After Iceland and Germany, Now France Declares War on the Gender Wage Gap (fastcompany.com)

France says it wants to make good on at least one-third of its motto of "liberte, egalite, and fraternite," by ensuring pay equality. From a report: The French government announced it is devising a "tough, concrete" plan to make the gender pay gap as much a thing of the past as Madame DeFarge's knitting habit. Per the Associated Press, France's plan for pay equity is still a work in progress. However, legislators may require companies to release the average salaries of their male and female employees and analyze them for disparities.

Comments

Fair Comparison

[dentree4]

As long as they release salaries *and* hours worked for a fair comparison, I'm ok with this.

Re:Fair Comparison

[erapert]

They must go further and quantify and release data about actual productivity.
It should go without saying that age, experience, and skill set stats must also be included.
And while we're at it, we should also make a note to release all info about who knows who and for how long as well as stats on who has been on which project for how long.
Y'know, now that I think about, it's probably also crucial to get some figures on who lives in which neighborhood because the cost of living and thus also salaries varies by region.


What if we just cut to the chase and straight up mandate how much companies must pay their workers?
Surely that won't drive jobs away... because we'll all be so multi-cultural and anti-sexists that our utopia will be the only place that anyone will ever want to work!

Re:Fair Comparison

[DaveV1.0]

And, they must go even further and release data about employees pursuing raises and promotions, actual histories of changing jobs for better pay or positions, being willing and actually doing less desirable jobs for better pay (night shifts, rotating shifts, etc) . And, then correlate this information across entire employee careers to quantify the exact effect each of these things have on compensation.

Re: Fair Comparison

[TWX]

There cannot be perfect equality, but when one aggregates a huge sample, the statistical centers for each gender group should be roughly the same, because with a large enough sample, individual deviations for things like actual hours worked and the strengths and weaknesses for particular work-related skills should even-out. Of course there will be outliers, both people earning more and people earning less, and both types will have deserved and undeserved reasons, but for the vast majority it should statistically be about the same.

It's possible that there are careers that would favor one gender over another, but those are mostly lower-skilled jobs that require brute strength. Even a lot of low-skill jobs should be roughly at parity, because there are a lot of labor-saving devices that any able-bodied individual can use. A worker in an automotive assembly plant attaching doors to car bodies uses a gantry to pick up, move, and position the door, and probably uses a machine to drive-in and torque the fasteners. Just about anyone able-bodied that has reached adolescence could operate that machine, there is no need for greater strength or dexterity. Neither gender really has any advantage over the other in this scenario, so there should be no reason to pay either gender more than the other for this sort of work.

Re:Fair Comparison

[umghhh]

This goes a bit further: you normalize for position, experience and company (the same job and skills set but different companies and you may have different wage etc) and you get at proper result. In a study after study this has been around 2% in Western Europe. So you go and fix that and I am ok with that. The problem is that most of the warriors for a better future are fighting to fix difference that is allegedly about 20% (socialists in Germany claimed 17% last year). This has no relationship to reality but in a world where for claiming reality you get James Damored you should not expect justice. How current injustice against men fixes previous injustice against women I am still waiting to see.

Re:Fair Comparison

[Richard_at_work]

There are multiple issues which are regularly conflated in these discussions, and often some of those issues are almost deliberately hidden in order to push the discussion in one particular direct (that direction being that any disparity is bad).

The UK just forced the top 500 companies to release this sort of information, and at a glance some of them are really bad - EasyJet (a budget airline) has a gap of over 50%, or in other words the average difference between wages paid to women is 50% that of wages paid to men. Except that men tend to be employed in the company as pilots, and women as cabin crew, which have massive differences - and it remains to be proven if that is a company culture issue or not (my guess is, not, as many airline pilots are ex-military pilots, and we are only just seeing an improvement in female military pilots, so perhaps this will resolve itself in due course).

Then you have the issue of the career gap, where women take time off to have children and return to work a year behind their male counterparts in experience, exposure etc. A very difficult one to solve - do you gift those women a year, do you hold back men for a year, what?

And yes, there are the outright legitimate arguments about women simply being paid less because they are women, and there are also the kinda legitimate arguments about different negotiating styles between sexes being an issue (but then that all depends on the job - my wife is a doctor, and a quick straw poll of her friends suggests she can demand a higher day rate as a locum precisely because she is female - more women want a female doctor for female issues, which is a good negotiating area for the locum).

Solving the legitimate issues doesn't however solve all the issues, but no one has worked out how to solve those ones without penalising companies and male workers (but some wouldn't see an issue with that at all).

Just publishing the wage gap is meaningless flame bait without a lot more information around that gap.

Re: Fair Comparison

[I'm New Around Here]

There cannot be perfect equality, but when one aggregates a huge sample, the statistical centers for each gender group should be roughly the same,

Why?

because with a large enough sample, individual deviations for things like actual hours worked and the strengths and weaknesses for particular work-related skills should even-out.

Except they don't. Particular groups work longer hours than others, take less vacation time and fewer sick days, work in less pleasant environments or more dangerous conditions. Particular groups also push more for raises or change jobs for increased pay.

If those groups don't represent men and women equally, their "statistical centers" would be skewed apart.

Re:Fair Comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Summary of your position: if men make more, it's obvious that it's deserved, and no evidence is needed to support it. But if women insist on equity, it has to be carefully justified.

Re:Fair Comparison

[polar red]

>Having to hire women instead of men if qualifications are equal?
BS. this is about wage. There is no mention of having to hire women.

Re:Fair Comparison

[epyT-R]

Whoever makes the claim should make the case. All of this "listen and believe" crap we get is why fewer and fewer take the accusations at face value.

Re: Fair Comparison

[epyT-R]

There cannot be perfect equality, but when one aggregates a huge sample, the statistical centers for each gender group should be roughly the same, because with a large enough sample, individual deviations for things like actual hours worked and the strengths and weaknesses for particular work-related skills should even-out.

This is a false assumption because it assumes that men and women are essentially the same minus some plumbing. This couldn't be further from the truth. Sex is an example of diversity so it puzzles me why progressives expect equal outcome. Trying to force it is illiberal and immoral. It demonizes men and infantilizes women.

It's possible that there are careers that would favor one gender over another, but those are mostly lower-skilled jobs that require brute strength. Even a lot of low-skill jobs should be roughly at parity, because there are a lot of labor-saving devices that any able-bodied individual can use.

There are fundamental biological differences at work. It's not just plumbing and muscles. The neurology and endocrinology is different too, and that affects temperament and imperatives which in turn affect life choices and priorities.

Neither gender really has any advantage over the other in this scenario, so there should be no reason to pay either gender more than the other for this sort of work.

From this I can tell you've never worked a day in a factory of any sort.

Re: Fair Comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither gender really has any advantage over the other in this scenario, so there should be no reason to pay either gender more than the other for this sort of work.

Okay ... let's say that there's some innate skill that determines one's ability to use machines to assemble a car: a combination of motor skill, spatial reasoning, and attention to detail. Call it skill X. Let's assume that there's some natural person-to-person variation in X, and further assume that the distribution of X is the same for both men and women.

Now, let's say that women prefer to spend a larger fraction of their time parenting than men do. Now the absolute amount of X among women is the same as that for men - but the availability of X is lower among women than among men. If an automobile factory hires and promotes people on the basis of X, they will end up with more men, or paying men more, or some combination thereof.

If you then require that the factory pays men and women equally, it will be paying women more per unit X: that is, a woman will earn more than an equally-skilled man. The net effect is a transfer of wealth from men to women.

To illustrate the point, consider what would happen if we adopted a converse policy: subsidise men acting as parents, by increasing government payouts to single fathers, and allocating custody in divorce cases to the father by default and requiring the mother to pay punitive child support ... which has a knock-on effect by giving husbands more leverage to force their wives to enter the workforce. This would enhance equality: more women would work, including those with high X, so numbers and wages in our hypothetical automobile factory would approach parity. But the net effect would be a transfer of wealth from women to men, so this option doesn't get mentioned: feminists want any change to advantage women, and there's no male equivalent that wants similar changes to advantage men.

Re:Fair Comparison

[Ol Olsoc]

Equal? No. Having to hire women instead of men if qualifications are equal? Yes.

This is a good place to interject my question.

The presumed wage gap is around 30 percent.

We'll just accept that for the purpose of argument.

It is not debateable that corporate America and other outfits want to pay as little as they can get away with. We have businesses declaring they will introduce automation specifically in order to get rid of payroll.

If women are getting paid 30 percent less and I had a business or corporation, I would not hire men - it would be all women. The amount I could save on payroll would enrich me quite a bit.

So why has this not happened? All other things being equal, who would hire any man?

Re:Fair Comparison

[AmiMoJo]

"All of this "listen and believe" crap we get is why fewer and fewer take the accusations at face value."

Yes, that's the point of it. They want you to listen to them and assume they are not lying for long enough to do an actual investigation. They want you to examine their claims, instead of ignoring them.

It sounds like it's working.

Thanks Europe!

[Jfetjunky]

Good to know our U.S. government aren't the only idiots to declare war on ideological and intangible things.

You want to fix a problem, then work towards a solution instead of chest-beating and pretending to "declare war" on it.

Re:Thanks Europe!

[Archangel Michael]

It isn't even a real problem.

analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher

The thing about a real market economy, is that if you could end up paying women whatever % less than men, you'd hire more women, everything else being equal.

The problem is, not everything else is equal. Women will forgo wage increases to stay closer to home, with the kids, during the 18 years or so it takes to raise them to adulthood. That has profound long term effects on wages. BTW, Stay at home dads suffer just as much, but get no sympathy from the Feminists.

This isn't about equality, this is about "feelings" about equality. After all, if you're against "wage fairness" you're obviously a misogynist" who hates women. Facts don't matter.

Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Will I get to take years off for maternity leave, and expect my job waiting for me?

Because in the real world, I lost my position because I took two months off to recover from having spinal fusion to have a tumor removed from my spinal cord.

That's the fucking real world, where a baby is a "special kind of tumor".

Re:United States GS equivalents?

[RightwingNutjob]

No, the US couldn't do this. Compensation agreements are a matter of consent between private parties and many businesses (and many individuals) view that information as a trade secret or an equivalent. Forcing its disclosure for all employment agreements would cost private citizens and private businesses a competitive advantage and thus revenue, in violation of the 5th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Also: WTF? Not all people perform the same quality of work in the same job category. In some white-collar jobs, it even defies quantification with GS ratings. So what a regulation like that would do (if it were even lawful, which it's not) is destroy fairness by preventing performance-based pay, destroy any incentive structure a business might have for motivating employees, and impose an additional paperwork burden that a) no one in government would even pay attention too since it would be a flood of information but also b) open up employers to liability and capricious enforcement from politically motivated government appointees and grandstanding politicians and bureaucrats looking to score points.

This is a horrible idea that will create chaos without solving anything. Do you work for the federal government? Have you ever had a real job in the private sector? Do you have any understanding of how business works or any respect for the idea that government's job is to serve its citizens and not to harass them? How in the world could you think this was a good idea?

There is no wage gap

[RightwingNutjob]

It is a myth being sold to cover up yet another governmental power-grab. Equal pay for equal performance is the only possible outcome in anything resembling a free market. If a woman could be payed less for the same job, there would be near 100% male unemployment in just about every job besides sperm donor. Any aggregate disparaties between wages of *all* men and *all* women are the outcomes of individual choices made by consenting adults evaluating what's best for them in terms of career and life outside of work and any disparties if compensation for the same job title are largely the result of individual choices about the level of effort and amount of brownnosing applied to the job as opposed to having a life outside of work.

Recipe for disaster

[kenh]

However, legislators may require companies to release the average salaries of their male and female employees and analyze them for disparities.

This type of analysis was tried in the US a few years ago, the politicians found pay disparities on gender when they simply did as discussed above (no surprise), but once they factored in things like comparing same jobs and years experience the pay disparity went away.

To save face, proponents liedand claimed the initial comparison was for men and women doing 'exactly the same job' (when it clearly wasn't) and those that believed there was gender-based pay inequities never challenged findings they already believed.

Zero tolerance with generic prejudices

[CustomSolvers2]

After reading articles like this or the previous one (for me, both of them are basically about people wanting irrelevant aspects to be relevant), my expectations on this front get further reinforced: zero-tolerance with generic victimism-, prejudice-, hypocrisy-based whomever/whatever at work (and pretty much everywhere else).

DISCLAIMER: I am a white, cisgender, heterosexual, leftist, etc. man proudly ignoring all these and other features/ideas of myself or anyone else at work (programming/engineering). I am also a big fan of fairness and objectivity.