I’m an employer. Multiple companies in multiple states nationwide.
I’ve never once even considered a lower pay scale for women, and most of the staff in the companies are in fact female, as I sit and think about this.
I’ve never seen a situation where a woman isn’t paid the same money for the same job as a male, I only read about it in articles like this.
Which causes me to wonder if its real, or just PC coming out.
This is the second story I’ve seen on this in several days.
It’s the beginning of the new push to ratify the ERA.
Your real-life experience is precisely the truth. I have NEVER seen even one example of gender-based wage differences. I have worked in computers for over 30 years, and the pay scales are identical, as adjusted for individual experience. Not only that, every government installation must as a matter of law and policy have identical scales. This whole thing sounds like feminist propaganda. If some women prefer to go into fields other than those that have identical pay for productivity, that is no concern of mine.
I experienced this first-hand just as this article says. I became a programmer right out of college (mainframes) in 1979, and I was paid significantly less than my male colleagues with the exact same experience and background.
I can certainly understand the pay gap years later after women spend time out of the work force, but right out of college it should not exist. Granted, it’s anecdotal, my experience was some years ago and I have no pay disparity issues now, but I was by no means the only woman so affected. I wasn’t even married at the time. My best friend was passed over for promotion a half-dozen times by male colleagues with less experience and fewer skills, until she finally left for a friendlier company.
It seems to me to be more of a corporate thing rather than a small business problem. Small businesses appreciate talent more than personality - again, anecdotal.
If you can in fact get away with paying women less, wouldn’t you as an employer choose to hire ONLY women? Think of the savings!
You have to remember what the study is not saying. They are not saying it was for the same jobs. So they are comparing comparing apples and oranges and making a conclussion about them.
These studies are absolute bunk. They lump ALL working men and ALL working women together and come up with their figures.
The fact that a woman working part-time at a day care center making $8 an hour compared with a male engineer making $50 an hour has a bit to do with the wage difference.
The folks who bring us these studies try to overcome that by saying that jobs are "comparable worth". In other words - the file clerk making $30,000 a year is "just as valuable" as the engineer making $90,000 a year.
If you look at SPECIFIC jobs - there is no discrepancy in wages.
Where I work - jobs are paid according to the job classification and level. A person's gender has absolutely nothing to do with it. There aren't separate pay scales for men and women.
If the women gravitate towards the lower paying jobs and the men tend to take the higher paying jobs - so be it. It has nothing to do with wage discrimination. It has everything to do with choices.