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The Almighty Buck Businesses Technology

How To Close the Gender Pay Gap By 2044 (fastcompany.com) 421

An anonymous reader shares an article on FastCompany: The wage gap in developing countries could be reduced by 35% by 2030 and eliminated by 2044, according to a new report from consultancy Accenture. But in order achieve pay parity, women need to be more involved in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields, the report notes. But, workplaces will have to change too. One of the biggest barriers to women attaining equal pay is that many women don't work full-time. They take part-time jobs in order to balance responsibilities at home or within a family -- work that is generally unpaid. If workplaces provide more flexible schedules, allowing women to work 40 hours outside of a typical 9-5 schema, more women would be able to work full-time.
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How To Close the Gender Pay Gap By 2044

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @06:23PM (#53995797)
    By all realistic studies it doesn't exist.
    Studies showing the pay gap don't account for reduced hours, child birth, different professions, different career path, etc.
    • by TooManyNames ( 711346 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @08:26PM (#53996701)

      The summary title is certainly inviting of knee-jerk retorts of the gender wage gap -- retorts that exist for good reason -- but the summary itself is actually a fairly reasonable assessment of the wage gap, noting things like:

      in order achieve pay parity, women need to be more involved in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields

      and

      One of the biggest barriers to women attaining equal pay is that many women don't work full-time

      Both of these statements are true, and represent a departure from the typical "OMG!! PATRIARCHYYYY!!" bullshit. Moreover, the central contention is, I think, fair and warranted:

      If workplaces provide more flexible schedules, allowing women to work 40 hours outside of a typical 9-5 schema, more women would be able to work full-time.

      Think about your own job... How much of it truly requires a physical presence at an office at a set time of day? If you're like me, the actual work requires almost no physical office presence, and certainly doesn't require a set time frame (I'm working with India half the time anyway), yet the company I work for still mandates a work-at-the-office policy. Why? There's really no good reason for it aside from that it makes the CEO feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

      Now thing of all the penalties associated with requiring work at the office. Aside from inflexible scheduling that arbitrarily penalizes mothers (or stay-at-home dads), it also requires unnecessary transportation (costing gasoline and emitting CO2 -- if that matters to you), unnecessary heating/cooling/maintenance (for office infrastructure), wasted time spent commuting, etc.

      Requiring work at a specific work-site and time makes sense if you're doing some sort of manufacturing/construction/physical maintenance/etc., but for straight office work, it's pretty unreasonably pointless. It's pointless, and it imposes completely unnecessary and arbitrary costs. Rather than reject the article because it's attached to some (mildly) feminist rhetoric, maybe consider that there may actually be a good point underlying it -- a point which applies to, and would benefit, more than just women.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @09:53PM (#53997121)

        That is not a "pay gap". That is a skill, and time and effort invested in education and work gap. It seems to indicate that women have it easier to be lazy in the workplace. (No difference in laziness in men and women in general, but whether you actually can be lazy if you want to be depends on opportunities.)

      • by mattwarden ( 699984 ) on Wednesday March 08, 2017 @12:47AM (#53997937)

        Yesterday, I quit my job. This has caused an employment gap when compared with my neighbor. We must fight this injustice.

        The point is, once we all agree that the outcome difference is almost entirely explained by people making choices with their lives, we need to stop calling it any name that implies injustice or even unnatural outcome.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @09:50PM (#53997105)

      Not quite, but almost. If you look at competently done studies, you find that there is a gender pay-gap of around 5% or so. That is mostly attributed to women generally negotiating worse than men do. But even that is shrinking, because you can actually negotiate the salary in less and less jobs. Were you cannot, no gender pay gap exists.

      So there really is nothing that needs doing, except to stop listening to these idiots that cannot read statistics (or are intentionally lying).

    • Not true, a gap of about 5% exists, at least in the US. However that has to do with the fact that men are more aggressive on average and thus better at wage negotiation.

    • by meburke ( 736645 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @10:12PM (#53997207)

      The poster is correct: A pay gap does not exist if men and women are receiving equal pay for similar work. Studies starting as early as 1973 show that women without children, continuously employed for 17 or more years, in the USA, actually made MORE than men with the same criteria.

      What creates the gap in income is that women make choices about taking time off for their kids, having children, spending more family time, and preferring less stressful or demanding jobs. Women seem to respond to quality-of-life enhancement over income enhancement.

      Pay is generally given (in the jobs market) based on the perceived contribution. A woman who has been out of her field for 4 or 5 years cannot usually contribute as much as another employee (man or woman) who has been continuously engaged and is up-to-date. That woman will re-enter the job market at a lower rate, which then becomes the new starting point for future increased pay.

      OK, one of the criteria is "in the USA". Conditions are different outside the USA, and the report may be correct for those countries.

      And remember: "Women" don't earn income; "individual women" earn income. Statistics based on averages can be skewed in many different ways, and maany of these create useless results.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        What creates the gap in income is that women make choices

        Are they really free choices though? Given the opportunity a lot of women would like to work more if flexible hours were available. If both the mother and father had flexible working hours they could likely both do 40 hours a week and still look after the kids. Affordable childcare also helps a lot.

        If we broke the rigid 9-5 business hours when everyone is expected to be working we could also fix a lot of the traffic congestion problems and improve general health levels.

    • The article is talking about the gap that exists because of reduced hours, child birth, different professions, etc. That's what it aims to remove/reduce. It's also not entirely accurate to say that those factors fully explain the gap. Granted they account for most of it, but about 5-6% remains unexplained. Links here [glassdoor.com] and here [huffingtonpost.com].
  • Frist pocporn psot (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @06:24PM (#53995803) Homepage Journal

    Time to get the popcorn, methinks.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • bah (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ruir ( 2709173 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @06:31PM (#53995853)
    Men should be more involved in nursing, hospitals and schools. Women should to be more involved as "garbage technician" and mechanic...
    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      You can close the gender pay gap only one way. You create a governing body which defines all salaries for all labour, government and private and ban private salary negotiations. You can then arrange salaries to your hearts content. For lower paid workers and excellent solution and a fair and reasonable one ensuring a living wage. For higher paid workers, some will hate it and some will appreciate not have to sweat it out with negotiations (for employers the second group are far more reliable and loyal and t

      • And how does the tribunal determine wages? It is arbitrary at that point because a crucial price has been divorced from the market. I don't mean to say that the market is perfect or anything like that, but without *any* relation to it, you're flying blind.
    • Women also need to equally represented in the NBA, NFL and baseball leagues. They need to be equally represented in infantry operations where they put their lives at risk.

      Men need to be equally represented as kindergarten teachers, nursing and other "traditionally female" professions as you mention.

      (tongue in cheek)

      My son's calculus class has about 10% women. Chemistry is a little higher.

      How can we expect equal pay in the same professions if women are STILL choosing to avoid math and technology?

    • Re:bah (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @07:47PM (#53996475)

      I used to work as a male nurse.

      I'm in IT now.

      Not because the pay is better. It's not. I was pulling down HUGE money. Not "rock star programmer" pay or anything. But I was pulling in well over 100K a year.

      It's because the institutional environment can be a ridiculously hostile environment for men.

      Bitchy co-workers who think they're going to unload their work on you and you'll do it because they have a vagina.
      Lazy co-workers who want to ignore proper, safe patient movement procedure because you happen to have a penis, therefore you're Superman and can benchpress an aircraft carrier. So that 600 lb guy in a steel reinforced "big boy" bed who just had both hips replaced is no problem for you.
      The fucking closet druggies.
      The golddiggers whoring themselves at doctors and medical students...

      I got sick of it, and went to do something else.

  • If you want to be part of it, then choose to be part of it like the rest of us business world men and women do. You aren't so special that the whole world is gonna rearrange itself for your schedule.
    • by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @09:11PM (#53996921)

      If you want to be part of it, then choose to be part of it like the rest of us business world men and women do. You aren't so special that the whole world is gonna rearrange itself for your schedule.

      What utter bullshit.

      I'll believe the business world runs "9-5" when you shut down your corporate website promptly at 5PM local time every weekday, and keep it shut down all weekend.

      From the creation of an entire digital world to 24-hour Walmarts, along with helping resolve the issues related to "business hours" traffic congestion, this world needs to fucking learn to adapt and operate to accommodate all.

  • non-issue then (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @06:33PM (#53995871)

    if the main reason is women not working full time 40 hours but that's what employers want, the discussion is over and nothing need be done. Cue the twitter SJW and their neckbeard manlette supporters, I've written something offensive.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      Not offensive, but short-sighted. If I found stupid and short-sighted comments offensive, I couldn't stand Slashdot.

      If the main reason is women raising kids, we've got a problem and the discussion is not over. That work is vital for the future of society, and should not come with a big financial penalty.

      • by elrous0 ( 869638 )

        What about men raising kids? They don't count?

        • To the government - No. And the statistics for how many men get full or half custody prove this.
        • Of course they do, but I'm sure you understand that it's not a true equivalency.

          When it comes to reproduction, men are actually irrelevant, at least as far as numbers go. I can prove it with a simple thought experiment:

          You have 100 men and 1 woman. They can fuck as much as they want. At the end of nine months, how many babies are likely to be born? How about 1000 men and 1 woman? A million? Unless she happens to be Octomom or Manjula Nahasapeemapetilon, the answer is very likely to be 1, maybe 2 if they hap

      • Part time work is lower pay because it is lower value. If there are 100 toilets to clean, then I can hire two people and they can each clean 50. If there is a circuit board to design, then it is much harder to split that work between two people. High paying jobs require skills and knowledge that can't just be handed over to someone else at the end of a shift.

      • Re:non-issue then (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ewibble ( 1655195 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @07:19PM (#53996251)

        What are you talking about raising kids IS a huge financial penalty, you have to cloth feed, provide accommodation ...

        You choose to raise children you should have to bare some of burden yourself. We do not have as shortage of people.

        If you are raising children in a couple then it all evens out since your income are combined. If you are single then isn't that what child support is for? Or at least should be.

        I do not see how somebodies children should be the responsibility the employer. We all make choices in our lives some will effect how much we earn, what is wrong with allowing people to make those choices and live with the consequences.

        I think too many these studies take a dollar amount and say look life is unfair, but really money is only a tool to maximize happiness. If someone decides to take a lower paying job that maximizes there happiness what is wrong with that? Why as a society do we need to "correct" the problem.

        A much more accurate measure would who is more happy. Given the men commit suicide 3 times more than women in the US, I would say that they are not living it up on their charmed life as a man.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by iggymanz ( 596061 )

        Hmmm, maybe that woman should partner with someone to share the bills and burden, like say the man that made her pregnant, what a novel thought.

      • by tsotha ( 720379 )
        Kids are a big financial penalty for both parents, and other people don't have a moral obligation to step in and help ease the burden of personal choices.
    • if the main reason is women not working full time 40 hours but that's what employers want, the discussion is over and nothing need be done.

      In the United States, the 40 hour work week did not come into legal effect until 1940. Before the 1930s, six-day work weeks were the norm.

      "What employers want" is irrelevant. If we went by "what employers want" we'd still have child labor and being paid in scrip.

      • I had to start my own business when I was 8 because I was not legally old enough to work. I walked around the neighborhood pushing a lawnmower and made $15/hr (inflation adjusted).
        • If you are your own boss, you can work as much or as little as you want.

          • I had more business than I could handle. Another kid....Donald (I can't believe i still remember his name)...saw how much money I was making and started doing the same thing. We both still had more business than we could do. I got bored of it very quickly after I'd made enough to buy my first computer...$2,500 inflation adjusted. That was ~150 yards mowed over two summers. It wasn't too hard, but very very hot. It comes out at about 1 yard a day. I wouldn't even blink considering having to do it now, but I
      • Stupid assertion, of course it is relevant when they can fire a person hired for a full time job who doesn't work the time. When the employer wants a full time employee, they get one and have legal backing to fire anyone who doesn't work full time. That's how the USA works and that will not change any time soon.

        Bringing up pre-1940s is irrelevant.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @06:34PM (#53995895)

    Boys still behind girls AT EVERY STAGE OF EDUCATION.

    But for some reason the feminists talk about EQUALITY while only whining about women choosing the wrong courses, working fewer hours for fewer years and for some reason sometimes getting paid less.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      AC here, I have no mod points to give and I know this is a lousy discussion forum, but we are leading ourselves into a huge tragedy by ignoring boys in schools. From what I can see, it is now starting around ages 8-9, the years when the curriculum starts to include more science and social studies, the years when boys develop a lifelong interest in the world around them, including computers. The years where we now start to encourage girls to get into math and technology. The boys get left to themselves, so t

  • doesn't make sense. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @06:35PM (#53995897)

    [quote]One of the biggest barriers to women attaining equal pay is that many women don't work full-time. They take part-time jobs in order to balance responsibilities at home or within a family -- work that is generally unpaid. If workplaces provide more flexible schedules, allowing women to work 40 hours outside of a typical 9-5 schema, more women would be able to work full-time.[/quote]

    Review the logic of that statement again... we take part time jobs to gain more time at home / with family... and then we should spend more of that time to work more to get 40 hours per week...

    How about understanding that there's nothing wrong with not working full-time.

    • Silly anon. If they make you work full time, they'll also be making you pay someone else to do the things that you now do for yourself on your time "off." This way they'll get two wage slaves, one of whom will explicitly owe their employment to their policies and one who can be blinkered into thinking it's a Good Thing that she now gets to work a full forty per week. If they let people make their own choices, they don't get the chance to buy votes that way. Report to re-education at once for your lapse in f
  • How about we start by getting countries to stop forcing women to get "circumcised", forcing them to cover their faces, denied the right to an education, and while we are at it, destroy the caste systems of countries. Seriously.

    Women are still brutalized in a lot of places and lack the most basic of rights, and we first worlders focus on paychecks.

    • Re:Or... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pushing-robot ( 1037830 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @06:50PM (#53996011)

      And how dare you give me a ticket for speeding when there are murderers to catch!

      • by lgw ( 121541 )

        That would be a legitimate complaint if there were more murderers than speeders. And there are more people living in places where women are lacking basic rights than first-world whiners.

        • And there are more people living in places where women are lacking basic rights than first-world whiners.

          That's only because many women lack basic rights in the first world too.

          The number of women living in the sorts of places you're thinking about is lower than you think and on the decline. RIP Hans Rosling.

          • Re:Or... (Score:4, Insightful)

            by lgw ( 121541 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @08:50PM (#53996823) Journal

            That's only because many women lack basic rights in the first world too.

            How many girls in the first world cannot legally attend school? Or cannot attend for fear of a militia group assaulting the school, overwhelming the police, and kidnapping all the girls into a life of slavery?

            How many women in the first world are forbidden from legally driving? How many women in the first world face the threat of vigilante attack and mutilation by the religious police for not being sufficiently conservative in dress or appearance?

            How many women in the first world have no say in who they marry?

            I could go on and on, but we both know you're full of shit. Women in the first world face such terrors as being criticized on social media, or being paid in a way that still puts them in the top 1% of income worldwide.

      • by elrous0 ( 869638 )

        To use one of BLM's favorite analogies: when a house is on fire, you devote more attention to that than the house that isn't on fire.

    • Meanwhile, nobody has ever heard you complain about the forced circumcision of baby boys.

      Not. Fucking. Once.
    • by leenks ( 906881 )
      Yeah! Too right. And because people are still getting murdered in Iraq we should stop trying to address deaths from obesity in the West! Focus!!
    • Think we should invade those countries?
  • by iCEBaLM ( 34905 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @06:36PM (#53995915)

    The gender pay gap is a myth. If it really existed, nobody would hire men. Men work longer, and in much more dangerous jobs, and therefore make more money.

  • If a woman can't work the standard 9-5 because of duties at home (raising kids is a more than fulltime job!) flextime just means she'll have two jobs: one paid and one unpaid. She'll be working +80 hours per week and so we'll still see a pay gap. If you want pay parity the only solution is to not have kids!

  • by Spy Handler ( 822350 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @06:48PM (#53996005) Homepage Journal

    If women are really being paid less than men for the same work, wouldn't it make sense financially to hire women only? Even a small company of 50 employees can save a million dollars a year just by hiring women instead of men. As the owner it would go directly into my pocket. Who doesn't like to make an extra million dollars a year?

    Employers will go to great lengths to hire the cheapest labor for any given task. They will even violate labor laws and risk prison by hiring illegal aliens, that's how much business owners love to save money (admittedly the risk of prison for hiring illegals was very small in the past, prior to Trump). Therefore if the gender gap is as real as the feminists claim, every CEO should be scouring the earth for all the women they could hire.

    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @07:18PM (#53996241)

      If women are really being paid less than men for the same work, wouldn't it make sense financially to hire women only?

      Yes, and this happens. For instance, in Japan women are often paid less than men for cultural reasons that are hard to change. So many American companies with offices in Japan hire mostly women and get a lot of very skilled and capable people for less pay than their Japanese competitors. This also works in India and in Islamic countries. It doesn't work in China, where women have higher status.

  • Pay male employees 30% less.
    Why 30% you say when the gap is closer to 20%. That's just because most executives are male and they don't want their pay to be affected of course.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @06:54PM (#53996045)

    Imagine what one could accomplish if there was a gender wage gap.

    If there really was a gender wage gap, anyone would be free to open a business, hire only female employees, pay them less due to the gender wage gap, use this competitive advantage to grow the business, capture market share, profit.

    Same thing applies to the premise that diversity makes us better. If this was true, one could just have a super diverse group of employees, and one would then out compete other less diverse groups/businesses etc.

    None of this happens in the real world.
    prsdntl

  • for one gender. Ban it for the other.

    Problem solved.

  • FORBID them taking time off for their children.

    FORBID maternity leave.

    FORBID any 'special rules' that benefit women. ....then you'll have companies go "OK, now this staff person is worth investing in, because I can be reasonably certain she won't vanish because her gestational clock is ticking, or her womb-fruit need caring for."

    Women have the ability to CREATE LIFE. I love how that's pretty much 'set aside' when we're talking about which gender has inherent advantages.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • tl;dr of the pay gap issue: Women, who are free to choose their career paths, are making decisions feminists don't like, so we should push women to make the career decisions feminists want them to make instead. Seriously, the "pay gap" is a terrible metric for equality. Women are free to choose their careers and their work-life balance and they are making different career choices than men, so of course there is a pay gap. It would odd if there wasn't. There are only 2 ways to eliminate the pay gap: Remove
  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @08:25PM (#53996693)
    the jobs men are best at (e.g. blue collar & engineering) are going away. Jobs women are good at (medical, knowledge, arts, etc) aren't. Barring massive societal changes the pay gap will go the other way in 20 years.
  • by waspleg ( 316038 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @08:26PM (#53996697) Journal

    2044. Simply make (private sector) corporations publish ALL of their employee salaries publicly.

    Public sector places already largely do this. It works pretty well.

    People get pissed off when they see someone with the same job title and experience making more money than them.

    • This leaves no room for competence and productivity.
      • by Pfhorrest ( 545131 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @11:16PM (#53997515) Homepage Journal

        Publishing everyone's pay doesn't mean dictating a single pay for every job. It means you can see the distribution of pay for each job. If you're being paid less than average, you can then take those statistics to your boss and say "hey, why am I being paid less than average", and he can say "because you perform below average". I guess the obvious next step in negotiations there is to find some kind of performance metrics to compare to.

        FWIW you can actually find average pay statistics for all kinds of jobs at the Bureau of Labor Statistics website (bls.gov), and I've used that extensively in pay negotiations in recent years to great effect. When the boss is always saying "you're the best person in this position we've ever had" and then you can show him government stats saying average people in this position get paid more than you, that really does something for negotiations.

    • by Raenex ( 947668 )

      People get pissed off when they see someone with the same job title and experience making more money than them.

      Except that's not why there's a wage gap. Read the fucking summary, at least, which, shockingly, manages to move past the stupid lie that women are paid less than men for doing the same job.

  • by mpercy ( 1085347 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @09:13PM (#53996935)

    Of the about 4500 annual workplace fatalities, 92% are men.

    http://www.aei.org/publication... [aei.org]

    Because women tend to work in safer occupations than men on average, they have the advantage of being able to work for more than a decade longer than men before they experience the same number of male occupational fatalities in a single year.

    Economic theory tells us that the “gender occupational fatality gap” explains part of the “gender pay gap” because a disproportionate number of men work in higher-risk, but higher-paid occupations like coal mining (almost 100% male), fire fighters (95% male), police officers (87% male), correctional officers (72% male), farming, fishing, and forestry (77% male), and construction (97.5% male); BLS data here. On the other hand, a disproportionate number of women work in relatively low-risk industries, often with lower pay to partially compensate for the safer, more comfortable indoor office environments in occupations like office and administrative support (73% female), education, training, and library occupations (74% female), and health care (75% female). The higher concentrations of men in riskier occupations with greater occurrences of workplace injuries and fatalities suggest that more men than women are willing to expose themselves to those work-related injuries or death in exchange for higher wages. In contrast, women more than men prefer lower risk occupations with greater workplace safety, and are frequently willing to accept lower wages for the reduced probability of work-related injury or death.

  • pass a law that all women have to be paid more than men. I'm sick of hearing about it.

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