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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.'"
Penalising better negotiators is hardly a good thing regardless if it's trying to promote equality. Really all they're doing is saving money.
"Men negotiate harder than women do"
Let's punish people who are good at something! Diversity!
We come up with an offer that we think is fair.
That's a pretty poor negotiating strategy if you're trying to hire the talent you want rather than the gender you want.
Why wouldn't I spend the time to fly out and interview if there was a significant chance I wouldn't like whatever number it was that they considered 'fair' and I couldn't negotiate from there?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Wouldn't the ability to negotiate be a useful skill for a Reddit salesperson?
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
doesn't want labor t be able to negotiate higher pay. Their kind hates us and wants us to die. She is so Republican. She thinks we have no rights.
Really? She sounds more like a Democrat to me. I thought the mantra of the Democrat party was equality through mediocrity?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
"Men negotiate harder than women do"
So, she makes a sexist statement to defend not negotiating in order to eliminate sexism? Fail. Would she use the same claim to defend hiring men over women for positions which involve negotiating contracts?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"we aren’t going to reward people who are better negotiators with more compensation"
Then you will find that the quality of candidate you get meets your low expectations.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Don't good negotiation skills increase the value of an employee?
And... isn't this penalizing someone for having more talent? What other characteristics are we no longer going to consider? Typing speed? The ability to write a coherent sentence? Designing maintainable code?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The claim itself is 'sexist' I'm okay with it because I'm 'sexist' (whatever the hell that means I'm for it). I am against it because I'm 'sexist.' Good times.
...was last week.
I thought she was a little off, because of her battle with her previous employer. But this is ridiculous. According to the WSJ, she is personally vetting potential candidates for their attitudes on diversity, and if a candidate says "I am not concerned about diversity" or "I don't consider diversity important" then they don't get hired. And now this salary non-negotiation thing. No one of any value is going to interview there.
I suppose the ones who are already there are safe because if she starts firing, say, white men, she's going to eventually have a nasty lawsuit to deal with. But I know her type. She probably won't fire anyone; she'll just harass and hound them into quitting.
I can't believe Reddit wants this person as their CEO; she's going to destroy the company.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
CEO feels they were wronged in a prior stint, makes knee-jerk reaction to claim the moral high ground against those who claimed the prior legal action was just for personal enrichment. CEO fails to recognize that the company wouldn't have been negotiating if it wasn't necessary for them to attract and keep the talent they believed was necessary to succeed; already planning future lawsuit when board ousts CEO due to lackluster performance in 3 years after the best contributors leave for other companies that will reward them for their skills.
Likely result: overpaying for talent after getting burned by multiple candidates, losing competitive edge due to loss of exceptional contributors, and not fixing a damn thing about all the people they've already hired.
Cheapskate under the guise of equality, yeah right.
Keep in mind you get what you pay for. Do you really think you'll get competent people for free?
I don't give a tiny rat's ass about equality when it comes to MY salary, but then again I've been my own boss for years and stringy companies are one of the many reasons I chose that path.
This is a stupid policy, but irrespective of that it will be circumvented by the direct line managers before it is even put in place.
HR rule - All employees of a categorisation must be paid the same.
Hiring Manager - OK HR. Please create the new position Systems Engineer Class 7a please. This role is paid X.
HR - But you were hiring for a Systems Engineer Class 2.
Hiring Manager - Correct but we have had some scope change and require a Class 7a which is exactly the same as a Class 2 but paid $3,600 a year more and happens to look exactly like Joe Blogs here.
Please
Men are better negotiators than women? Since when? Sounds more like sticking some makeup on a decision to hardball candidates. Her original lawsuit ended up being pretty merit-less as well. She couldn't even win her unfair dismissal claim.
It's the AC that thinks all Republicans are Robot Nixon from Futurama
What was said: "something something sexism".
What she means: "We are lowering our entry salaries because we no longer need the top talent for our current set of requirements. Engineers with that level of skill and negotiating talent will go somewhere that will pay them what they are worth, and we are fine with that because we don't need that level of skill at the moment. I'll try to phrase this such that anyone who calls me on it sounds misogynistic, k thx!"
She lost the lawsuit, which if you read the facts of the case, she had only a slim chance to prevail. (She had an affair there, they had senior partners who were women, etc.) Made it look like they let her go so she sued to get even, then lost. Now she applies dumb logic to the hiring process, which some could argue shows that she is the one with the sexist POV. Reddit board should dump her if they get the chance.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
More femitechnonazi bait , but I'll bite: At my last job, I was told the salary cap for my position was X and there was nothing that could be done to circumvent it. When I threatened to leave, they made a new position for me, with a cap that was suspiciously around what I was asking for. Aside from how easy it is to get around the cap, shouldn't you award people based on their skills, not on the penis or vagina? And aren't negotiation and salesmanship highly valued skills?
> I thought the mantra of the Democrat party was equality through mediocrity?
Some Democrats do this, yes. Some Republicans believe in ~~equality~~ fuck you, I got mine. I'm not sure which is worse.
You can't suddenly make mediocre people good at what they do, so the only way for the left to enforce equality is to make the good people mediocre.
I read an autobiography some years ago by a woman who was in the Chinese Army in the 70s or 80s, and one thing that particularly stood out was the part where she wrote about how she had to deliberately shoot badly on the shooting range, because anyone who could shoot well would be punished for making the others look bad.
That's 'equality' red in tooth and claw.
I got up to the register at the grocery store and when the cashier told me the groceries cost $35.50, I told her that I would pay $20 and I was not willing to negotiate. I walked out with an empty basket.
This reminds me of a policy that was caused the closure of Computer Science labs between 2AM and 6AM. The justification went something like this;
There are women who are afraid to be on campus late at night and therefore will not access the computer labs during that time. If men have access to the labs at that time they will have an unfair advantage in completing their work. Therefore to keep access equal the labs will be closed
It lasted about two months until they got security cameras in the labs. I think that was a face saving thing as many women on campus were upset about the closure too. This is the same faculty that shut off the phones in the labs because they could be used to make long distance calls (with some work). They forgot that those same phones could be used to call security if needed. This whole idea of making everyone equally bad is just stupid.
What makes her think that gender equality of pay is something the CEO of a company should have any input on? Does she do anything that helps the company make money?
Gay scammer husband who also sued for "discrimination", and will possibly spend time in prison for fraud. Real bitch on wheels that nobody at work liked, and she felt entitled to raises/bonuses/etc... Sues company nice enough to hire her in the first place, and which bent over backwards acceding to her crazy demands prior and during the lawsuit.
She then gets a job as CEO at Reddit 'somehow' (some sort of shady nepotism), and proceeds to get revenge by basically turning the place into an SJW-only space.
If I was a white dude working at Reddit I'd be looking around for other work.
Oh, and she can't ban salary negotiation. She can only say Reddit won't budge on their first offer. The potential employee can just say "mm, OK, but X-Cotech just offered me 5% more - see ya."
Why do people keep propagating this crap? When you measure by the only reasonable metric - pay versus hours worked, on average, women get paid 97% what men do. The only reason there is a "wage gap" is because women are much more likely to take maternity leave. If you're on leave, you're not gaining experience, and don't get a raise based on experience.
Also, if you look only at women without children, you'll see similar statistics - 97 to 98% of the wage of men in the same position.
Seems like if she were truly interested in helping women, she would encourage, reward and train women to negotiate since it is a learned skill, not a gender based genetic trait. Instead, she takes the sexist position that women are inherently poor negotiators because of their gender, like it is genetic, so the only solution is to rig the selection process because women cannot be trained or encouraged to negotiate.
And you call her a 'Republican' ??
... as long as they agree with my opinion.
Sent from my ENIAC
because this is the most transparent attempt to pay people less that I've ever seen :).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
My mother!
This is just a cop out to pay people less. "Oh sorry we don't negotiate on salary, it is a gender equality thing, you'll just have to take the pay we offered you even though it is below what you should make." It's a CEO being a CEO and looking to line their own pockets. However she's just figured out how to couch it in equality rhetoric so as to mask the fact that it is just designed to screw over workers to enrich her.
It means that in order for Reddit to be competitive in hiring, they will need to make a first offer (the fixed salary+benefits) that is at or above the market average. As a jobseeker, I can just look at what they have to offer and take it or leave it. No haggling. No drama. That sounds good to me! I'm decent at negotiating, but I don't enjoy it.
For jobs where negotiating skill is NOT part of the job, the negotiation ban should make hiring decisions better correlate with merit. And generally, I want to be surrounded with people hired for relevant merits, and not just good self-promoters.
Really? She sounds more like a Democrat to me. I thought the mantra of the Democrat party was equality through mediocrity?
Are you really that stupid?
The (modern) Democratic Party is socially progressive and economically centrist, not communist. They advocate a progressive approach, aka, social security and safety net, increased taxes on the wealthy, tax-cuts for the low and middle class, increased minimum wage, modernized public education, universal health care (and many want single-payer), infrastructure investment, STEM investment, defense cuts, student loan reforms, and equal pay for equal work, among other policies...
Nothing in their platform strives for equality through mediocrity, though it does seek to balance wealth distribution to reduce economic inequality. And anyone who bothers to look at the current economic disparity will quickly realize that if we continue our current path, the richest 1% of people will eventually end up with 99% of all the wealth. That's not sustainable or a good thing and just leads to Plutocracy (seems like we are almost there already).
How about women first making sure they are as good as men?
ANd if you really want to go this path, how about caring about less pay for shorter people? For people with a weird voice? For people with disabilities? For people with an eccentric hairdo? For people who stink?
Frantic feminist freak, bah.
No thank you!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Yea men working over time at twice the rate of women, and women working part time at twice the rate of men has absolutely nothing to do with the wage gap. Or maybe the census data the shows this is just wrong.
"always." http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01...
Eventually the Republicans are going to kill us all. All they have to do is succeed once. Just once, and we're dead. By claiming labor has no right to negotiate, that hateful Republican is pushing us back to feudal times. They want feudal times. That is how they do. You're right that they hate us. This proves they want us to never make progress against their attacks. This keeps us down. With this, there's no damn point to even trying.
Negotiation is a basic skill. Everybody negotiates things great and small every day, all the time. Yes, even techies: negotiation is the core of those prized "collaboration skills."
Ergo, were Pao's rather bald assertion to be true, women would be unskillful collaborators and consequently less valuable. Not my experience.
What she's saying is incredibly condescending!
It's time for Reddit to show her the door. This policy will ensure that Reddit is unable to hire top talent.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If the ability to negotiate aggressively is not a talent required for the job, there is no reason why someone who negotiates well should get a higher salary. The same skills that make for aggressive negotiation (affinity for conflict situations for example) may make a prospective employee perform less well in team situations.
An interview should give the employer a chance to describe the job and the prospective employee a chance to describe their relevant talents. Each side should then know the market value of the applicants skills with respect to the job. If the company's offer does not match the applicants pay requirement, them should part ways. What does a negotiation accomplish?
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
"Reddit must suck already for women"
It does.
Oh! You meant the company, not the site! My bad!
It does.
It's all a plot to push down everyone's salaries. The anti-sexism public relations bit is just a happy coincidence.
A modest proposal for equal pay for title...
How about you allow them to negotiate from a base from which the position is set.
If they negotiate less high than everyone else who has negotiated, you give them the highest rate previously negotiated.
If the negotiate higher than the previous high, everyone gets a raise.
Solves the same problem, doesn't it?
You say this like it means self marketing is required for the job, rather than just the interview, this is why interviews are a bad way of hiring people! You get the most confident, not competent, the most convincing, not the most skilled, and the most fearless / the best at lies, not the most trustworthy.
Of course we do not really have a better way, but making the bias worse is not a good strategy.
Ellen Pao is either lying about her motivation by attempting to underpay her workforce, or perhaps she is just an idiot. When she says, "Men negotiate harder than women do and sometimes women get penalized when they do negotiate," she is first being sexist, then undermining her own credibility as a policy setter within the company. First off, it is blatantly and horribly sexist to make a ludicrous blanket comment like that when she claims to be striving for equality. To then admit that her underlings might penalize women for negotiating for themselves is an admission of failure.
That, or she is simply looking for an excuse to refuse to negotiate in good faith, thus making it easier to underpay everyone across the board (and miss out on valuable talent, of course). What a load of crap, which should not be unexpected considering this is Reddit we are discussing, I guess.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
WTF is 'progressive'? Do you mean as in the 'Progressive era' when people like Magaret Sanger were promoting eugenics?
Is this because woman are unable to negotiate as hard? Because they are unwilling to? Because they are too stupid to? What is her explanation? Is it hormonal? Does it have to do with having different body mass distribution? Inquiring minds want to know.
If it's to their advantage to negotiate hard and men and women are indistinguishable professionally, women obviously are just as able to negotiate hard (and, given negotiations I've been in, I have no reason to doubt they are not just as capable at this art).
Pao is really insulting women by saying this.
This really opens a Pandora's box. If she thinks women, by virtue of being female, are not as good at this important aspect of professional life, one wonders what other parts of their professional lives women are not as good at. She should give us a complete list - who knows what might be on it.
I wonder what would happen if she ran a purchasing organization or a sales organization. Usually the willingness and capability to negotiate effectively (and, therefore, hard) are basic job requirements for these positions. Would she refuse to hire women because, as she has stated, they are not as good at negotiating hard (ouch, there's a sexual discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen)? Would she refuse to negotiate salary and lose the very people who would negotiate effectively on behalf of her company? In reality, negotiation is always a part of almost any senior job -- you have to negotiate for headcount, resources, approval for projects, even convincing a customer that they don't need something is "negotiating".
Perhaps she has realized that she (the individual, not the gender) is not good at negotiating and this is a convenient way to avoid acknowledging this reality.
Perhaps she doesn't realize that no party to a successful negotiation goes away unhappy - does she lack confidence in herself and her own staff being able to negotiate successfully?
If Reddit has a candidate they really want and offers them $180K and they get an offer from another company for $200K (assuming similar fringe benefits and option valuations), how is it good for the company to walk away from the candidate instead of negotiate? Both $180K and $200K may be "fair" offers. Just because her company didn't happen to guess precisely what the FMV was for the person will she really stubbornly refuse to negotiate and start over from ground zero in trying to fill the position (which will likely cost tens of thousands of dollars in staff time and more tens of thousands of dollars in delay in filling the opening)?
I also assume that if the board offers, unwisely, to keep her on as permanent CEO and she wants a better offer than they gave her, she will understand when she when the board says "sorry, we don't negotiate and since you don't appear happy with our offer and we want a CEO who is happy with their situation, we retract the offer -- don't let the door hit your ass on the way out".
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Indeed Sweet Meteor of Death is leading in the straw polls
https://twitter.com/smod2016
Not sure about his domestic policy but his foreign policy is top notch.
"Take it or leave it" is a negotiating tactic. She's perfectly within her rights to negotiate in this manner. However, if she attempts to as much as encourage any other company to follow her lead on this, it would immediately become a collusion against employees and an illegal anti-competitive tactic. Oh, and, btw, do the employees actually get to collect that salary? Or do they have to spend it "at the company store"?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
since men are better at standing to pee.
How does this work? Does Reddit give the same offer to all employees for a given job title? If so, and they make a single offer better than the market initial offer, they'll be paying non-negotiators more than they have to, and losing the best negotiators. This is likely to be costly.
If they make the same offers they made before this policy, they'll lose negotiators to other companies. If negotiation is correlated with skill this is a loss; otherwise, it could be a loss or a win.
If they make an individualized offer to each employee, negotiation will happen anyway; it'll just happen without explicit haggling. Candidates will try to signal that they'd require a lot to accept, in order to get a higher offer. I'd bet that candidates who would negotiate are probably better at that kind of signaling.
Because this is the epitome of a communism? I really have no idea what to attribute her stupid statement to, so picked an easy target. All offense is intended at her, not you.
What she just did is claimed that everyone magically has the same abilities, experiences, and knowledge to draw from. That is the only possible way to claim that there is no reason to ever negotiate salaries. A side effect of this will be that nobody will want to work for her, except out of desperation of course. What she will be able to hire are 40 hour a week clock watchers who stick to their job profile at their own pace. Again, that is the only type of person that wants to work for a non-negotiated salary. Factory workers.
Let me go further and state that this is where the whole "everyone should get equal money" argument falls down on it's face. On average women make the same or more money PER HOUR WORKED as a man for the same job. The statistics tossed around consider all people working the same amount of hours and the same amount of work. The statistics also neglect the fact that some jobs which are considered high risk simply lack interest by females, so for this equal pay thing to work all jobs must be paid an identical wage. That is right, a clerk in the army should make the same pay as a Navy Seal, and a PHD should make the same wage as the Walmart clerk.
In short words, I am betting this is another fabrication.. just like her claim that she was passed over for discriminatory reasons. Everything I read from this person is venomous trash, and it's really sad that the paid for media treats her opinion as more valid than countering opinions from well known rational feminists Karen Straughan. Pao is as the KGB used to say, nothing more than a useful idiot (I'll let you go figure out the meaning of that, it's a fun journey).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
If she had said women are better negotiators, critics would say she's a female supremacist.
But she said -- not she, actually, this isn't anecdotal, there is evidence for this difference -- that women are not as good at negotiating, so you, a critic, say it's sexist.
It doesn't matter what a feminist says; critics will always not like it.
Where did she get that idea? It doesn't take testosterone to negotiate. She's a victim of her own sexism.
Since this is a bit buried and you seem genuinely inquisitive I repost -
paper title -
Social incentives for gender dfferences in the propensity to initiate negotiations: Sometimes it does hurt to ask
Abstract -
Four experiments show that gender differences in the propensity to initiate negotiations may be explained by differential treat-ment of men and women when they attempt to negotiate. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants evaluated written accounts of candidates who did or did not initiate negotiations for higher compensation. Evaluators penalized female candidates more than male candidates for initiating negotiations. In Experiment 3, participants evaluated videotapes of candidates who accepted compensation offers or initiated negotiations. Male evaluators penalized female candidates more than male candidates for initiating negotiations; female evaluators penalized all candidates for initiating negotiations. Perceptions of niceness and demandingness explained reistance to female negotiators. In Experiment 4, participants adopted the candidate’s perspective and assessed whether to initiate negotiations in same scenario used in Experiment 3. With male evaluators, women were less inclined than men to negotiate, and nervousness explained this effect. There was no gender difference when evaluator was female.
link
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/cfawis/bowles.pdf
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).
There was a Planet Money story about this.
A company decided to make everyone's salary open knowledge, posted on the wall for everyone to see.
This would better solve gender pay equity than Pao's no-negotiation strategy. It puts more pressure on management to limit pay decisions to something defensable, prevents employees from pitting against each other for pay and minimizes management's ability to overpay or underpay. Employees know where they stand relative to other employees (and what they may need to do to make more). It motivates better paid employees to show they're worth it and makes it harder for well-paid employees to goldbrick.
The problem with no-negotiation is that for any given hire there are a finite number of employees available to take the job and the best candidate is likely to either be a little better or a little worse than average. Without the ability to negotiate, the better candidates will be less inclined to take the job because it only offers average pay and the below average ones will be more likely to take the job because it pays above what they're worth. You'll end up trending towards below average talent for more than they're worth.
Transparency allows for positioned to be negotiated for and if a given hire has an above average skillset and experience, you can agree to pay them more and won't have to worry about justifying it. The same is true the other way around -- it's justifiable to pay below average, too when you have legitimate reasons of skill or experience.
Pao's strategy is right out of the socialist playbook -- arbitrary price controls, and it destroys the free market's ability to seek efficient pricing. This isn't a political complaint, but an economic one. Most current job markets with "secret" pay agreements now are also bad because they create an imbalance between seller and buyer by eliminating pricing information.
It's also pretty sexist because it attributes a behavioral attribute to gender. I'm pretty sure Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, and other Fortune 500 CEOs don't have a negotiating weakness.
sore loser
Yes, but then the women she hires will sue when they don't make partner (or VP or whatever).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Hmm.. That's a possibility, but I'm not clear who she would sue at a bankrupt company with no remaining assets.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Men negotiate harder than women do
This is why women don't get paid as much or given the same opportunities.
Because as YOU said Ellen... Men negotiate harder than women do.
After all what if the job was negotiating deals for your corp? According to Ellen we shouldn't hire women for that position.
Now get me a fucking beer...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Pro tip: never accept the first offer......companies can always offer more.
Even better tip: While you are still in college take the negotiations class. A good negotiations class that covers the art (psychology, etc) and science (game theory, etc) over a quarter/semester timeframe (readings, homework, in-class negotiation practice emphasizing recent reading/lecture topics -- i.e. applying different negotiating strategies) is incredibly valuable and a hell of a lot of fun when done right.
How about if women just grow some balls and learn how to negotiate so we don't have to "protect" them -- that only perpetuates the stereotype of the helpless woman, which you'd think real feminists would be against. Women can be every bit as aggressive and vicious as men; I can't see any reason why they would have a "natural" disadvantage in negotiation. It not like having a deep bass voice makes you a better negotiator, is it? Personally, I'd do better negotiating via email, perhaps everyone should do that to eliminate any gender discrepancies.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It may work out for candidates, though. Right now the company tends to start low and let the candidate name a higher figure, then go back and forth ending up somewhere in the middle. If their initial offer's too low the candidate will just name something higher, and unless the candidate's really cocky the company stands a good chance of getting them for less than they were willing to offer. With no negotiation the company knows there may well be competing offers out there so if they make their offer too low the candidate, knowing they can't negotiate, will probably walk away. Where before the company had an incentive to low-ball the offer and negotiate up, now they have an incentive to offer the most they'd be willing to pay this candidate to minimize the chance of losing the candidate to a competing offer.
NB: this is also why companies try to get the candidate to give an expected salary first, knowing that that sets an upper limit and the candidate is caught between asking for as much as possible and keeping the salary down so the company doesn't decide it's more than they'll consider.
I'd rather vendors worked the same way, give me their best price and I'll tell them whether it's within my budget or not. But then I'm a tech, not a salesman, I prefer to minimize the rigamarole so I can get back to doing productive work.
There are of course exceptions. In some cases, increasing the salary takes an act of Congress. Or at least an act of the state legislature. In a very large company or a deep government bureaucracy such as a university system consisting of several universities, the board may have instituted a freeze and the person hiring you is six levels of management away from that decision. It's helpful to have a friend on the inside who can give you a hint as to how flexible budgets are that year. Otherwise, at least read up on the company to see how their cash position is and how budgets look that year.
You might not get anything, but it doesn't hurt to ask. When the salary is set by bureaucracy, there is still usually some room....or there might be other benefits like an extra day off.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
MightyMartian, somewhat above-average Earthman here.
I think the whole situation is better characterized as doing what women in the U.S. often do, make themselves miserable. Underneath her statement is possibly a feeling that she doesn't like talking with men. (If you want to meet women who are, in general, much happier, go to Brazil.)
No negotiating? That's crazy! Negotiating is just talking. When there is good communication, there will be better decisions. To give one small example, maybe there is a clerical error in the human resources department that makes the person being interviewed seem less valuable to the company than he or she really is.
If someone makes exaggerated claims, that person is dishonest. Don't hire a dishonest person. If someone asks for 10% more pay than offered, ask why, and investigate any information that supports the request.
Ellen Pao appears to be another Carly Fiorina. (Look at that terrible photo of Ms. Fiorina.) To me, Ellen Pao seems to lack social sophistication.
I find the assertion by this CEO that women are going to be aided by this because they are somehow not as effective as negotiators to be really offensive.
If your favorite social theory is being tested on the masses, when things good, it is because of your social theory and when things go bad they are going as good as they could have gone in all possible worlds.
That's why those who object to your social theory don't need to be consulted for their consent prior to your experiment being run on them. Indeed, if they strenuously object (say, because an aspect of your social theory is that "sexual pressure ushers, guides or shepherds the process of sexual awakening" in your prison system), their extremism is a clear and present danger to the stability of society and it is only reasonable to preemptively treat their psychological disorder, with or without their consent.
Seastead this.
I feel all kinds of fuck her.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
what is more, the company is going to have a hard time holding on to and obtaining top tier talent if they tell everyone "we don't negotiate"... so if I find a job offer from another company that will negotiate and offers a better rate... and then I go back to my boss and say "can I get a raise because your competitor will pay me more"... you'll say "we don't negotiate with terrorists"... I mean employees.
Poe is at best a troll. And her idiocy is increasingly becoming an embarrassing laughing stock amongst her peers... male and female.
What a clown.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
'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.
Except the executive positions...
That makes no sense at all. If I can't negotiate my own salary as part of the hiring process I don't want to work for you. Plain and simple. This crap isn't about leveling the playing field between men and women. It's about a company saying "this is what we'll pay, and it's non-negotiable".
Hopefully Reddit fires Ellen soon. This woman is delusional.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Holy shit, someone had an outbreak of common sense. What's the containment protocol for this? Do we nuke the site from orbit?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
So when women duplicate the personality traits of males they become feminazis?
So because of a feminist bitch, someone who is female now receive the same salary as me, just because she has the same qualifications but not necessarily better skills than me? Reddit probably is having financial issues or the guy is really pissed after losing a court case, :p who would want to work for a place where such practice is current?
Great, next up: we aren’t going to reward people who are smarter with more compensation ! Or those who work harder, or have more responsibility & risk...
Men negotiate harder than women do
You see, that's the problem right there: Stereotypes.
Some people negotiate harder than other people. Maybe statistically speaking, men fall more often into group 1 and women more often into group 2. You're trying to tell me that's the only factor? I'm quite sure introverts fall more often into group 2 while extroverts fall more often into group 1. Maybe redheads fall more often into group 1, or people born in August. Maybe tall people. Probably younger people fall more often into group 2. People shortly after a divorce, people with pets, people growing up with older siblings...
It's so crazy that we focus on the sex thing when there are one thousand differences between person A and person B, most of which were not theirs choice, many of which are equally genetic.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If the candidate is someone they really need, they will negotiate.
And the reasoning behind it is pretty sexist. Hopefully it's just sour grapes from the trial and the real reason is less, um, ridiculous. I can tell you that my wife has negotiated with employers for jobs, salaries and raises - and is better at it than me. But then, I'm not a Ponzi-scheming waste of teeth and hair.
I guess this will pre-screen the candidates for people that really want to work at Reddit for whatever reason.
She lost the (bias claiming) law suit against the investing VC firm. This would give her leverage to demand hush money.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
But, why would anyone who actually had money offer hush money? What am I missing?
Once it's clear that Reddit is toast, the creditors own it and recover pennies on the dollar by selling the coffee machines. As an interim CEO, it's unlikely she has a golden parachute (although, I would respect her more if she had figured out how to negotiate a temp job w/a golden parachute -- but she asserts that women are not good at hard negotiations so I am unclear how that would happen).
I suppose one scenario is that Reddit sells for pennies on the dollar to a Yahoo! et al. However, the board will make that call and, as interim CEO, she probably gets 30 days notice and is out and done.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
So you will get penalised for this. Here to my middle finger to you. It also does not hurt I am having a profit. They are not doing me a fucking favor hiring me, it is a contact negotiation. If people are assholes negotiating a contract, I will go somewhere else. Business is business.
Secret pay agreements create an imbalance of power between employers and employees because they eliminate pricing transparency and allow for non-rational pay inequity, such as racial, gender or merely office politics reasons.
There's no reason people need to be paid the *same* -- different people bring different skills and experience to the table as well as being hired in different points in time when skills may have been more or less in demand.
Two people may do the same job and make different wages, but they're not the same person, either. With transparency, the onus shifts to *management* to justify why people are paid differently, and management has to be cognizant of pay differences being transparent -- they can't deviate significantly without real reasons.
Do you think there's no scheming/bitterness/morale problems *now* relative to pay? Making it secret is much worse.
It's been a while since I was in your salary bracket, but I might have hired you simply for having the balls to do something like that, as long as everything else I was looking for was there.
You somehow think your little rant is relevant?
Reminder: the existence of misandry doesn't disprove or render irrelevant misogyny.
Before :
Interview with a woman :
- Pay is X
- Ok (final pay : X)
Interview with a man :
- Pay is X
- I want 20% more
- I give you 10%
- Ok (final pay : X + 10%)
After :
Interview with a woman :
- Pay is X
- Ok (final pay : X)
Interview with a man, case 1 :
- Pay is X, no negotiation
- Ok (final pay : X)
Interview with a man, case 2 :
- Pay is X, no negotiation
- I quit
So yes, equality : take the lowest salary and make it the standard. As for men or women with good negotiation skills, they will simply look elsewhere.
So rather than empower women by making them better negotiators in the business world, Ellen Pao is trying to take the process of negotiating out of the business world. I'm sure that will end well.
Unless negotiation skills are relevant to the job then it's good (if idealistic) to not determine salary based upon that skill.
However Ellen Pao's reasoning is to make women and men equal... Please notice my wording here, not to treat men and women equally but to make them equal, an attempt to "correct" a statistical bias.
This is bad reasoning: if you take this concept and apply it more broadly it starts to look more absurd. There are large statistical differences between men and women in too many areas to count (in terms of both advantages and weaknesses), those statistics (and stereotypes) should not lead to discrimination when women and men are treated equally (we want to be treated based on our individual ability after all). However handicapping everyone to force equality is like forcing all Olympic athletes to not perform better than the average of whichever gender is statistically weaker... there would be little point in having an olympics other than to prove you can perform at the average of the weaker half of the population (but not better! that would be unequal).
Reddit is probably going to get quite a bit of PR for this - they're also not going to be employing many people who have strong negotiating skills. In the short term they get to resonate a message with their audience, in the long term they lose a lot of competitiveness, especially in their sales and procurement departments.
Not a tradeoff I would be willing to make if I was concerned about the long term viability of my business.
It's well known that men and women tend to value different things: men tend to go for higher base pay, ergo they tend to negotiate better for it, whereas women tend to go for better work-life balance benefits such as flex time or whatever. By freeing up money by reducing the rates by preventing negotiation, this translates to being against men's interests and allows the company more money for the sort of things women want.
To be clear, Pao is trying to kowtow to women by sticking a thumb in the eye of men. THAT is how this all shakes out in the end, plus any money isn't use for women's benefit goes right into the company's profits.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
Reddit CEO Ellen Pao Bans Salary Negotiations To [-BS-]Equalize Pay For Men, Women[-/BS-] Facilitate Hiring Cheaper Help
Fixed it.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
And yet encouraging hard negotiations when hiring someone is going to see those kinds of people get to the to of the list.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Why pay your employee more for negotiation skills they do not need in their daily job?
There are many factors that determine pay, not just education level.
My understanding is: women do not equal pay for equal work - they already have that, that has been the law for 50 years, or more. Women want equal pay for so-called "compatible" work.
BTW: I have degrees in math, comp sci, and business. I have worked right next to a woman with nothing more than high school, and she got twice my salary. Where is my "equal pay for compatible work?"
Doing away with negotiations might make sense if you were hiring programmers, but what about executive level staff? The C-suite people need to negotiate on behalf of the business. They need to go to vendors, clients, suppliers, etc. and argue their case. You might save a bit of money here and there but you're also losing people who are really good at negotiatingâ"I bet that the people who are good at negotiating would be negotiating themselves better salaries at other firms for more than Reddit is handing out.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
"The year was 2081 and everyone was finally equal."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
Research about women's poorer negotiation skills or underpayment is based on hard salary dollars and almost always does not include the value of benefits and job characteristics. For example, before the new health law, more women would prefer and accept jobs that provide better health plans at a trade-off of a lower salary, while more men would forego health benefits for higher pay. The compensation value to the employer is identical, but the reported pay of men is higher. Women as a group negotiate or choose jobs with more flex-time, less travel, less overtime, less weekend work and more on the job safety than men. This has been studied and documented by the US DOL and many researchers. Many promoting the idea of women's lower wages as compared to men fail to mention and include the value of non-W2, non-1099, job benefits and characteristics. Whenever there is a number showing the ratio of women to men's pay, it is always an inter-employer, inter-industry number. Similar job classifications at different industries and different employers have a different ratio of benefits and job characteristic value to salary. What has been attributed to poor salary negotiating skills of women is really women over time in the workforce, negotiating non-salary benefits or self-selecting into jobs or industries with higher amounts of non-salary benefits. Because the large scale pay differential between men and women is always across industries or firms, just about all pay discrimination lawsuits against an individual firm employer, whether it be a Wal-Mart or a Kleiner, fails in the court.
Because she is banning negotiations before employment. Staff are, by definition, already employed.
Wait.
So she is saying Woman aren't as good as men at negotiating? I thought the point here was that Women are equal to men.
Which is it? Are women equal to men, or aren't they?
She is also saying that this supposedly margin of pay difference that supposedly proves we are still a sexist society is caused by women negotiating with less skill than men. So she is blaming women for their own low salaries and she is removing the blame on sexism.
So that means we have reached equality and women are be treated equally to men because a man with poor negotiating skills gets paid less too.
Did I miss anything here?
Reddit: "Okay, we're selling for $6 Billion."
Me: "Look, I'll offer you .... $100,000 because your EBITDA seems vastly over-inflated.
Reddit: "Seems like a good deal. We'll take it."
*** Don't be dull.***
Here is an idea. Reddit should just publish their salaries. That way both men and women know what they should expect to be offered.
Other than that, company makes offer, and I tell them I either don't accept it (because I am already earning more than that, or enough to not bother moving), and company makes me a higher offer anyway, or negotiations just happen on the sly, you know, off the record.
If she burns down Reddit, she gets to make a public argument that the creditors made her a target because she took on a cause. She gets to drag VC firm's name through the mud of public opinion and put them in jeopardy of public hysteria outrage (divestment campaigns, etc.) In order to avoid this jeopardy, she hopes the firm will offer her a cushy contract (ie, hush money) in which they severely overpay for some of her property, services, etc. in exchange for her declaring that "things have changed a lot since she was made a target" or something to that effect.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
She said herself women can't negotiate as good as men.
Stop forcing equality
There is no equality, forcing equality turns people into average sheep following a political correct groupthink collectivism mentality.
From ancient man, to now men are the bread winners, the hunters, the protectors, its in our DNA to compete, fight, negotiate, step on competition, win at all costs.
It is natural and comes easy. Women are better nurturers, better at records, accounting, teaching, its natural from ancient woman to now its in the DNA.
Its why men and women don't compete in sports, men bones are denser, more solid frames, their bone density is much much stronger than us. We learn that in basic anatomy.
A better negotiator should be rewarded. I negotiated my salary, I get paid more than my coworkers, but I work harder to prove worthy, and have had 3 promotions in 2 years from that ambition.
You destroy negotiations, and force equal pay then you kill ambition. If I got paid same as coworkers I wouldn't fight to beat them to top, we'd all just do minimum work required to get paid and not give a fuck.
Allow competition among workers, if women can't keep up then its not the man's fault. Don't punish men for being naturally better in certain fields.
Keep pissing off men you will get an Ayn Rand fucked up scenario where men say OK we quit, go have fun... Then the company will fall apart and destroy itself.
I see that one post has tackled the main gist of Ellen Pao's ban on Salary Negotiations. Though some have touched on it in one way or another. It seems to me that gorilla in the room was only glanced at, and reluctantly so. This seems more of a lashing out by Pao due to her loss of her law suit. The salary inequality between men and women is a myth when you take away all the extraneous stuff. Taking away the ability of a potential employee to negotiate their salary in the name of gender equality and then saying that it is because "men negotiate harder". I'm detecting a bit of misandry in her thought.
Specks
Batteries not included
... Reddit could just offer negotiation skills classes to all candidates, thus improving the lot of all, instead of reducing the playing field to the lowest common denominator.
As long as salaries are considered confidential there will be inequality in compensation. The fact that employees feel that we will be the ones who have to justify our salary to other employees (in the case where we make more for the same (in name) position) is a cultural issue. I think that the employer should have to be prepared to justify why they may pay one individual more than another for a similar job. If one person performs better, let them be the ones to say so. Once the stigma of salary sharing is gone, we'll be much closer to pay equality.
Ellen Pao cannot pee standing up, so she ripped all the urinals out of the men's bathroom and made the ceilings five feet high so you must sit down to piss. This is a huge blow to feminism. no wonder she lost her case; she is an imbecile.
The people doing the hiring and promoting aren't the ones sitting around calling coworkers bitches.