Missing the point

[Gendo]

I don't feel like posting this on Facebook, and everyone here already agrees with this anyway, but I need to rant.

So a common argument against the wage gap for men and women is "if women get paid less then men, then why would anyway hire any men if they can run their business cheaper by just hiring women? Huh??? CHECK MATE YOU STUPID FEMINISTS!!!"

I mean, seriously? This is a real argument, not just people trolling. Do they seriously think that the wage gap is in the form of "we have laws in this country that say that women make $75 while men make $100." Do they seriously not think that how much a company agrees to pay is something that the company can decide on? That if every company started saying "we will only pay $75", that then men would start having to work for $75? Or that if companies started only hiring women, that the women would start getting paid $100 instead of $75? They seriously seem to think that there's some magic thing about women that makes it so that the women are getting paid $75. Not that it's the company's decisions on how much to pay each person.

[OpiateOfTheMasses]

I take your point and don't disagree with it. And I also agree that in roles where there is a degree of flexibility for payment men are paid more than men on average.

However, every time the gender pay gap argument comes up the appalling mis-use and abuse of stats does annoy me somewhat, because they're rarely accurate...

The average woman in country X will get paid less than the average man in the same country - even if it everyone doing everything it could to pay fairly and evenly. Because of a whole bunch of other reasons... women are much more likely to be in part-time work than men, men are more likely to be in dangerous jobs such as lumberjacking or working on oil rigs (which get paid more) than women, men are more likely to take jobs which involve extended periods away from home (which pay more for being away from home), women are more likely to take maternity leave (which not only doesn't pay as well, but also slows down your career path - even if only by a few months - it all adds up!) and so on.

So the only stats that are worth a damn are those stats that show pools of men and women that have been doing the same grade full-time job with the same skill sets for roughly the same length of time. When you compare those and see that one group is being paid more than the other - that's a legitimate comparison. Anything else is just lies, damned lies and statistics.

As I say, I think that more should be done to help women earn as much as men. Frankly from my experience in business, I think that men are often more aggressive when it comes to negotiating their initial pay settlements and more assertive when it comes to demanding raises and I think that's got a lot to do with why they end up getting paid more. And that's not how the system should work.

I just wish the campaigners would use properly detailed statistics when making their point.

[Dr_Liszt]

People have a hard time understanding that even if you have "legal equality" you still lack social, economical, political, etc, etc, etc equality. Because if a piece of paper says you have equality, it suddenly becomes true regardless of the world's evidence telling you otherwise.

As I say, I think that more should be done to help women earn as much as men. Frankly from my experience in business, I think that men are often more aggressive when it comes to negotiating their initial pay settlements and more assertive when it comes to demanding raises and I think that's got a lot to do with why they end up getting paid more. And that's not how the system should work.

Also this. There was a "don't be sorry." campaign aimed for women to be more aggressive, who also got heavily criticized. So women just can't win.

[OpiateOfTheMasses]

Thinking about it... I've recently changed jobs and there were half a dozen other people I got one quite well with who have left or will be leaving soon. We're all leaving for a variety of reasons but a common one is that company didn't pay particularly well for the industry so we all wanted to get a bit more money too.

But all but one of the people that left for new jobs were men. Of the women I knew that worked there and got on with just as well and I knew to be just as unhappy about the same sort of things - they're all just staying and hoping it gets better.

So I think the risk-taking/assertiveness probably is a large part to do with this. And I don't know how you resolve that. Because my old company isn't going to pay them any more, just like it wasn't going to pay me any more if I'd stayed. (Incidentally, they hired a women as my replacement if that means anything - she was "happy to take a pay cut to get out the rat race" - little does she know!).

[Blade Azaezel]

I get paid less than all the women I work with, when worked out as an average per hour stat. One woman lets less annually because she works less hours. Another is always complaining about the lack of pay and how difficult it is to pay the bills, but she's still been there 6 years and not bothered looking for another job. From my very limited experience, I would agree with Opiate. Maybe women just find somewhere they feel comfortable, regardless of pay, then choose not to risk moving on...a better the devil you know sort of situation??

[aels]

As I say, I think that more should be done to help women earn as much as men. Frankly from my experience in business, I think that men are often more aggressive when it comes to negotiating their initial pay settlements and more assertive when it comes to demanding raises and I think that's got a lot to do with why they end up getting paid more. And that's not how the system should work.

There are some indications that when women do try and negotiate, it can backfire on them: http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria- ... -negotiate

[CashRules]

Women should just hire men to do their negotiating.

[OpiateOfTheMasses]

As I say, I think that more should be done to help women earn as much as men. Frankly from my experience in business, I think that men are often more aggressive when it comes to negotiating their initial pay settlements and more assertive when it comes to demanding raises and I think that's got a lot to do with why they end up getting paid more. And that's not how the system should work.

There are some indications that when women do try and negotiate, it can backfire on them: http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria- ... -negotiate

Interesting article.

It's difficult to draw any real conclusions from the one example they give though. My first reaction when I read it was "what the fuck? how much does she want?". I've been on both ends of a fair number of negotiations and the candidate should know what the package is when they accept the job, so it's fair enough if they want to haggle to get to the top end of the pay scale that's being offered - I have absolutely no problem with that. But if they start moving the goal posts and wanting a whole bunch of their role's terms and conditions changed that were already defined, I'd be tempted to pull the plug too as an employer because I'd be thinking "they're just not worth the hassle".

To give you a real world example, about a year ago I was working in central Cambridge and I hired someone. We agreed terms, money, everything and settled on a start date. About a week before they were due to start the contacted me and asked if they would have a reserved parking space and I said that they wouldn't because we're in the middle of Cambridge and space is tight - only the senior managers and Directors have allocated spaces.

They then demanded that they could expense the cost of parking each day.

I told them that we don't give expenses like that to people on the grade they were coming in on and that they could either take the Park and Ride like everyone else or they could pay for it themselves. This wasn't acceptable and they said they would have to be compensated for the cost of parking. So I offered them the equivalent of £10 a day (which they'll get taxed on and still left them within their payscale) and they seemed delighted and off they went.

It costs about £25 a day to park in Cambridge.

They ended up taking the Park and Ride and it wasn't actually a problem.

But they came "that" close to being out on their ear before they'd even started because they hadn't bothered to read their job pack and research the job, where it was, how much it would cost them to get there, etc before agreeing to and thought that we were the bad guys for not giving them parking and that we should change the way the business operates to accommodate them. It's that sort of shit that winds employers up.