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

[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.

Wait, what?

[olsmeister]

I hadn't heard about France declaring war on Iceland and Germany!

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".

what gender pay gap?

[Cederic]

This is going to get messy. How do France surrender to something that doesn't exist?

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.