In this episode of the Employee Survival Guide ®, Mark discusses the continuous pay disparity among female and male employees. Mark shares two recent studies that support the conclusion that women earn 80 cents on the dollar in comparison to men. He explores several explanations for the cause of the pay disparity. Mark advocates that the facts speak for themselves- men do not want women to be paid equally. Employees 30 years and younger actually have the solution- they share their compensation information with one another in order to get around the employer’s wall of pay secrecy. Mark offers the solution that all employers should disclose pay compensation for all employees. There is more financial benefit to “say your pay” than to hide it.
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Transcript:
Unknown:
Hi it’s mark here and welcome to the next edition of the Employee Survival Guide. Today’s topic “the joke men and women are unequal and pay. It’s a fact.” I’ll get to the point, men are paid more money in comparison to women, and they men do not want to admit it. Specifically, the Wall Street Journal reported on August 8 2022, broad new data on wages earned by college graduates who received federal student aid showed a pay gap emerging between men and women soon after the join the workforce, even among those receiving the same degree from the same school. The data which covered about 1.7 million graduates showed that the median pay for men exceeded that for women three years after graduation in nearly 75% of roughly 11,000 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. In almost half the program’s male graduates median earnings topped women’s by 10% or more. Nationally, women across the workforce earn an average of 82.3 cents for every dollar a man earns. According to the US Department of Labor. I cannot resist the applicability of the following song lyric to the persistent pay inequality issue. female employees continue to experience brandy Carlisle, she wrote the song called the joke. You get discouraged, don’t you girl. It’s your brother’s world for a while longer. We got to dance with the devil on a river to beat the stream, call it living the dream. Call it kick in the letter. They come back to kick dirt in your face to call you weak and then displace you after carrying your baby on your back across the desert, and the joke’s on them. Several reasons were cited in the Wall Street Journal article for the pay disparity. First, many economists cite the so called motherhood penalty, referring to the perception that mothers are less committed to the jobs and say This affects hiring promotions and salaries. We’ve seen these cases in our office, primarily through the pregnancy discrimination statute, and can confirm the persistent occurrence of the motherhood penalty at play in today’s workplace. The unequal pay cases are unreported and underreported. In our opinion, for female employees, primarily due to fear in retaliation and termination. We suspect a lack of co worker pay data is to blame here. Management will cite the confidentiality of personnel files as an excuse. But this is only self serving. It isn’t employers best interest to keep employees from discovering pay data in the workplace, as this reduces the bargaining around salary compensation by all employees within a company. Quote, employers continue to argue that they need the flexibility to set pay after seeing candidate pool in order to attract talent says an attorney from the Women’s Legal Defense Education Fund, who was working on the law in New York State at the time it was passed. But research she goes on to say but research has shown that giving employees employers free rein to set salary in this way is precisely what leads to discriminatory pay. Today, younger employees under 30 now share their compensation data amongst themselves to catch employers engaging in unequal pay practices among female and male employees. cities like New York and Washington State are now require posting of salary ranges and job ads to reduce the pay inequality in hiring. Second, the Wall Street Journal reporting. Researchers say women choosing careers sometimes internalize societal expectations about which jobs suit them. well intentioned advisors and employers can steer women toward less lucrative options based on assumptions about their aspirations. Third, the Wall Street Journal article argues that confidence plays a role in early career decisions. And then site research that women are less aggressive than men in negotiating salaries or raises because they will appear too demanding. Have we gotten past this point yet? The continued propagation of the idea that women are demanding is demeaning and dehumanizing. I would have to strongly disagree here on the cause. My experience with female clients reveals the opposite is true. The majority of female employees know how to negotiate and do it better than men. In my opinion. The problem lies in the party on the other side of the negotiation table men, including some women who report to them, there’s a systematic bias within each employer that men must be paid more than men. This is an undisputed fact according to the data in both of the surveys reported in this article, the pay inequality persists because government agencies fail to police employer pay practices. If there exists no threat of getting caught, then there is no penalty to the employer and an increase incentive for profitability due to continued pay inequality. However, there is other evidence that the pay inequality gap has decreased to zero in some metro areas, but only for a short period of time. reverting back to the statistical 80% counterpart comparison norms we’ve seen nationally. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research study, the earnings parity tends to be greatest in the first years after entering In the labor market, the gender wage gap is narrower among younger workers nationally, and the gap varies across geographical areas. In fact, in 22 of the 250 US metropolitan areas, women under the age of 30 earn the same amount as or more than their male counterparts in both the New York and Washington metro areas. Young women earn 102% of what young men earn when examining median median annual earnings among full time year round workers. Nationally, women under 30, who work full time year round earn about 93% or 93 cents on the dollar, compared with men the same age range, but the study suggests that women will lose this level of parity with men as women age to the 35 to 48 age range, dropping the pay inequality to any sense of their male counterpart into those 21 The Pew Research Center wrote that the following in an attempt to answer the question of why does a paid gender pay gap still exist, and they responded by much of this gap has been explained by measurable factors such as education attainment, occupational segregation, work experience, the narrowing of the gap is attributed in large part to gains women’s have made in each of these dimensions. Even though women have increased their presence in higher paying jobs traditionally dominated by men, such as professional and managerial, managerial positions, women as a whole continued to be over represented in lower paying occupations relative to their share of the workforce. This may contribute to the gender pay differences that we currently see, the aforementioned survey results reveal a sudden burst of important improvement in the wage inequality issue in the 13 under group in certain metro areas, but the data then reverts back to the historical norms. Also paying an equal pay equality only reaches parity in coastal metro areas, leaving the vast majority of the country leaving disparity in place. Why and who controls this issue, men and the boys club that still prevails in this country. This is not fair. It’s not equal. And it’s discrimination. And it continues. Until we collectively addresses important societal issue we cannot say that men and women are equal in the workplace in terms of pay. We cannot say that the Equal Pay Act is affected to prevent pay inequality among female and male employees. Pay inequality nationally has remained unchanged at 80 cents for $1. In comparison to men, for female employees over 30 years of age from more than three decades in will not change, a simple solution exists. All companies must reveal and make transparent compensation practices for all employees, not just new hires. This rulemaking should occur at the national level through the US Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. younger employees under 30 have already demonstrated their ability to bypass management’s wall of secrecy on pay by openly sharing their salaries with one another in order to force management to reconcile their pay practices. Once employees start to share their pay data, they will achieve more in form of pay increases versus any benefit obtained by not revealing their pay data. Why keep your pay data secret? From who? There is no benefit to keeping these information private? Stop, say your pay. If you’d like more information about this topic, please contact us at Carey & Associates PC on the web. I look forward to talking with you soon. Have a geat week.