Eliminating the Gender Pay Gap

Hiring Practices

Your organization may also prevent the gender pay gap by reviewing hiring practices. Women's pay sometimes suffers for the following reasons:

• starting wages
• turnover rate
• position in wage structure

Starting wages

This may be an overlooked area in which pay discrimination occurs. The wage rate that a person accepts on his or her first job, and especially the first job with a particular organization, influences the wage rate of the employee from then on, since increases in pay are most often a percentage increase over current wages.

In the past, there was a tendency to offer women not only lower level, non-STEM jobs but lower wages compared to men for the same job.

Although this practice is illegal under the Equal Pay Act, it is very hard to detect, since job offers are clearly made within a particular pay range. The organization would need to keep track of the average pay offer for each job category for men and women to control this tendency.

Women exacerbate this by being willing to accept lower pay than men for equivalent jobs.

This may be particularly true for women re-entering the work force after being out to raise children, since they may feel unsure of their talents at the time. Once they are back working and feel confident, they are still saddled with the lower pay level created by the salary at which they began.

One study in this area showed that women were offered lower wages on average than men for a particular job. To compound the error, they were more likely to be assigned more routine tasks and then given lower second-year increases than men. A court case that illustrates the problem of women getting behind men in wages based on prior pay history is Kouba v. Allstate.

Although Allstate won this case, it raised awareness of the variation in pay history between men and women.

Turnover rate

Many women's jobs have a high turnover rate, so few women get to the top of the pay range. This also lowers women's average wages.

Solution to Discriminatory Hiring Practices

The best solution to these problems is to make efforts to hire women for male-dominated positions while also reviewing the social group norms of the work environments to ensure no harassment or hostile conditions transpire. This starts, though, with encouraging more women to enter STEM education programs, as these are higher-paying careers. This should increase the likelihood of higher starting wages, greater longevity and more advancement opportunities.

Career paths for women's jobs need to be opened up so more movement can be made, but most important is to help reduce the job segregation of women through education and development programs to provide opportunities to be placed in male-dominated jobs. This is seen by most people as the best way to reduce pay discrepancies.