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Admin
Maybe it's the UK or the agencies round here or the way things work round here, but
I have been looking for a job in a "startup" for years and never found one. All I ever get back from the agencies when I ask for a start-up or green field is "oh, we were recruting for one a few months ago" and I have missed out again.
I have never been able to take a step back and go in anything (usually a new technology or business area) at "entry level", the consequence being I am pretty much where I was around 10 years ago in technological terms. Ok, small slow progress, but nowhere near the incredibly rapid progress my career made between 1997 and 2002.
Admin
Sorry, but that is absolute bullshit. Yes, there is ONE study that says women get paid as much as men except for the time that they take off to raise kids. On the other hand, there are about a gazillion studies that show that women get paid less, simply already because the boss assumes the woman could get pregnant/ill oftener/less productive. At the same time, there are no studies that seriously show that women cost their employer more than men in the same position.
Last but not least: In what kind of fucking retarded time are we living where people are effectively discriminated against for having children and trying to raise them good? We should actually have incentives for people to become parents instead of doing the opposite.
Admin
But why should an employer pay those incentives? It is not in the employer's interest for you to be at home popping out babies instead of assembling cars or whatever.
Anyway, the world does not have a severe shortage of people! We should be rewarding people for doing the environmentally responsible thing, not for mindless reflexive breeding.
By the way I think you meant "raise them well" not "raise them good". Apparently somebody did not raise you well. Let's hope you don't pass that sloppiness along to another generation.
Admin
I'll admit, I oversimplified there. Supply/demand economics does play a role. However in civilized circles, which is what we seem to be discussing here, the concept of corporal force simply does not apply.
Even granting that admission the single overriding factor is budget. You simply do not pay an employee more than you can afford to budget for them (after accounting for projected profit gains). There are myriad factors involved in compensation decisions but the hard fact is if the employee demands more than what you can budget for them then that employee simply takes themselves out of the supply pool of your hiring (or continued employment) decision.
Admin
This is not a scientific study, it's just my personal experience. In April 2011 I received a small pay rise. In April 2012 nobody in the company received a pay rise. Now I am suddenly overpaid and they might have to cut my salary or get rid of me. What's the missing factor?
Since the last pay review I have transitioned. I used to be a man and now I'm a woman.
Admin
You've made HR angry by forcing them to figure out how to alter the gender field in their personnel database.
Admin
HR were fine. They had changed my name and photo within an hour, plus an "Oops, are you a Miss/Ms/Mrs?" within the next hour. IT Support took two weeks to change my name on a couple of dozen databases and get most of them right.
Admin
Typical :(
Admin
That would be a paper route with literally a couple hundred stops that are not immediately next to one another (like a postal carrier) where you are frequently pushed to deliver more stops per hour each quarter while driving a large vehicle in sometimes bad weather. Yeah those slacking bastards, how dare they make more money than I think they're worth? If it's such a great overpaid job, then run your ass down there and get one.
Admin
That's hilarious! I am so recompiling the sudo binary on my system
Admin
That may be your problem right there. I would be very surprised if any company just out of the blue offerred you a pay raise because they knew you needed more money. My daughter just started college, and my boss did not come to me and offer me a pay raise because he knew I needed the money. When my son was racking up big medical bills, my boss did not offer me a pay raise because he knew I needed the money. Whether you're a man, a woman, or an alien from Arcturus, that's not how real life works. The boss may be a nice guy and stretch things here and there for someone in trouble, but a company is not a charity. In the long run, he can't pay you based on what you need or think you need. He can only pay you based on what you contribute, or he'll quickly go broke and then he won't be able to pay anyone.
If you want more money, ask for a pay raise. Point out what you contribute to the company, not how much you need. If they say no, look for another job. When you apply for that new job, ask for what you believe you're worth. And "worth" here is calculated by how much income you bring to the company and how much other people doing similar work are paid. If you're working just as hard as any man, putting in just as many unpaid overtime hours, are just as smart and capable, etc, then they should pay you the same as they would pay a man. If they won't, then go someplace else. If literally 100% of the businesses in the country will not pay you what you think you're worth, then maybe your expectations are unrealistic. They can't ALL be sexist pigs.
Admin
Just to drag this argument on for another post or two, I'm sure if we just have a couple of more exchanges one of us will be convinced that the other is completely right :-) ...
"Your entire post is effectively just the above"
Umm, yes. This conversation began when I objected to your statement that people should be required to join unions so that the unions would have more bargaining power. That is what I objected to.
"And you would tear down the entire institution based on this single point."
Umm, I never said that I thought that unions should be banned and all union organizers dragged out and shot. I have no objection to you forming a union and seeking to convince others to join.
That said, this not some tiny little point. To some of us, freedom is an extremely important thing, and being forced to support organizations that we disagree with politically and financially is not some trivial technicality but a full-scale assault on the very concept of freedom.
It's obviously not a tiny little point to the unions, either. They fight tooth and nail for the right to force people to join their organization.
If unions would abandon the idea of getting special legal privileges for themselves, like employees being forced to join and employers being forced to recognize them, and if they abandoned violence and intimidation as tactics, and instead operated as associations of free people negotiating freely with employers, I think they would find that the political opposition and antipathy to them would largely evaporate.
I would never dream of accusing you of "trying to impose [your] vision of the world on other people". I would only make such accusations against someone who brazenly said that people should be forced to support organizations that he approves of whether they like it or not, and that if they object to such organizations, the only acceptable form of opposition is to join the organization and continue to pay dues and give it political support while working from within to attempt to make changes. You'd never say anything extreme like that, would you? :-)
Admin
Based on my own purely anecdotal experience: Employment agencies do not work with start-ups. They work with big, Fortune 500-type companies. Maybe this is because start-ups can't afford to pay the employment agency's fees on top of what they have to pay the employee. Maybe it's for some other reason. But if you want a job with a start-up, I think an employment agency is just not the way to find it.
The jobs I've gotten with small companies years ago were all found through direct advertising by the company in a newspaper. I got my present job, which is with a small company, through an ad on a programming-related website. (Not this one, sorry.)
Others have told me they got jobs with start-ups and other small companies through friends and personal contacts, though that's never worked out for me.
Admin
If you make less than the market rate, you will feel cheated. If you make more than the market rate, you will be terrified that the boss will discover it and fire you. If you make exactly the market rate, you will feel like an banana in a grocery, gradually turning black. Forget market rate; be what you are and grab what you can. The world does not owe you fairness.
Admin
If you really want to match your salary against everyone else's, become tech support for the payroll system.
Admin
And you are male, right?
el
Admin
I'm in that position as well, but my view is that the main measurement of "how much does the company appreciate what I do" is how much they spend on me, salary being the largest portion of that. So I ask for raises based on the value I see me adding to the company in relation to how much I think I've increased that value input. If there were other ways the company rewarded me, they would be taken into consideration, but in most cases the paycheck is the only one.
In addition to money I expect respect for my work, but that'll never show up on the radar of management when it comes to determining your value amongst the bean counters so I can't ignore the money.
Admin
I used to work for a University. All salaries made by employees were publically posted online. I loved that.
Admin
Admin
I'll admit that there's good and bad in both situations. Either way, you acquire new skills. It's just that the skillset isn't the same. What works for one type of companies doesn't seem to work for the other, and vice versa. My impression is that learning, and using, new technologies happens more naturally at small companies. Large places tend to have huge, stable systems in place that are too big to upgrade.
Admin
OP says "It is getting better- women between the ages of 20 and 24 make about 93% of what men make for the same job".
Is it just me, or does it feel as an indicator that things are NOT getting better, but simply the salary gap is small at the beginning and then explodes at the (modern average) child-bearing age ?
Admin
Admin
Christy, I'll posit that everything you say is true, and that you'd be a good employee, coworker and boss (or at least, that your shortcomings would have no correlation to your sex), and that once I got to know you I'd have no qualms about having you as any of those three.
But in my years in IT I have seen women get away with crap that would never be tolerated from a man. I have seen a woman who couldn't do math at my 7th grade level put in charge of a (small) aerospace project, and allowed to shift the blame for her mistakes onto her subordinates. Of the technically incompetent, ethically empty middle managers I've seen, the majority have been female even in male-dominated environments, especially in companies that boasted about diversity and "breaking the glass ceiling". I have seen women play for sympathy with soft voices and downcast eyes when they were in the wrong and get it. I have seen more than one female colleague burst into tears when she couldn't get her way, and to my shame I've caved (which I guess makes me part of the problem). I have been accused of sexual harassment by a woman who imagined I was stalking her (emphasis on "imagined", I wasn't interested in her and had never so much as asked her out)-- I had to spend months fighting that; she was not punished.
For that reason, I do feel wary about female coworkers and subordinates, and downright alarmed when I get a female boss. Although I have no problem at all working with (or under) a woman who knows a technical field better than I do, and I think I have always made fair, sex-indifferent hiring recommendations, I am happier -- at first -- when the result is that I'll be working with men, and if not for my sense of fair play I'd hire that way and pay a premium for it. Every coworker like you makes this feeling weaker; every one like her and her and her makes it stronger.
It is quite possible that men display equally egregious sex-linked misbehavior, and I'm just not seeing it. But when I see it I speak out against it, and I just don't see women speaking openly against other women. That's what it'll take to make me truly not care whether the new sysadmin is an XX or an XY.
Admin
A buddy was slid a job offer by the HR person. He then said, "Before I look at this keep in mind that even though it is against company policy I will know half the salaries in development within a week. If anyone is paid 5% more for doing the same job or if anyone is paid more for a lesser job I will quit on the spot." The HR person took back the offer. My bud was a bit worried that it was a permanent take-back. 10 minutes later the HR person came back with an offer. Months later the HR person confessed that the offer went up $25,000. Needless to say my bud had a collection of skills that they were desperate to get.
Admin
Sure - there is a gap in pay between women and men. However, after analyzing the specific choices that affect a salary, you will find that men and women tend to make different choices - each with an impact on his/her expected salary.
This book (link below) explains these specific choices and roughly how much they influence a wage. Reading this, gives anyone (man or woman) a good gameplan for how they would like to balance their work/life choices: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Men-Earn-More-Startling/dp/0814472109/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1349603709&sr=8-4
Although.. if I go by my experiences (about 20 years in the finance/IT industry) there is a gap; - a woman optimizing her earning potential in my industry, will mostly out-earn a man doing the same. I believe that this is starting to become visible, as mentioned in increasingly in the press (for instance: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/workplace/2010-09-01-single-women_n.htm ). On a few occasions when I've been in direct negotiations with potential senior staff, I have found myself directly ordered to "hire the female" even though the female with the lowest wage requirement was demanding more than 50 % of the salary demanded by her male competition (and at all times did the woman have significantly less of a track-record than the men).
Admin
That's a really interesting suggestion. Please try it out and let us know what happened !
I've got a sneaky suspicion that you'll find that as a woman, you'll get more replies than a man.
I remember a headhunter who told me straight:
Admin
Check glassdoor.com for your area at least
Admin
That is true. Also, once an employee is undervalued, a company will always undervalue that employee. They don't just suddenly say "hey, he's doing great work and deserves 40% more" it's more like "we can't give out more than 10% raise for that position"
Admin
The studies I've seen say it both ways.
Some of the studies do look at lifetime earnings and utterly fail to take into account total hours worked and things like that. Criticizing those studies is fair as you're trying to make apples and oranges comparisons.
However, at least some studies of university profs salaries found that women do earn less in even when only looking at women later in their careers who had not ever had kids. IIRC the least discrepancy was in IT fields though.
Admin
At IBM before the tech bubble burst, I had just left to go to a startup, but was having lunch with my old teammates. I had heard of a couple IBMers getting a $50K retention bonus (you had to give it back if you left the company within two years). So I asked my friends, "What are you going to do with your bonus?". Turned out, IBM was only giving the bonus to younger developers who they thought might leave the company.
One guy gave his notice that same day....the other guy took until the end of the week.
Sure, talking about money might make someone mad, but maybe they SHOULD be mad.
Admin
I haven't seen a lot of headhunters giving useful ranges... I get vague numbers anywhere from half what I'm making to twice what I make, but that doesn't really make them all reasonable or ones that would follow through.
Admin
As a female web developer, I made exactly half of what my equal-level male counterparts did. I know, because I was close with the other devs on my team -- and as the only female web dev at the time, they coached me on a few things. If you feel like you're getting shafted, you probably are. And bringing that up to your management probably won't help. The only way out of this situation is to move into another position and demand to be paid what you are worth. You can find out median salary ranges for employees in your line of work, doing what you do, in your area through Salary.com.
Some employers feel like they shouldn't make as much of an investment in their female employees because many women cut off their potential by leaving the workforce to have children. Consequently, their more sound investment is perceived to be in the male employee who may stay with the company through transitional life phases. It sucks -- but that's at least part of what it is.
I will never, ever let another employer take advantage of me the way my previous company did. You have to do your research. And you have to get out of there.
Admin
You show up to work, you get paid. Contract complete, justice is served, there is no problem to speak of. If you don't like it, leave.
These are the basic rules of economics for--wage earners.
Admin
There's only one not-that-offensive way to start talking about salary: "I'm making X."
Admin
The 'paygap' is most definitely NOT real, or at the very most, it is minimal.
Look at the link first link from the BLS you posted in this article - I mean, actually READ it this time, don't just skim it. There is zero attempt made in the study to compare apples to apples.
The fact is, yes, if you add up the salaries of all the men in the country, and divide it by their number, you will get a higher number than if you do that for all the ladies. Why? Because men and women CHOOSE DIFFERENT CAREERS. Women (on average!) spend fewer hours per day, per week, per year, and per lifetime at work. As a result, as they get older their total experience in their field is lower than that of their male counterparts, hence, lower pay.
If men and women did the same jobs, in the same numbers (which is the only way that 71% number could possibly be accurate), then the following could NOT possibly be true: men make up 92% of workplace deaths (http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfch0010.pdf). So, women and men choose different jobs.
Still don't believe me? Ask yourself: when is the last time you saw a female garbage collector? Sewer worker? Power line worker? Certainly they exist, but they are few and far between.
Admin
Well, I don't know how does it look in your country, but where I live female is significantly worse worker than male. Why? Couse there are policies that make them more priviliged. For example, women tend to take care of children, wich means long, payed vacation, while men don't. In case of exhausting, devastating or dangerous job women have strict limits, while men will pull as much as you tell him, and nobody cares about limits. Also, you can't fire male worker since his vacation started, and you can't fire female worker since she requested vacation, as well as you can't fire pregnant worker. And then, she will request payed vacation. And when she's not pregnant you have to deal with PMS. Statisticaly gender DOES have impact on the job getting done, so I'm not surprised that average salary also varies.
Admin
As far as i know, the only way to get a decent raise after acquiring technical skills is to quit your job and get another one. It cost nothing to ask, but be prepared to get denied and have to look for a new job.