Women Make Less Than Men: 5 Things HR Needs to Do Right Now to End Pay Inequality
Unexplainable Pay Inequality in 2007
Women make less than men. In 2007. When controlling for all factors. How is that possible? Do you know anyone who actively and consciously pays women less than men? Well, it happens.
Women Earn on 80% Of What Their Male Counterparts Earn Right Out of School
The American Association of University Women released a new study that shows that women make less than men right out of school, continue to fall further behind as their career “advances,” and it’s not pretty. The AAUW reports:
In the report, Behind the Pay Gap, the AAUW Educational Foundation found that just one year after college graduation, women earn only 80 percent of what their male counterparts earn. Ten years after graduation, women fall further behind, earning only 69 percent of what men earn. Even after controlling for hours, occupation, parenthood, and other factors known to affect earnings, the research indicates that one-quarter of the pay gap remains unexplained and is likely due to sex discrimination. Over time, the unexplained portion of the pay gap grows.
This seems like an issue that HR should have solved a long time ago. How can it possibly be in the days of discrimination testing and pay surveys that gender pay differentials are still so large (or different at all)? It’s astonishing.
It’s Time for HR To Take a Stand on Pay Inequality
You know, I can practically understand how there could be gender pay inequalities in composite (for non-normalized data). Men don’t take time off for having babies, they tend to not be the primary caregivers, and for that, they stay in the workforce and get more promotions and money. But it just doesn’t reconcile when it starts out with inequalities right out of college. How in the hell can that be?
5 Things HR Needs to Do Right Now to End Pay Inequality
It’s time for HR to take a stand. To stand up and say “It’s our responsibility to provide equal pay for equal work.” That it’s not acceptable to pay women less than men right out of school. To think it’s just okay that men make more. Here are 5 Things HR Needs to Do Right Now to End Pay Inequality:
- Do a normalized study of pay equity in your organization. Find out if your organization’s results mirror the AAUW findings. If they do, be afraid, be very afraid.
- If you’re paying women less than men for equal skills and experience, then fix it. Today. Don’t pull that “We need to reconcile this over years” BS. You have to fix it now. Best time to plant a tree? Ten years ago.
- Put gender-based pay inequality on the discussion for each and every pay strategy session that you have with other senior managers.
- Ask yourself, “With all the data and testing that we do, how could it be that women make less right out of school?” Think about the culture of your organization. If you talk the talk about diversity, do you walk the walk and pay fairly?
- Scream from the rafters that you won’t tolerate gender-based pay inequality, make it a much-discussed policy, and fire people who think it’s okay to pay men and women differently for the same job.
The Equal Pay Act of 1963 (U.S.) and 1970 (U.K) is decades old. Maybe it’s time to just get with it and comply. Doing the right thing is always the right thing to do.
Women Standing on a Glass Cliff?
Photo credit: liikennevalo
I saw this definition today on Word Spy:
glass cliff n. A senior job or important project, particularly one given to a woman, with a high risk of failure (cf. glass ceiling).
Word Spy offers an example of “glass cliff” in use: [I]n a study of FTSE 100 companies, Haslam and his team discovered that most appointed women to senior positions only after a downturn in their fortunes, leaving them standing on the edge of a “glass cliff.”
—Women face ‘glass cliff’ effect CNN.com, September 8, 2004
Very interesting phrase. And it doesn’t look like women mind pushing each other off the glass cliff, either. Times Online reports that “women bosses are are significantly more likely than men to discriminate against female employees” in its article titled Office Queen Bees Hold Back Women’s Careers. A little diversity lesson for everyone: Push careers along, not over the edge.
Technorati Tags: glass cliff, women, diversity, discrimination
Malcolm Gladwell on Defining a Racist
Malcolm Gladwell’s Defining a Racist is a powerful and thought-provoking article, and one that should be required reading for HR and company legal professionals, especially those charged with maintaining EEO and training on respect in the workplace.
A Diversity Gut Check for You
Here’s a diversity gut check for you: Would you hire this illustrated man? (It’s is the real thing, a full face tattoo.) Would you hire him? The University of New Mexico did. This tattooed man is Bruce Potts, who teaches public speaking at the university.
Has the shock worn off yet? Is Bruce Potts the face of tolerance and diversity? Or did a voice in your head say, “No one who looks like that could work in our company”?
When I saw the original post on BoingBoing called Teacher Sports a Full Face Tattoo, I initially said, “Wow, cool.” Then I started to wonder. Would a guy who looks like this ever get hired in a “regular” job? And if how he looks matters, how is that any different that how other people “look”?
Workplace diversity is a serious topic in HR circles. Studies show that we like to hire people who look like us. An SBA article called Managing Diversity in the Workforce outlines the diversity gut check for all of us:
“We’ve all heard, and some of us have said, ‘I don’t care who I hire - or work with - as long as they’re the best qualified,’” observes Joan Steinau Lester, author of The Future of White Men and Other Diversity Dilemmas. “This of course brings up the question, how do we recognize the best?
“In real life, we all tend to hire people much like ourselves,” she continues. “Those are the people we instinctively recognize as ‘qualified.’ They speak like us, walk like us, dress like us and have similar cultural references. These people are part of our world. We ‘know’ them. And we automatically know how to evaluate them.
“It’s a stretch to see the qualifications of people who are different,” admits Lester. “Unfamiliarity all too often means discomfort and even mistrust.”
If you really want to do a diversity gut check, pull your seat belt tight and take one or two of the Harvard Implicit Association Tests. I’m serious, be ready to be rattled. Tests available include assessments of personal bias about gender-career, age, weight, and race. For instance, the race test says, “This IAT requires the ability to distinguish faces of European and African origin. It indicates that most Americans have an automatic preference for white over black.”
Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the Implicit Association Tests in his best-selling book, Blink. Gladwell writes about orchestra auditions where men were selected disproportionately over women, that is until musicians started auditioning behind a curtain. Then, women held their own with the men. Once again, “how they looked” made a difference, and those decisions happen in an instant - a blink.
Gladwell put it this way in an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “That’s what discrimination is. It is, we are making a judgment about somebody instantly, unconsciously, without realizing we’re doing it. And that judgment is biasing our — all the conclusions we make about that person down the line in ways we’re not aware of.” By the way, Gladwell, who is of quite a diverse background - his mother is a black Jamaican - was astonished to find that when he took the Race IAT, he scored with a an automatic bias to whites over blacks. He said it rattled him.
So…would you hire Bruce Potts, The Illustrated Man? Diversity, on the surface, seems so obvious and so clear. Compelling. But the complexities underlying doing what’s right is the tough part. As always, the devil is in the details. Thoughts?
A Simple Look at Diversity Statistics
The Miniature Earth intro says, “If the world’s population were reduced to 100, it would look something like this.” It’s a compelling look at the world that we live in with statistics that are easy to grasp. This “reduction to 100″ approach would be a killer way to show company diversity information.
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