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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.
As long as they release salaries *and* hours worked for a fair comparison, I'm ok with this.
I hadn't heard about France declaring war on Iceland and Germany!
Nobody ever wants to talk about equality of _productivity_.
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.
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".
Will they tackle that as well? This is a serious question. I work with two other guys. I am paid less than one and more than the other. We all have different backgrounds doing the same work in the same position in the same location, in the same company. If we get a woman, who's pay should her's be compared to and why?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
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?
This is going to get messy. How do France surrender to something that doesn't exist?
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.
Her pay is dependent on boob size, just like you three.
:^P
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
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.
Ken
As long as they release salaries *and* hours worked for a fair comparison, I'm ok with this.
they don't.
Doing a fair comparison is _not_ the motivation behind these legislative initiatives.
This is SJW / neo-feminism at their best, hiding a social constructionist goal to eliminate the free choices of men and women as they interact with the labor market behind feel-good words, which shuts off the logical thinking of people while hiding the real numbers.
Sargon had an excellent piece on this which explains very well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7iaOk9QTHM
It's fine as long as they look at the ADJUSTED pay gap which takes into account factors such as hours worked, occupation, skills, length of employment or experience. However, media and politicians like to quote the unadjusted value because it gives them way more space for manipulations. The unadjusted pay gap does not make any f... sense in the context of statistics whatsoever.
As for the equal pay, it is nearly impossible to compare two people in the same role. Again - skills, experience, commitment; there is no fair, deterministic way of evaluating and comparing these qualities between two individuals let alone in a given population.
Lack of understanding of these fundamental flaws in the concepts of gender pay gap and equal pay makes them yet another useless measure which was created with people's well being in mind but got incorrectly understood, applied and taken advantage of by politicians who are trying to put everyone in the same bucket for their own purposes.
Everything within the framework of what's legal and in line with our values as a free society. I wouldn't entertain a debate about things like nationalization of all industries and business to ensure uniformity of wages, for example, because those alternatives, while possibly effective, are not in line with how we do things in this country.
EU working time directive caps legal hours
Given that any real economic assessment of the so called wage game has systematically disproven it we're now left with the parts of the EU just using this as an excuse to pass any new regulation they want. That can't possible end in economic catastrophe when people are legally required to hire people passed on their physical gender instead of weather or not they're worth a damn.
Clearly, the government knows better, how you should be running your business. Not only do they already know, the gap exists, they also know it must be eliminated — as well as exactly how to do it.
If only the cantankerous electorate stopped fighting the inevitable and simply allowed the government to run everything... Poverty, hunger, hate, and racism would've all disappeared, Global Warming stopped, and sex improved.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Hell, I would just lower all wages to minimum wage levels, and then make them work their way back up again. But every employee in a group gets the same raise, and no one gets it if one person in the group doesn't deserve it.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
When did this happen?
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.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Where I work, I had to negotiate my own salary - nothing was set. I know there are male developers that earn less money than me, I know there are male developers that earn more money than me. There are also female developers that earn less money than me and others that earn more money than me. We've all negotiated our own salaries. Mind you I think some people have obtained their salary not because of their ability to code, but their ability to talk (but that is a different issue).
Perhaps we should just become communists, where everyone gets the same amount for a day's work, regardless of the work we do. I'm sure that would work out great.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Yeah, great idea, tie salaries directly to age or number of years at the company. That will totally not backfire at all.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I can't wait for the war on the gender occupational safety gap. You know, the one where men make up virtually all workplace deaths and a large majority of workplace injuries. Where are the vagina hat marches against this inequality?
See that "Preview" button?
Said no Frenchmen, ever.
In liberte, egalite, and fraternite, that last word is gender-specific. There's been a push in France to create “écriture inclusive” in recent years, which would strip words of their inherent gender when it isn't needed or wanted, but there's a lot of pushback against such a foundational change. It's hard to gauge just how big a problem it is... is the fact that "terrorist" is gendered male in French responsible for an observed pattern of less inspection of women at security stations? That's a hard question to answer. Humans are so guided by our languages, it's hard to recognize when those inherent word biases are pushing us in our actions.
Yeah, great idea, tie salaries directly to age or number of years at the company. That will totally not backfire at all.
Why not? It works perfectly when unions do it, according to Slashdot groupthink. At least, that's what my moderation history suggests.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
However, if the men are being forced to come in on weekends alone while females get to work regular office hours because it's "too dangerous" for the females- then the men deserve more money.
That's not a random example by the way.
There are ways this can all be made gender neutral.
Same hours, same pay is certainly a basic one.
Another factor is employees who change jobs for higher pay are aggressive employees.
Normalizing pay could reduce the benefit of going to a new job in terms of pay. So, by the rule of unintended consequences some other form of compensation would be found such as extra training when the person is onboarded. Some kind of signing bonus. Etc.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Yes, if you live in Sweden you get the same amount of paternity leave. http://metro.co.uk/2016/07/27/...
What should an employer do in cases where female employees take significantly more time out of the industry then male ones, to raise kids?
If an employer has a female workforce with average experience of (say) 10 years, and males with average 15 years experience, and if it's a sector such as medicine where experience massively affects capability, how should the pay policy work?
If the employer pays by gender equality, then female employees of lesser experience who took time out for child raising will be getting paid more than male employees of greater experience who stayed, continued their training and built their skills. Employees of greater merit will be suffering pay disadvantage.
But if the employer pays by merit and experience, the average female pay will be significantly lower than average male pay, and the employer will be exposed to legal problems.
What is an employer to do here?
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Call me when women are 50% in mining, underwater welding, septic tank maintenance, construction, etc... etc... etc....
It works perfectly when unions do it, according to Slashdot groupthink.
No it doesn't. You're falling into the America-centric trap in assuming that the noisiest, crappiest American unions are representative of all unions. Look abroad for how to do it better.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No it doesn't. You're falling into the America-centric trap in assuming that the noisiest, crappiest American unions are representative of all unions.
Every time I complain specifically about American unions enshrining mediocrity, people attack me for being some kind of conservative assface. Only, I'm about as liberal as you can get, and I just don't like seeing corrupt union bosses run away with our education money, for example.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In other words, you're complaining about the crappiest US unions, attributing their failings to all unions, and claiming that anyone disagreeing with you is practicing groupthink.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes