My Slashdot Comment To Ellen Pao Salary Negotiation Ban To Equalize Gender Pay At Reddit

My posted comment to "Reddit CEO Ellen Pao Bans Salary Negotiations To Equalize Pay For Men, Women" on Slashdot:

Research about women's poorer negotiation skills or underpayment is based on hard salary dollars and almost always does not include the value of benefits and job characteristics. For example, before the new health law, more women would prefer and accept jobs that provide better health plans at a trade-off of a lower salary, while more men would forego health benefits for higher pay. The compensation value to the employer is identical, but the reported pay of men is higher. Women as a group negotiate or choose jobs with more flex-time, less travel, less overtime, less weekend work and more on the job safety than men. This has been studied and documented by the US DOL and many researchers. Many promoting the idea of women's lower wages as compared to men fail to mention and include the value of non-W2, non-1099, job benefits and characteristics.

Whenever there is a number showing the ratio of women to men's pay, it is always an inter-employer, inter-industry number. Similar job classifications at different industries and different employers have a different ratio of benefits and job characteristic value to salary.

What has been attributed to poor salary negotiating skills of women is really women over time in the workforce, negotiating non-salary benefits or self-selecting into jobs or industries with higher amounts of non-salary benefits.

Because the large scale pay differential between men and women is always across industries or firms, just about all pay discrimination lawsuits against an individual firm employer, whether it be a Wal-Mart or a Kleiner, fails in the court.