Posted on 01/31/2016 10:22:40 AM PST by Kaslin
Author's note: The column contains satire.
It is with a heavy heart that we must return your initial capital investment. President Obama's recent executive action will make implementing our brilliant moneymaking plan almost impossible to accomplish.
When we released the video announcement about creating an engineering firm staffed only with women, the response was almost overwhelmingly positive. The idea was genius: exploit the pay gap between men and women to generate obscene profits. Investors, like you, lined up by the dozen, up to the point that we had to turn interested parties away. There were thousands of them.
As everyone knows, despite the laws on the books since 1963, women can be hired to work for less than men. By focusing the business on a male-dominated industry yet having a lower cost structure - paying roughly $0.77 in salary for every $1.00 that a man would have received - our prices would have instantly guaranteed market share dominance. And we would have made a fortune. An engineering company staffed and run by women has never existed.
Over the last 12 months we've amassed a massive binder full of women seeking employment with our organization. Hundreds of well-qualified applicants were eager to work for us. Remaining consistent with our commitment to transparency, we explained to each of them that their salaries would be at least 20% less than they would command if they were men. Only a handful objected and the lawsuits they filed have been quietly taken care of.
Among the responses to the overall investment opportunity, there were naysayers, of course. Some pointed out that the wage-gap between men and women is largely a myth. They even supplied data and documentation supporting their assertion. They maintained that the raw data - showing that men and women have different incomes - does not adjust for things like education, industry, hours worked, and other variables.
When a true apples-to-apples comparison is made, they say, the difference in pay between men and women completely disappears. It ends up such that differing incomes are almost entirely the result of choices made by individuals as opposed to structural discrimination based on gender bias.
Obviously, we totally disagreed with this, as the inability of women to command equal pay was the fundamental assumption of our business. We documented this fact by referring to claims made by Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Nancy Pelosi, and others. If the gender wage gap weren't real, influential leaders such as these wouldn't have been talking about it at every single turn.
But now the game is over.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, under direct instruction from the President, has enacted a new regulation that will hobble us. Every company that has more than 100 employees will be required to report their pay scales and separate the data based upon gender. They will be actively working to discover if companies are paying men and women differently for the same job.
They estimate the cost of compliance to be around $400 per employee, which from a broad perspective is nothing, but from our perspective it's massive. Despite the willingness of all our applicants to work for less than men, the Federal government is sure to catch on.
So, please find enclosed a check for the entirety of your investment, less a small handling charge.
We do have another idea percolating, although we're not yet ready for a formal announcement. It has to do with playing around with the Federal definition of gender and some of the not-so-well-known cash benefit programs that exist. According to our lawyers, a person born as a man who has fully transitioned to being a woman can self-identify as a man yet qualify for some Federal programs set aside for women. There may be an opportunity here and we'll let you know when we've a formal business plan put together.
I’m sad if this is closing down. Was looking like my only chance to get back into my profession! I really don’t care if I’m paid less than a man, if I’m still paid more than burger flippers and get something on my resume. (No joke!)
Women are NOT paid less then men unless here is a gap in work history for things like raising children.
Furthermore, women do not like being paid less for men for doing the same job; not at all! But sometimes there is just not anything you can do about it, because you are the sole breadwinner for your family, your ex, Mr. Peter Pan, does not pay child support, and so you have to take whatever job you can get.
An organization has existed for decades known as the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). Does anyone familiar with this group know what their take is on this subject?
The stupid part about this law is that there will be even more finely graduated job descriptions to get around it.
Engineer 1
Engineer 1a
Engineer 2
Engineer 2a
Engineer 2b
And so forth so that the jobs will not be exactly the same on paper.
The really bad thing for women is going to be if there are several people with the same job description and same duties etc. but say as one of them you are a woman and you work harder or smarter or whatever ... can they pay you more? No, that would be gender discrimination.
Then there all sorts of intangibles. For example, you could have 2 people with the same job description, same duties and responsibilities etc,, but one of them does a little marketing for you on and off the job (not in the job description but some people do this because that is just how they are ... they talk up the business). Then you would have to change their job description to add “does a little marketing on the side” so that you could pay that person a little more, even though they were not specifically hired for that function.
I see this all the time. And the differences are not just between men and women or between whites and minorities.
It’s all over the map ... some employees are just that little bit more valuable for intangible reasons ... say they boost morale of other employees because of their sunny disposition and therefore boost production ... but you would not be able to pay them that little bit more even if you wanted to.
You’d have to add “sunny disposition boosts office morale” to their job description in order to pay them more.
Or “offers to work late in crunch time” to their job description.
Or “has own transportation so can do spur of the moment errands or can attend sudden unscheduled meetings” to their job description.
In short there are millions of reasons why people with the same exact qualifications, job description and duties might have differing value to the employer.
In the end this will make employers less inclined to hire women, even though and individual woman might have turned out to be the more valuable employee for unforeseen reasons. Not because she is a woman but because of some aspect of her work ethic or outlook or whatever.
Having hired people (and fired people) I can say you cannot always know up front what the persons hidden talents (or liabilities) may be. They rarely if ever have anything to do with gender or race ... they have to do with the fact that people are INDIVIDUALS, and do not represent a group or class of persons.
It does happen, but smart employers are not going to pay an employee who does a good job and increases their bottom line less than a person who does a less good job, even if their job description is exactly the same.
They may do that, but then the better employee may leave and you only hurt yourself as the employer. I am certain there are some who do this, but they do it to their own detriment.
Also ones who do this ... the word does get around and they get a bad reputation among their peers. Employees do talk and I’ve even had headhunters say “don’t work for company so and so unless they offer you 1.5 x the normal salary for the position, they have a bad track record with women, or they have a lot of turnover, or the supervisor there has a bad reputation... etc”.
The women in my company run the departments, report the results at meetings and drive the project schedules.
Writing code, tests, running tests, or debugging?
Not so much.
There’s a glass ceiling and discrimination alright but it isn’t the one NOW claims exists.
Hmmmm, sarcasm, it is.
Believe it, I would not.
Women were paid more working for Hillary and in the Obama white lie house.
I’ll say one thing here...every time crap like this happens, the losers will be the ‘protected ones’. It will certainly happen in this case too.
I wrote code. I wrote tests. I debugged. I was a test manager. I wrote proposals and I was a proposal manager.
Then I had kids.
It’s been 20 years.I would like to somehow get back into it, but don’t know how.
If there is some law forbidding females from fixing or repairing motors, furnaces, et cetera, I'm all for amending those laws. If someone is not hiring competent female repair persons for sexist reasons, they are idiots more than they are sexists.
More common, I suspect, is a gap in the amount of hours worked; certainly the case in my decades of work experience. Guys at my current job have cut back to the bare minimum now; since what’s good for the goose if good for the gander, we’re all working like geese now.
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