Gender Pay Gap Still Exists

Mikey1

We as HR professionals need to work to close this gender pay gap.We have to power to do it and we are responsible for creating gender equity in the workplace.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=azcypNg00in0&refer=us

RuthG

I agree. We are the ones who have a lot of control over setting the wages of our employees. Even when our executives set the salaries of higher level employees, if we see gender inequity, we should bring it to their attention - if not to diminish the gap, then to protect the company from a discrimination claim.

blakefan

I agree. If we see that two recent grads are coming into the same or similar positions with different pay, we really should speak up. It's just not right and, besides, its unlawful.

BarbieW

Part of the problem is that we usually look to save $, so if a manager can get someone for less they will. It really is our job to make sure this doesn't have a disparate impact on women. At the same time, women do need to learn to negotiate salaries and to make sure they aren't selling themselves short.

RuthG

That's exactly right - we always try to negotiate a low price, within market range. And women aren't necessarily raised to negotaiate as hard as men. We need to change how we socialize girls/women so they negotiate from a stonrger perception of their own worth in the job market. That's not the job of HR professionals, but our job is to make sure we pay eaqually qualified people the same amount for the same job - regardlessof gender.

kyliefan

Hi--there is another thread on this topic under the "Discrimination" section of the Forum.  Since you mentioned negotiation, here's a link from ABC news (related to a news story from a few weeks back ) on the topic. Below is what I posted on the other thread the day after I saw the report:<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

There was a report on ABC national news that said from DAY ONE out of college, women are earning 95 cents to the dollar of men.  They were pointing out that life events such as having children could not account for this difference (since this their first job right after finishing school).  Suprisingly, they attributed much of it to the fact that women do not negotiate salary in their job interviews as aggessively as men do.

And, ABC news posted an article on its website yesterday (to accompany the news story) about how to negotiate salary (directed towards women), noting that "men are four times more likely to haggle over pay than women".  You can find the article http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/TakeControlOfYourLife/story?id=3074877&page=1

johnnyBravo

A Harvard economist,  Alberto Alesina, proposes "discrimination, the good kind" to fix the problem: lower women's income-tax rates AND raise them for men!  (Never heard about the good kind of discrimination before!)

He says the female tax rate "should be no greater than about 80 percent of that of that of males and possibly much less" and argues that a small increase in income taxes for men would finance the larger cut in income taxes for women because as more women chose to work--which they would do if they had a lower tax rate, he says--they'd pay more as a group in income taxes.

Married men would benefit because they would share in extra income and lower tax rate on the earnings of their wives, he says. "Single men may not be happy about it," Alesina concedes. "But you can't make everybody happy."  (I'm betting Alberto is married!!)

Sounds like a strange, end-around way to achieve workplace gender "equality"!

 

 

babaHR

I am a member of the AAUW (American Association of University Women), which has an equal pay initiative.

For more information and AAUW's pay equity resource kit, go to

http://www.aauw.org/issue_advocacy/actionpages/documents/payequityResourceKit.pdf<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />