Employee Survival Guide® - The Joke- Men and Women Are Unequal in Pay- It's a Fact!

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, 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 in 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 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

Starting point is 00:00:36 after they joined 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 of the programs, 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 U.S. Department of Labor. I cannot resist the applicability of the following song lyric to the persistent pay inequality issue female employees

Starting point is 00:01:15 continue to experience. Brandi Carlile, 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 this dream. Call it living the dream. Call it kicking the ladder. 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.

Starting point is 00:01:43 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 and 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,

Starting point is 00:02:21 but this is only self-serving. It is in the employer's 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 employers free range to set salary in this way

Starting point is 00:02:55 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 now require posting of salary ranges and job ads to reduce the pay inequality in hiring. Second, the Wall Street Journal reported, 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 cite research

Starting point is 00:03:41 that women are less aggressive than men in negotiating salaries or raises because they will appear too demanding. Haven't 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 is a systematic bias within each employer

Starting point is 00:04:15 that men must be paid more than women. 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 increased 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 have 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 the labor market. The gender wage gap is narrower

Starting point is 00:05:02 among younger workers nationally, and the gap varies across geographical areas. In fact, in 22 of the 250 U.S. 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 annual earnings among full-time year-round workers. Nationally, women under 30 who work full-time year-round earn about 93 cents on the dollar compared with men in 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 paid inequality to 80 cents of their male counterpart. In 2021, the Pew Research Center wrote the following in an attempt to answer the question of why does a gender pay gap still exist?

Starting point is 00:06:05 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 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 positions, women as a whole continue to be overrepresented 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 improvement in the wage inequality issue in the 30 and under group in certain metro areas, but the data then reverts back

Starting point is 00:06:44 to the historical norms. Also, 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 address this 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 effective to prevent pay inequality

Starting point is 00:07:18 among female and male employees. Pay inequality nationally has remained unchanged at 80 cents on the dollar in comparison to men for female employees over 30 years of age for more than three decades and 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 U.S. Department of Labor and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Younger employees under 30 have already demonstrated their ability to bypass management's wall of secrecy on pay by openly

Starting point is 00:07:55 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 this information private. Stop. Say your pay. If you'd like more information about this topic, please contact us at Cary and Associates PC on the web. Look forward to talking to you soon. Have a great week.

Employee Survival Guide® - The Joke- Men and Women Are Unequal in Pay- It's a Fact!

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