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Reddit CEO Ellen Pao Bans Salary Negotiations To Equalize Pay For Men, Women
sabri points out that Reddit CEO Ellen Pao plans to ban salary negotiations in an attempt to equalize pay for men and women. "After losing a sex-discrimination lawsuit in Silicon Valley last week, Ellen Pao continues on her crusade to bring gender equality to the tech world, but this time with a focus on her home turf. As Reddit’s interim CEO, Pao said she wants to eliminate salary negotiations from the company’s hiring process. In her first interview since the lawsuit, Pao told with the Wall Street Journal Monday that the plan would help level the playing field. 'Men negotiate harder than women do and sometimes women get penalized when they do negotiate,' she said. 'So as part of our recruiting process we don’t negotiate with candidates. We come up with an offer that we think is fair. If you want more equity, we’ll let you swap a little bit of your cash salary for equity, but we aren’t going to reward people who are better negotiators with more compensation.'"
In more specific terms it is a known and measurable effect that men who push and demand more are praised as go getting or leader types and women making the same moves are called names, bossy at best, and penalised for asking. So women learn not to push because others punish them for it, not because of any real difference in temperament or talent.
Saying men negotiate harder than women do is about the most sexist thing I've heard lately from an executive.
All monetary transactions are like that. Yet we don't negotiate for toothpaste, gas, etc.
That's because nowadays, we (in first world countries) rarely interact with anyone that has the power to charge a different price for toothpaste and gas.
Back when the store/station workers were also the store/station owners, we did negotiate for toothpaste and gas. And this negotiation can still be seen in less "developed" countries where the person doing the selling is the person that sets the price of the items.
You're missing the part where there are actual studies that show that when women DO negotiate, they get penalized FOR doing so. Women are seen as "pushy" and "demanding" whereas a man doing the same thing is "assertive".
One of the big problems with salary negotiations is that inevitably everyone knows everyone else's paycheque. So if you find out that the guy sitting beside you doing the same job is earning way more then you just look at your paycheque as a biweekly insult.
I worked for one company that paid its programmers a perfectly round number and everyone went up at the same time. But bonuses were far more complicated with a huge factor being voting among the employees. The company literally had a rule that if anyone discussed who they were voting for then it was an instant firing. This way the outstanding employees got massive bonuses.
What was interesting was that when some people came to the end of their interviews they would begin negotiating their salary after being repeatedly told that it was not negotiable. The ones who pushed this harder and harder tended to be douchebags and this pretty much always resulted in no job offer or a withdrawn offer. They genuinely seemed pissed.
One douche summed it up as "When I heard that everyone was earning X, I just had to earn X+1 so that I could prove I was better." This was even after he was told how the bonuses worked.
The cool benefit of bonuses was that it really weeded out the crappy programmers. Bonus time would come along. The results would be published and a few guys had literally zero votes and usually they were gone in a month or less. The only programmer ever fired for talking about bonuses went around with a sob story how he needed the bonus. Literally the next day he no longer worked for the company. This is the same company that didn't fire people after one threw a laptop through a window with the intent of hitting another worker. (they worked out their issues).
http://content.time.com/time/b...
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
http://www.consad.com/content/...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/th...
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/...
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
"Well, I have to ask - did she negotiate her own salary?"
Are you kidding!?
She's talking about the minions, not the masters. Of course she negotiated her contract to the latest comma.