What Most Of Us Don't Understand About the Gender Pay Gap
As long as we continue to devalue caregivers, the pay gap will endure
A CEO I know recently proclaimed on LinkedIn that at his company, “there is no gender wage gap.”
He went on to outline the process his company used to close the gap, which is very similar to the process we’ve followed at my own company. The intention is to ensure that no man on staff makes a higher salary than a female coworker with comparable skills and industry experience.
If this is how we define the gender pay gap, my company can also confidently proclaim that we don’t have one. That’s because we set our salaries according to market value and publish salary ranges in our job postings. We’re not going to go above this range just because someone asks, and we’re not going to go below it just because someone doesn’t ask.
Each year, we reassess all team members’ job descriptions, research the current market value, which can fluctuate year to year, and make adjustments accordingly. If the market value dips, we’re not going to give a team member a pay cut — that would feel crummy! But if it increases for a specific role, we’ll look at adjusting the salary accordingly so that each team member is as close to 50% of the market value as possible.
My company is a worker-owned cooperative, and 11 of our 16 staff members, including me, are co-owners. All co-owners, over 50% of the company, know exactly how much everyone else makes. Over 50% of the company is involved in setting and approving annual raises and salary adjustments. While I hope to explore full salary transparency in the coming years, even now, it would be hard for us to get away with a gender pay gap even if we tried.
So, should we all give ourselves big pats on the back and congratulate one another? Box, checked. Problem, solved. All in a day’s work.
Unfortunately, no. Because here’s the thing: We still have a gender pay gap. The aforementioned CEO’s company still has a gender pay gap. Not because any woman on either of our teams is making less than a man with comparable skills and industry experience. It’s because the “market value” we use to inform our pay scales is far from the objective holy grail it’s sometimes made out to be. The market is rife with gender biases of its own.
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I understand the logic behind setting salaries according to market value. It gives companies a shared barometer, an external range that has nothing to do with whether a prospective employee was, or wasn’t, taught how to negotiate. And by using the market value to offer salaries comparable to what a prospective or current employee may find elsewhere, companies can also better attract and retain talent.
But let’s also be honest with ourselves about who is driving the market. Who decides which jobs are “worth more” than other jobs? Who decides which industries are more “economically valuable?”
By and large, the answer is “men.” No, not a group of men sitting in a back room smoking cigars. (Well, maybe… who really knows?) But historically, the economy has largely been viewed as a male-driven engine, with women occasionally doing cute helper jobs because they want a little extra pin money, or because they couldn’t find a man to support them.
Even though 75% of women now work outside the home, 16 of the country’s 20 top-paying jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, are dominated by men. Fourteen of the 20 lowest-paying jobs are dominated by women.
This is not a coincidence.
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In fact, the entire notion of “market value” — that is, of some jobs being more “economically valuable” than others — is one that deserves some serious re-examination. Sometimes, we forget that the economy is something we just made up. Yes, it has become its own unpredictable beast that often resists our efforts to tame it, but it’s a beast of our own invention.
That’s all to say that the so-called “value” of a job has little basis in objective criteria. Sure, there are jobs that require more education or training than others, but when you look at the vast array of jobs that require a college degree, I’m hard-pressed to understand why, for instance, a computer and information systems manager makes an average annual salary that is 252% more than the average salary of an elementary school teacher.
Let’s be honest — market values reflect human values. A compelling argument could be made, for instance, that the tech sector is a valuable economic driver. An equally compelling argument could be made that the tech sector has decimated urban economies for the rest of us — my own hometown of San Francisco being chief among them. The inherent economic worth of a job or sector is largely dependent on your metrics, and your metrics are largely dependent on your values.
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