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.
No, why would they?
I don't know! \o/ Just what my intuition says.
Of course, everyone who gets a competitive offer elsewhere will get a counteroffer, so this policy only applies where it’s convenient.
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.
Very simply, the measure of women being paid less is useful on wide scale in demonstrating women's position in society, but it doesn't go into the complexities of the issue, so aiming to get your company more equal on that measure can mean so many things as to make it a useless target unless you understand the situation.
But that test doesn't mean that movies that pass the test are better or more feminist than movies that don't. Terribly sexist/misogynist movies can still easy pass it, whereas Gravity, a movie starring only Sandra Bullock for most of its duration, doesn't pass it because there's nobody else in the movie to talk to.
Similarly, the point of calling attention to the gender wage gap should be to pay women better and give them better access to higher paying jobs, not to deny men raises.
Equality should lift people up, not push them down.
Your model makes no sense. If powerful forces wanted diversity out of self interest all along, we wouldn't even have a diversity movement, because the environment would be diverse already due to natural locally optimizing market forces, so there'd be nothing to advocate for.
Then mean wages go down, but if more of the raises had been going to men then wages for men go down even more.
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.
Edit: I mean that instantly increasing the salaries would be like an admission.
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.
"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."