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Poll: Are you paying your female employees the same as your male employees

11 points by jerrya ↗ HN
Equal Pay Day is Tuesday, April 9, 2013. This date symbolizes how far into 2013 women must work to earn what men earned in 2012.

Does your startup pay your female employees the same as your male employees?

10 comments

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hahainternet
I wonder if any people who have voted 'no' could explain and justify why not.
johnpatonx
We negotiate salaries independently for each person based on their skills, experience, and competing offers.

We employ six male engineers, one female engineer and one female designer. All the men scored higher on their skills, experience and had higher competing offers, so they got higher salaries.

I don't see any problem in that.

If I paid them less because of their sex, that would be a problem.

brownbat
> higher competing offers

It took me far too long to realize that this is 90% of salary negotiation. Get multiple offers. Have people bid over you.

We should probably teach this to people. I'd say particularly women, but we should really just teach it to everyone. There's some evidence that if enough people in a certain group know how to haggle (not necessarily all) then it benefits all members of that group. Haggling is expensive, if people think you're savvy, that you'll only take their final offer, they'll just start with their best offer. If 9 out of 10 people will haggle, it's a waste of time to search for the tenth.

So help your fellow employees negotiate, it will get you better offers in the long run.

Ian Ayers probably has the best work on discrimination through negotiation strategies, how you can get differences without animus, it's kinda his bailiwick:

1) http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2118176?uid=3739936...

2) http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

scarmig
Therein's the catch 22, though. To get a better salary you've got to negotiate. However, negotiation is perceived differently if it's done by men versus done by women. When a man does it, it actually improves how he's viewed--"he knows what he's worth! he's confident!" etc. A woman, on the other hand, is more likely to be perceived as ungrateful or even bitchy.

The really f'ed up thing is that even if the hiring manager is female, she views negotiators that same biased way.

WayneDB
Do you have any supporting evidence for the claim that a female negotiator is more likely to be perceived as ungrateful or bitchy?
[dead] savagejen
There was a study done on this recently. Google is your friend.
tsotha
I was wondering if people who voted "yes" could justify it. People aren't replaceable parts - if you're paying people based on their contribution to the business there's bound to be some disparity (in either direction).