Senate Problems with perceptions of masculinity

There's all kinds of ways for pay gap data to go wrong, the devil is literally in the details on it. And those details go pretty deep.

But the starting point we should all be able to agree on is the same rate for a person doing a job no matter what.

 

For a flat pay/salary job I agree.

Different for flexible pay jobs where people are paid based on experience, the number of roles they do, the value of that person to the brand/corporation etc

 

Paying more based on experience / or time in the job isn't incompatible with a clear, transparent pay structure.

Where I can see problems arising is with a "negotiate your own salary" set-up, as that brings in ambiguity over the final decisions and tilts the field towards those better at navigating the process.

 

Yea, but largely that’s what most companies and corporations are doing already. That’s why the pay gap, as it is commonly understood (men and women are getting paid vastly differently for doing the same jobs) is false.

 

A clear transparent pay structure can be compatible with experience etc... provided its clear and transparent.


e.g. 5 years experience will give a salary of X this will increase in line with inflation each year until you hit 7 years where it will become Y. A person newly starting with 6 years could be paid less than someone with 6 years experience in the company due to inflation etc... BUT once you hit the equalizer 7 years of experience both will balance out so while there would be a discrepancy, it would be minor AND would be the effect same for both sexes.

Differences based around performance bonuses, I can live with as some people just like to do the job to the best of their ability and others look to go way above and beyond and make a name for themselves. Again, in these scenarios there should be fully quantifiable and qualitative KPI's rather than ones based around perception so that conscious or unconscious bias is removed.


edit.
The review around the pay gap should be against people in the same roles though. Male and Female teachers, nurses, planners, Heads of department in the same companies should have comparable salaries. Using differing roles really muddies the water as some roles are traditionally/typically male or female oriented and that can heavily distort a broader picture.

that being said, nurses, teachers etc... should be paid more than they are considering we rely on them for little things like keeping us alive or looking after AND teaching our kids

 

Time worked is also, I think, relevant to that discussion. When the number used is the average income of men and the income salary of women on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, it's also still going to have baked into that that there's also a gap in hours worked for full time workers. That's sometimes included and sometimes not.

 

I didn’t see this earlier.

I think teachers should make more, but I don’t think much can be gained speculating on why they are undervalued or attempting to attach it to gender. However, I am very cautious, philosophically, on attaching moral connotations to pay. (I fundamentally disagree with the concept that it is moral at all for an individual to sell their labor to an enterprise they are not invested in).

 

I agree that not all these examples are automatically, discriminatory, but I think it's an interesting place to start. For instance, secretaries were once an apprenticeship-type role for executives in waiting, with the idea being that it got them a lot of face time with senior leadership and familiar with the challenges those positions faced. It morphed into something much less ambitious and much more female over time. I'm not sure we can say that was entirely just a huge coincidence

 

Is it moral for an enterprise to buy labor from an individual that they are not invested in?

 

Except, by definition, this society doesn't agree on that. If we agree on this, then you inherently disagree with capitalism. Capitalism does not hold to the labor theory of value nor any other theory of value in which value is an inherent aspect of the commodity. Instead, value is based on market forces and negotiation. And the value of one's labor is subject to both market forces and negotiation. Negotiating your salary is how this works. The company wants to pay you as little as possible while getting as much as possible from you. People negotiate for higher salaries in this system. They are wagering that their work is, in the mind of their employer, important enough to increase their salary with the risk for their employer being that said employee will leave. If they have wagered wrong; if the employer believes that the employee is either expendable or will not leave, then they will not get the raise. Companies are not handing out these raises to men like Oprah hands out cars to audience members. Companies do not want to give out more money period.

So if we want to start going down the route of "everyone should get the same pay for the same work" I am your first sign-up. But that's simply not going to happen in a capitalist society. It's always going to be subject to negotiating, and who chooses to negotiate and how well they do.

 

Sure, I suppose in the "purest" sense? But outside of Ron Paul people, very few people endorse that anyway. The idea of capitalism with state-mandated restraints or limitations is not new, and has explicitly been the model of the United States for well over a century. The big debates are around what sort of restraints are excessive or not. In this case, I think you could get pretty broad consensus around the idea that pay is supposed to be equitable. Perhaps most relevant to this discussion, you will note that the Civil Rights literally forbids pay discrimination, and the Lily Ledbetter Act (the first ever law signed by Barack Obama) significantly expanded the statute of limitations for such violations so that it could be better enforced.

In short, Ben is basically correct. Society has already agreed to that point.

 

There's huge differences between the US and UK but as a general point, do I disagree with capitalism? That's a bingo. Think you'd find a lot of people do given its rampage over here for the last 40 years.

As for salary negotiation, I'd be terrible at it.

 

I think Vivec's right, at a minimum as it relates to the US, because the statement of "the same rate for a person doing a job no matter what" isn't a held value for a large swath of jobs. I don't hear many calls to get rid of all individual salary negotiations in jobs and all circumstances where people doing the same job get different pay. That "no matter what" part of it is quite relevant.

For example, LAUSD determines salary based on level of education and years teaching. That is not paying "the same rate for a person doing a job no matter what", it's paying people different rates for the same job based on background factors. And that's a job that doesn't add in more nebulous individual negotiations which are, by definition, not going to be paying the same rate for a person doing a job no matter what because if it worked that way, there'd be no negotiation. Society feels that you can discriminate based on some factors, just not on others (and things get tricky when different factors correlate).

If society had agreed to the point that there should be the same rate for a person doing a job no matter what, then pay negotiation would be outlawed already. I think you can probably argue that some union situations would be a different example of this (depending on the pay structure they put in place), but I also think it'd be incumbent on Vivec to clarify just how "everyone should get the same pay for the same work" would arrive at a number that doesn't involve negotiation, unless this is with the premise that that negotiation is being done on behalf of all workers in some way. But there's a lot of no true scotsman type opportunities in that direction.

 

In context, we are discussing gender-based pay discrimination. That was the topic of the larger discussion (wage differentials as an expression of social bigotry) and of Jedi Ben’s specific post.

I agree there is no broad consensus across all possible job types. But the specific type of wage diffeeence being explored here is in fact illegal, so there’s a consensus on that one point.

 

So you point is that it is specifically outlawed to pay women less for being women, therefore society agrees with "equal work for equal pay, regardless of gender." And the fact that everything else about wages still leads to the same outcome (people don't get paid equally for equal work) is immaterial?

So as long as it's not being done with explicit "social bigotry" it's fine, regardless of outcome. Because that's what it really looks like you're arguing.

 

I’m arguing that laws (and especially enforcement) are imperfect, but nonetheless get at an underlying intent.

The clear underlying intent of the American legislative framework is that equal work cannot be paid differently because of gender. The rest of the debate is about what counts as “equal” (eg how much is experience/time on that job, skill, etc. a relevant “difference” in the type of work).

But none of this challenges the underlying premise that once you concede two work efforts are the same, you cannot and should not pay them differently on account of someone’s gender.

Finally, though, this isn’t a point about what should be or what I want, but what actually exists. There is, in the law, a present consensus about gender (and some other categories) that does not extend to all possible differences in employers or their work product.

 

If I’m understanding this correctly (which I may not be), I’d say, for me, “morality” doesn’t exist in a system where individuals can sell their labor at all. I’m not going to get on my high horse here, but once one entity is able to put a number on someone else’s labor, trying to be moral or pass moral judgements at all when it comes to business seems…. Weird, I guess. It’s once someone is telling you how valuable you are, EVERYTHING becomes negotiable.

See I disagree here. I don’t think what’s happening is illegal. It’s unfair, sure, but illegal…. Eh.

As it relates to men, I agree with the podcast that part of it is wage for men. Especially in a world where people are thinking that making 100k is a normal thing to be doing at all, yet alone during peak dating years in your 20s and 30s. Our society has attached men’s value to money and social status and while individuals can break away from that sordid ideology, this does not mean that society as a whole isn’t still pushing this.

So while one may say (and they’d be correct): “Hey, women making more shouldn’t change how men feel about themselves.” We know that’s not how it has worked.

 

What does it matter that there is a supposed "intent" (which is something we cannot prove) within the law when the same negative outcome is still happening? The fact is that the laws have been made to allow loopholes for the outcome said laws are supposedly against. It is against the law to fire someone for their race. Yet employers can still selectively write up employees and then fire an employee for supposedly legitimate reasons. Then the onus is on the employee to prove, somehow, that they were fired because their employer was racist. The same injustice is happening that the law is supposed to get rid of.

How does the existence of these laws prove that there is a societal agreement that the injustice should not be allowed when these laws do not actually stop the injustice but merely allow the injustice to hide in the background?

 

That is an absurd comment. Legislative history exists. We are in a common law system and judicial reasoning has weight in future interpretation. "Intent" of law is highly knowable. The clear intent here was to make gender based discrimination illegal. You are correct that the existing legal framework has not ended the practice. The clear intent to make murder illegal has also not ended this crime.

That means that, at best, enforcement needs to be stricter. At worst, it means that people have exploited loopholes to escape the meaning of the law. Some of both is probably true. I fully agree with your comment that the evidentiary standards shouldn't be the employer making an open, declared statement of bigoted intent. That is the kind of deliberate blindness that our current Supreme Court endorses but has never really been reasonable or practical. That relative minority of radicals notwithstanding (especially because they haven't gotten around to crippling this law yet), the clear weight of legal precedent, actual written laws, and decision in the United States supports the notion that the populace really did want to stop gender-based wage discrimination.

I am not sure why you resist this point so heavily.

 

But isn't unfair more important than illegal?

 

Yes, I remember the aftermath of the Financial Crisis when the mantra for not holding anyone accountable was "it was unethical, but not illegal." Actually, it was illegal. Most of it was illegal. Most of the time when people say, "unethical but not illegal," it's actually illegal, but they don't want to hold people accountable.

 

I find that a significant portion of the time people say that, it's because it's not actually illegal. Though it not infrequently then pushes legislation to be created to change that.

 

I was specifically talking about the misconception of the gender pay gap. I should’ve asked Wocky what he was specifically referring to, so my apologies.

I thought we were referring to the unfairness of people being paid differently per the gender pay gap, which I know isn’t illegal, and I also don’t know if it’s unfair. I’m not an expert on this, but I read what the experts say and while in some executive level positions women don’t make as much, the gap is so much smaller (some reports down to 8-10% )that it could be contributed to various factors that we’re not aware of. All I can say with any confidence is that a woman in a similarly placed job as a man should not make significantly more or significantly less, with respect towards experience.

But if more women are teachers and more men are electricians or construction workers (highly profitable blue-collar jobs), I don’t think that’s unfair, but mixing their salaries into a statistic is going to make it seem so.

Is unfair more important than illegal…. Sometimes. It’s dependent upon what we’re talking about. I made this statement a few years ago: I think teachers should be paid more, sure, but society as a whole clearly doesn’t… or else we would pay them more. This same society thinks is reasonable to pay men to dribble a basketball millions upon millions. It definitely feels unfair… but I don’t know if it actually is. It’s subjective.