[marvin]

This is happening at my place right now. Leadership has dictated that priority is now to even out gender imbalances rather than giving raises. Since the women in our company are heavily skewed towards lower-paying roles (QA, customer support), this means the company will avoid giving raises to the roles that actually are in demand and have strong salary growth elsewhere. Needless to say, those of us with options have started looking.

Of course, everyone who gets a competitive offer elsewhere will get a counteroffer, so this policy only applies where it’s convenient.

[mcv]

I don't get this kind of destructive attitude. Surely the sensible thing to do when you want more equality and women are skewed towards lower paying jobs, is to hire more women in higher paying jobs?

I'm all for paying people in lower-end jobs better, mind you, but using this as an excuse to hurt salary growth seems like it's intended to discredit the whole idea of gender equality. Well, unless the people involved are provably overpaid, like CEOs tend to be. But somehow I suspect the CEO is still getting his excessive raises.

[marvin]

I don't think the real intention is equality at all. I think it's scoring PR points via virtue signaling, and reducing expenses as a bonus. (Who would dare oppose a move that appears to increase equality, even if it hurts their wallet?)

[faceplanted]

> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

Very simply, the measure of women being paid less is useful on wide scale in demonstrating women's position in society, but it doesn't go into the complexities of the issue, so aiming to get your company more equal on that measure can mean so many things as to make it a useless target unless you understand the situation.

[mcv]

Excellent point. Reminds me of the Bechdel Test, a simple test to show how poorly women are treated in movies. To pass the test, the movie has to have at least two named women talking to each other about something other than a man. It should be trivial to pass, yet a surprising number of movies don't.

But that test doesn't mean that movies that pass the test are better or more feminist than movies that don't. Terribly sexist/misogynist movies can still easy pass it, whereas Gravity, a movie starring only Sandra Bullock for most of its duration, doesn't pass it because there's nobody else in the movie to talk to.

Similarly, the point of calling attention to the gender wage gap should be to pay women better and give them better access to higher paying jobs, not to deny men raises.

Equality should lift people up, not push them down.