First, I NEVER was advised, tacitly or otherwise, to avoid hiring women.
Second, when women announced they were expecting, there wasn't some smoky, backroom meeting about how to muscle out Mary. If anything, it was simply another HR matter requiring changes to workflow and assignments... and assembling an in-office baby shower.
Third, we NEVER asked "are you coming back?" Indeed, the female employee frequently offered up the question AND answer after announcing her pregnancy - "I'll be taking some time off then coming back." More often than not, that happened. There were a few instances where the woman voluntarily left the workforce to care for her child, and in all of those cases it was because she WANTD to do so. Nature, you know.
Fourth, after taking over departments, I observed "apparent" pay disparity instances. Upon deeper investigation, many of these disparities were explained by experience, hiring dates (people hired more recently tended to have higher/market-adjusted base pay), and performance.
Notwithstanding all of this analysis, there were absolutely a few places over the years where the disparity boiled down to the prior hiring manager being a POS. In those cases, I called HR and they had ninja-like skills in finding funding pools to correct the disparity. Parenthetically, I never saw a guy getting the pay shaft in my analyses.
During the pandemic I saw men AND women rise to the occasion. For every guy I saw work harder, there was a woman who thought harder. And visa versa. Differences in talent I've observed, was solely based on the individual and not their XX or XY pattern.
One last salient point: I've had MANY women confide in me, that women can be the worst bosses to other women. "oh yea...it's a thing" I was told. That's not to say guys can't be terrible bosses - I've had quite a few - but as one female told me "women can be our own worst enemies."
Your mileage may vary.
I’ve seen numerous surveys. Women PREFER male bosses.
I do a lot of contracts for banks and my bosses have overwhelmingly been women……as in 14 of the last 15…..I’ve generally been lucky and had good bosses though.
I might also mention in my company, HR will actively work to resolve pay disparities. When we do our merit increases, there is a bucket of money that can be used to make these kind of adjustments.
For example, if a "Specialist III" position (to be generic) had a mid-point salary of $78,000 and we brought somebody internally into that position that was making considerably less in a different job role, we would add to their merit increase from that pool of money to make them more whole in that position over time (those in the lower third of the pay scale get a higher increase than those in the upper third). Otherwise, they might never get to the mid-point on just the regular merit increases alone (which can be rather meager).
Provided of course that the employee is receiving favorable performance reviews and doing well in the job.
We want everybody getting to the mid-point as that is a good launching point to the next higher job title in the career path.
There is literally no such thing as women getting paid "less" than their male counterparts. The pay scales and percentages of merit increase are the same regardless of gender. That is never taken into account.
Well done and informative.
What you describe has been the norm since around 1990 and in larger corporations since the 1980s, as best I know. In smaller good-ol-boy owned businesses in the 1970s, and even in some into the 80s, there were owners/bosses who made no bones about paying women less because they would sooner or later get pregnant and quit, or become less reliable, and paying men more because they “have families to support”. I heard both from the lips of former bosses in person. **”But I never saw or heard any of that after 1990.***
In the 1970s, business and industry leaders began welcoming women in earnest as they reakized women were willing to work for less or work harder for the same pay. Men were sometimes replaced by women for this reason. They supported Women’s Lib and abortion in the political sphere through donations, as these kept women in the work force either longer at lower cost and made them look good guys to the women’s libbers to boot.
During the 80s, the DINKs and professional singles emerged as a lucrative market for a number of profitable products and services that benefit from heavy marketing and advertising, thanks to their having disposable income and leisure time available for restaurant meals, designer goods, upscale beauty products, gym memberships, travel, gadgets and entertainment of all kinds, etc. So the carefree childless lifestyle featured prominently in advertising and in TV and movies, which further encouraged the trend.
This piggybacked nicely on the already established emphasis on teen marketing. The shift to teen marketing efforts began in earnest in the late 40s (when the word “teenager”, coined by marketing and ad men, came into more general use) as teens became more mobile and had more disposable income to spend on things like entertainment including records/tapes/CDs/concerts, cool clothing and accessories, fast food, soft drinks, etc. (and thanks to the baby boom, a large market). So we had already established the youth culture as having outsize pop culture influence , and the basketball-in-the-python Boomer generation was moving on up in age.
So yes, corporate America did exert influence in pushing and glamorizing youth culture and extending that into young adulthood. It wasn’t some sinister plot, but a rational quest for profit. Businesses benefited from young adult singles and childless couples both as a market and as labor pool.
Couples with children simply didn’t have the spare money for products and services that benefit from intensive marketing (other than fast food, a time saver and cost effective for working couples with kids) nor the spare time to go out to movies, concerts and nicer restaurants, or for top line beauty products, trendy accessories, etc. They were spending their money on housing, baby food, diapers, gallons of milk, school supplies, and saving up for the kids’ college, etc. None of which are discretionary or impulse buys and therefore none of which benefit from intensive marketing. So there were fewer ads and movies and pop songs aimed at that audience.
Now, today, paying travel expenses for out-of-state abortions looks like a generous women-friendly gesture but is actually far less costly than the expenses and downtime of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. So it’s a win-win for the company (looks generous while actually saving money).
I do *not* think it means they will try to influence pregnant female employees to get abortions or curtail maternal leave or benefits. But as policy, making this offer makes good sense from both a financial and a PR standpoint.
Yes, women can be quite nasty toward each other in the workplace. The ones in bookkeeping/secretarial/clerical type positions can be especially vicious toward women in professional positions. Seriously! Jealousy?
I’ve had terrible and wonderful bosses of both sexes, most in between. The bad women bosses do tend to be more back stabby toward other women in my observation, as are bad women colleagues and underlings. I did my best to be a good boss to both men and women and believe I was evenhanded. I hope so, at least.
Nice to have an intelligent and thoughtful conversation with you here! It’s like the olden days on FR before it became twitterized. :)
The entire point of my post is that wage differentials are almost always “explainable”. A lady letter carries was PO’ed because she was making less than a man in the same department with about the same tenure. She went to court and won. The next week she was back at work, but for the first time, was assigned to help unload the 100lb mail bags from the trucks and place them on the loading doc.
She quit two days later. Sometimes a job description, isn’t.