Apple, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft Sign White House Pledge For Equal Pay (fortune.com)

In honor of Women's Equality Day, an anonymous reader shares with us a festive report from Fortune: More than two months after the White House first announced its Equal Pay Pledge for the private sector, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and other major industry players have signed on. By taking the pledge, which was first introduced at the United State of Women Summit in June of this year, companies promise to help close the national gender pay gap, conduct annual, company-wide pay analyses, and review hiring and promotion practices. The new signees were announced in a White House statement on Friday -- which also happens to be Women's Equality Day, the anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Apple, which announced earlier this year that it has no pay gap, released a statement promising to dig even deeper into compensation. "We're now analyzing the salaries, bonuses, and annual stock grants of all our employees worldwide. If a gap exists, we'll address it," the company said in a statement. Twenty-nine companies signed the pledge on Friday, bringing the total number of signatories to 57. The pledge is part of a $50-million, White House-led initiative to expand opportunities for and improve the lives of women and girls. The consortium members issued a statement via Whitehouse.gov's press release: "The Employers for Pay Equity consortium is comprised of companies that understand the importance of diversity and inclusion, including ensuring that all individuals are compensated equitably for equal work and experience and have an equal opportunity to contribute and advance in the workplace. We are committed to collaborating to eliminate the national pay and leadership gaps for women and ethic minorities. Toward that end, we have come together to share best practices in compensation, hiring, promotion, and career development as well as develop strategies to support other companies' efforts in this regard. By doing so, we believe we can have a positive effect on our workforces that, in turn, makes our companies stronger and delivers positive economic impact." The consortium members include: Accenture, Airbnb, BCG, Care.com, CEB, Cisco, Deloitte, Dow, Expedia, EY, Glassdoor, GoDaddy, Jet.com, L'Oreal USA, Mercer, PepsiCo, Pinterest, Rebecca Minkoff, Salesforce, Spotify, Staples, Stella McCartney, and Visa.

Comments

Re:There is no gender gap it's b.s.

[Crashmarik]

http://www.wsj.com/articles/th...

Yawn

Re:You forget that

[x0ra]

Sure... higher likelihood of death on the job, higher dropout rates, higher homelessness rates, higher legal obligation, higher deathtoll in wars, higher suicide rates, higher homicide rates, higher sentencing rates, less cancer research funding rates, smaller custody rates, higher victimization rates.

Enough ?

Re:You forget that

[AmiMoJo]

There are some real issues for men, no doubt. Homelessness, drop out rates, longer sentences... But I'll address a couple of the others you mentioned because they aren't quite as simple as they seems.

Higher suicide rate is actually more like a higher success at suicide rate. Women tend to try cutting and poison, where as men tend to use guns (in the US) or jumping which are more effective. The actual attempt rate is similar, it's just that men more often succeed because they choose more effective methods that don't leave time for medical intervention.

Which is not to say I'm unsympathetic, but the issue isn't the disparity, it's the things that drive people to suicide.

As for the custody issue, I looked into the stats carefully on this one. The disparity goes away when you only consider times that the couple went to court, which is less than 1% of cases. Most of the time an agreement is reached outside of court, and in those cases when the man requests custody they have about the same rate of success as women. The disparity in the overall numbers come from the fact that men simply request it less.

Again, I'm not unsympathetic to cases where there is genuine injustice. What I'm saying is that it's easy to see individual cases, and see the headline number, and think there is a vast "feminist conspiracy" or something.

It's really important to properly understand the problem if we want to fix it.

Re:You forget that

[guruevi]

Sorry, but you must be looking at different stats:

Contested cases where the Custodial Father (meaning the child currently lives with the father) retains custody: 17%
Contested cases where the Custodial Mother retains custody: 83%

The only articles I can find that say otherwise are ALL pointing to the same HuffPo article (not even a scholarly backed piece).

The "majority" of parents does indeed reach an agreement out of court, a little over 50% (Macooby & Mnookin) reaches a so-called uncontested agreement, that means at least 49% is contested. In SJW-world this would mean any contested cases should automatically go to the father right? Equality in numbers and all.

In a study of 705 cases, an uncontested request for maternal physical custody was made in 500 cases. The outcome matched the request for maternal custody in nearly 90% of such cases. In contrast, paternal physical custody was awarded in only 75% of the 47 cases in which there was an uncontested request for sole paternal physical custody. - So EVEN in uncontested cases (the mother agrees), the courts will 25% of the time override the parents' wishes and still grant the mother custody.

There are some 40,000 disputed custody cases every year which are decided by family court judges. These judges will listen to recommendations from court welfare officers who visit the family and write 35,000 reports every year. The welfare officers work in the probation service which deals with mostly male criminals, this makes it difficult to see fathers in a positive light. The result is that family courts award mothers sole custody in 71% of cases and fathers sole custody in 7% of all cases, joint custody is awarded in the remaining 21% of cases. Many fathers report giving up an expensive custody fight for their children after advice from lawyers who say they can't win. It is very common for mothers during custody battles to receive state funded legal aid. A custody battle is therefore a very unequal war of attrition. Many fathers report that efforts to have contact with their children are blocked by mothers, and the courts will not enforce the right of children to have contact with their fathers.