It can be, but, women are also socially pressured, by both men and women, not to negotiate salary.

It's a complex issue and you should avoid people on either side who try to scrunch it down to one sound bite.

The social pressure is a cop out. There's social pressure to drink alcohol, eat fast food, keep up with celebrities, etc. and there are plenty of people that don't do it. I think it's derogatory to women that we treat them like they can't think and act for themselves.

Half my team are women and they make more money on average then the guys because they don't take shit from anyone.

It doesn't matter if you are a man or a woman. You will never get what you don't ask for. It's in the best interest of every company to pay as little as the employee will take so every employee has to stand up for themselves.

We can't keep blaming "society" for things we need to do as individuals for ourselves.

There is a difference between blaming society and dealing with thousands of years of social pressure. Social pressure doesn't mean listening to what TV and Movies say you should do. It's dealing with input from your parents, your family, your friends, and your peers.

Dismissing the anecdotal evidence of the women on your team, you have no idea of the differences in environmental stimuli women experience vs men.

GENERALLY speaking, and no, it's not universal, but on average, women are much less aggressive and assertive in situations where there is risk to social standing or cohesion. And it's not just their self-perception, others (including other women!!) perceive women as negatively for acting in ways that is rewarded in men.

I'm sure you've never done it yourself, but the fact is it exists, and it will not go away if we pretend that there is no bias, there is no further progress to be made.

Similar to how claiming we live in a post-racism society promotes racism.

You can't dismiss his "anecdotal evidence" then make a sweeping generalization that on average women are much less aggressive and assertive due to their upbringing and provide no evidence.

At least his comment was based on personal experience of successful women on his team.

    It's in the best interest of every company to pay as
    little as the employee will take so every employee has
    to stand up for themselves.

That's true, if the company culture you're looking for is a back-stabbing dog-eat-dog climb-over-his-corpse kind of a thing, which some companies undoubtedly are, and some of those I'm sure are financially very successful, but it's not how I want to spend my week.

Otherwise I kind of agree with you.

>There's social pressure to drink alcohol, eat fast food, keep up with celebrities, etc. and there are plenty of people that don't do it.

And when social pressure increases, more people drink alcohol, eat fast food, keep up with celebrities, etc.; when it decreases, people do these things less.

Going against the social current entails loss and risk of loss. It's strange that libertarian types don't understand economic incentives, since they expect them to alone hold society together.

Really? According to what study? I don't think I've ever discussed the topic of salary negotiation socially in my entire life.

It's an interesting question, what (if anything) should be done to correct this, if this indeed makes up for the majority of gender wage disparities. Ex-Reddit CEO Ellen Pao got rid of wage negotiations altogether to correct for women's supposed inability to negotiate. That seems to me like the wrong way to go about it. I don't know the right answer, but I tend to favor bottom-up solutions (for example, encouraging people to learn negotiation and assertiveness strategies which are valuable for more than just making money) rather than protectionist top-down solutions (eliminating negotiations, affirmative action programs, encouraging litigious environments, etc).