Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Publishing Employee Salaries - Help Gender Pay Inequities?

In Minnesota local governments report job classes, whether or not the job class is female or male dominated or neutral & pay ranges for that job class. Why? To determine if there are any patterns of paying jobs dominated by women less than jobs dominated by men that are of similar work value. But, what if each individual salary was published like it is for the province of British Columbia?

In the province of British Columbia all 30,000 salaries are published annually. For those of you who wish to see it to believe it check out:

http://www.fin.gov.bc.ca/OCG/pa/07_08/Detailed_Schedule_Pymts.pdf

P.S. Conventional wisdom would have us believe that knowing everyone's salary acts as a demotivator. I believe the opposite is true -- not knowing salaries increases the level of distrust between employee and employer and increases the likelihood of pay inequities. This is true for any internal equity issues -- not just gender.