Statement by Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis on US Senate's failure to pass Paycheck Fairness Act

PR-USA.net - Statement by Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis on US Senate's failure to pass Paycheck Fairness Act

Pay Envy and What to Do About

Check out Chris Walker's response in the comments. He ran a quick salary check using jobsearchintelligence.com. I've cut and pasted his response here. Thank you Chris.

"Check the salary calculator at jobsearchintelligence.com. I ran a calculation on male & female accountants in Akron, OH with the same education and experience. The calculator uses 12 datapoints, here's the results:
MALE 'Your salary survey data results for Accountants in Akron, OH:
There are 2910 persons employed as Accountants in Akron, OH.
Entry level range salaries (The 10th percentile) for this occupation are $38850
The median salary for this occupation is $57220.
The top earners for this occupation have an annualized salary of $90850
Based upon the information that you have provided, the market will likely offer you an annual salary of $62700'

FEMALE:'Based upon the information that you have provided, the market will likely offer you an annual salary of $49100.
As a reference, a person who is not subject to any gender bias or racial bias, with the same qualifications as those listed by you is currently earning an annual salary of $62700'"

Pay for Performance leads to Bias

This is a study done by MIT researcher Emilio Castella. I found the article's link at workforce.com. You may have to subscribe as a member to get to the link. This website is worth it -- and its free as long as you don't mind the occasional email touting a book or a conference or webinar. I've actually attend two webinars as a result of joining the 'free website.

The study concludes what is becoming more and more obvious to those of us following equitable compensation practices. The practice of wage setting must be as open and transparent as possible. In this study employees who received similar performance ratings were in fact not given the same pay raises. The folks who were responsible for setting pay took the liberty of fine tuning the pay adjustments. The same formula was not applied to all employees resulting in bias. Oops.

Here's the MIT sloan link:

http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/2008-castilla.php

Motherhood and the Wage Gap

Just found this article courtesy of the Society for Human Resource Management. See link above.

I found this section of interest, especially the last sentence:

"Previous studies on wage differences by gender have found that roughly half of an observed 20 percent gender gap cannot be explained by the usual factors that drive wages, such as experience, hours worked, occupation, industry, age and the like," said report co-author Beata Caranci, deputy chief economist at TD Economics. "The research leads us to conclude that exits from the labor force, most often related to family or motherhood—not gender—are the culprit behind this 'unexplained' wage gap."


Here's what I know -- one of the logical properties of equality we learned in high school math....

The transitive property states:

* For any quantities a, b, and c, if a = b and b = c, then a = c.

Wage gap logic:

Exits = 'unexplained' wage gap
family or motherhood = Exits
'unexplained' wage gap ≠ family or motherhood

The math doesn't add up to me. Also, I presume motherhood still means female since 99.99999999% of mothers are women (could be more but I'm leaving room for speculation).

I just really can't draw any more conclusions around this report. I'll let you try. Feel free to post a response.

Females are equal to males in math skills, large study shows

Females are equal to males in math skills, large study shows

Costco Salaries Online

I've been searching for tools to make payroll processes transparent. I came across this list of Costco salaries -- all posted anonymously. I'm not sure if this was done by an outside third party or if the process is blessed by Costco internally. Either way, it gives employees and potential employees an idea of where they fit or could fit in terms of pay within the organization. I think this is a step forward into instilling transparency into payroll processes -- but the goal - in a completely open payroll process is for everyone to know what everyone earns and why. This is the only way to avoid litigation and build trust into the system. Think Lilly Ledbetter -- who found out she was paid a great deal less than her male colleagues -- from an anonymous note. Ledbetter's salary and those of her male colleagues were so grossly disproportionate to each other that the only recourse for Mrs. Ledbetter was to sue her employer. The problem would never have escalated to that level if her employer were open and honest about pay. Time to stop hiding behind payroll secrecy. And, can we please get rid of pay bands while we're at it! But, that's for another post.

Workplace Salaries: At Last, Women on Top

Workplace Salaries: At Last, Women on Top