Without a doubt we will be taking women seriously in the workplace. More of them are getting degrees and advanced degrees than men.
Equal pay…to me goes beyond gender disparities. I would like to see equal pay for equal work with some adjustment for regional cost of living.
There is some salary threshold above which you can’t compare two people or two roles. Somewhere between $200,000 and half a million a year, you are starting paying people for unique personal skills and connections and not some trainable talent. Not saying these people don’t continue learning but they have something personally special to command that price. Also at that point it should be more pay for performance and a big part of their compensation should be based on concrete metrics and making goals.
Under that limit we should still strive for meritocracy and reward performance but people with similar jobs should be paid similarly. There also should be some correcting mechanism for adjusting the pay for people hired in different times in the business cycle, either the economy’s business cycle or the company’s business cycle. A designer hired cheap at the peak of the depression needs to making as much or more than a designer hired years later to do the same job when candidates were less desperate. It can be a little disturbing to be training someone to do your job who is hired in at a higher rate or to be managing people who are making more money than you. I am not saying that that is never right but it should be the exception.
Back to coding like a girl. Something to run by the girls, I am not one, men like it that pay is not public and we (hubris) always think we are better than the next guy and all the girls (kidding) so we will negotiate better pay and if the pay was public, management would have to keep pay more equal. I am imagining (foolish) that women would prefer that pay rates were public, care to comment?
TEK
