmers
Go work on that, not attempting to solve a none problem of a mythical pay gap
If an average exists then an average exists. We can talk about how it's structured, but the existence of an average pay gap is hard to dispute at this point.
If you find that narrative offensive, ask yourself why. I suspect the motivations are not very laudable.
Either is unacceptable, don't you agree?
Why are you so eager to assert the labor of women is obviously worth less?
What an insane and condescending assumption.
I support focusing effort on training women for high paying jobs. I support researching why women don't study STEM degrees as much as men, and working to mitigate that gap.
I do not, however, support paying those that study less valuable "feel-good" degrees more money just because more women choose to go down that path.
And finally, I don't need to actively "support" women making the same as men within the same professions, because that's already the reality we live in.
The next step after that would be for accreditation to be made more flexible, accommodating combinations of work-study, self-study, community college, private lab classes, and standardized testing to qualify a person for an accredited degree without having attended a traditional university at all.
Competition for admission to expensive, elite schools that apparently don't teach any better but simply pick the applicants who have already made themselves elite and charge them exorbitant fees to grant a brand-name credential which then boosts the value of the brand itself is distorting actual EDUCATION beyond all recognition.
The sooner employers have to judge applicant quality by means other than perceived eliteness of their school, the more diverse the paths to employment success can become, which ought to be a goal of both the left and the right politically.
You can already get an accredited 4-year (or graduate) degree without traditional University; e.g., through Western Governor's University, which is an accredited but non-traditional, competency-based, online school that’s been operating for almost 20 years.
This seems like a very low-impact way to ensure that your past salary history is not used against you. Why should it be? And what is the burden of simply disallowing a line of questioning, with no burdensome reporting or auditing requirements?
Well if the objective assessment of the evidence didn't reveal a wage gap based on gender, then maybe we could agree.
But it seems, left to their own devices, many companies perpetuate the wage gap.
So what this does is further increase the cost of doing already shady and illegal business by making a practice that's almost universally bad for workers anyways and made that illegal to.
These laws don't result in jail, they result in fines. So it's the government engaging in it's population-mandated practice of making illegal practices more expensive.
The law also requires that a pay range be provided by the employer upon request. I'm completely in favor of this law. Those who are strong negotiators will still be able to negotiate how they wish, and those who are in less fortunate positions won't have their pasts come back to bite them.
> We get the market rates through a company called Radford. [1]
Is "Radford" still allowed to pull salary data?
https://m.signalvnoise.com/how-we-pay-people-at-basecamp-f1d...
Hmm, I'd never thought about that angle,but I guess it makes sense.
No word on if they are allowed to use Equifax, etc to pull salary data from?
EDIT: looking at the bill it looks like querying Equifax is probably also prohibited
> (b) An employer shall not, orally or in writing, personally or through an agent, seek salary history information, including compensation and benefits, about an applicant for employment.
As a side note one of the biggest issues macro economists have is that its very hard to prove their theories as you often can't run huge macro economic experiments.....
> Delaware, Massachusetts and Oregon have passed similar laws that take effect later this year or next, said attorney Ben Ebbink of Fisher & Phillips in Sacramento. Philadelphia passed one that was supposed to take effect in May but is being challenged in court. New York City and San Francisco have similar ordinances that take effect Oct. 31 and July 1, respectively.
With the number of states introducing legislation like this it will be interesting to see if you can tease out any state or city based GDP growth/shrinking based on these laws.