
Ask HN: How to determine equal pay for genders at a company? - JBlue42
I have a question sparked by the NYT Gender Equality link on the main board as well as a throw away comment by a former co-worker yesterday.<p>With a few women at my past work, I&#x27;ve had the discussion about equal pay for experience and, since the majority of payroll is opaque, the general assumption is that they get paid less, even though that workplace claimed to be &quot;very progressive&quot;.<p>The general assumption for pay was that it was whatever you were able to negotiate when you came in.<p>Beyond that though, how would you figure out if a company actually was or was not paying people equally for equal amount of experience, regardless of gender?<p>I guess the easiest answer would be to have enough trust and honesty with some of your co-workers that you could freely discuss it. Since I was not in the same profession as them, I had no trouble discussing my salary but, especially in the US, it&#x27;s seen as something that&#x27;s not done.<p>I don&#x27;t think this previous company were consciously nefarious, only that the operated like a company does, getting people to work for as little as they&#x27;ll accept.<p>Curious what others think.
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codegladiator
I read some years ago about this problem in a paper. They solution they had
was this:

1\. Make buckets of "pays", say 80-85k, 85-90k, 90-95k, and so on, you can
decide bucket length

2\. you have two people at hand. we will come to know if there is a wage
difference between these two.

3\. put box in a room, send one person in, with a chit, ask them to put the
chit in the box with the label of their salary.

4\. get the person out, send second one in, ask them to open the box of their
salary range and tell if they find a chit or not.

If they find the chit, they have same salary and the information is complete.
if they didn't find the chit, there is a difference.

I am sorry I couldn't find the link or search it back. Hope the
grammar/english wasn't too shitty.

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tabeth
There's no solution other than anonymity. Humans are and will forever be
inherently biased. Therefore the solution is to remove information we don't
want to influence us. In your case, this means gender.

Other than anonymity, which is the general solution, you could just not allow
negotiation or adjust wages (which will be to you/your company's detriment).

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JBlue42
It seems like the salary band, determined on experience, would at least give
room for negotiation or adjusting wages, at least the hiring level.

In terms of a company with the wage structure it currently has, you would have
to the executive level be interested in "normalizing" the wages, which would
probably also cause a ruckus.

Not to mention if you have people that, due to client relationships, work on
more monetarily significant projects.

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jstewartmobile
Closest I've seen anyone get to success on this front is to have per-title
salaries with very narrow pay bands, like "Developer 1: $80K-$90K". Not really
practical in a small shop though. If there's no next rung, better people will
immediately know that they've topped-out and just leave, but at least it's
honest.

The problem with the secrecy surrounding this topic is that instead of hashing
out the differences in compensation and provided-value up-front, the acrimony
gets dragged-out over time, and under opacity people tend to assume the worst.

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JBlue42
Yeah, it seems like it would open up such a can of worms which, in my mind,
just seems to be a part of the difficulties of addressing the equal pay for
equal work stuff.

Not to mention that taking a full maternity leave puts women six months behind
on things which maybe they're penalized for, whether consciously or
subconsciously, when men might be able to take a shorter leave (even if they
did want longer).

~~~
jstewartmobile
I know this is all anecdotal, but most people are A-OK with someone making
more than them if that person is also obviously providing more value.

With the ad-hoc thing we do in tech, where everyone is working in the same pen
and has a similar title, but some are making more and some are making less,
and the ones making more are often providing less value and only have a higher
salary because they were hired during a better market, you end up with a lot
energy being expended on intrigue/sabotage/oneupsmanship that could have been
spent on the product.

Take sales for example. You can make a decent estimate of what another
salesman on the team is making just by looking at the board and multiplying,
and if it comes out higher than what you pulled, it is really hard to pin that
on anyone but yourself.

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auganov
I'd wonder if given the prevalence of the bias - you could simply make it be a
function of company size.

