[notacoward]

I've been a fully remote worker for almost a decade. I appreciate the fact that my compensation is on a scale implicitly tied to a higher cost of living than where I am. Nonetheless...

Companies don't set pay to be fair. They set pay to attract and retain the talent they need. Otherwise, companies that employ people in India wouldn't have a 3x pay spread for people doing the same work (hi Red Hat). Software developers in general wouldn't make more than, say, plumbers. The potential employees' perception of fairness does come into the picture a bit, but that takes a distant back seat to good old supply and demand. If a company needs to pay more to attract and retain talent in area X, they pay more. If they need to pay less to attract and retain talent in area Y, they pay less. This is just basic business. Companies pay local prices for real estate or electricity, and they pay local prices for personnel.

The only thing different about remote workers is that there's no single local standard to measure against. So you have to tailor things more specifically to the individual. But if you think that you should pay remote workers more or less because they're more or less productive, or because you're saving money by not having to provide them an office, you're forgetting the purpose of pay. Attract and retain. Supply and demand. That's it.

P.S. I'm not trying to make a moral argument here. I'm certainly no laissez-fair "markets uber alles" greed funnel. Quite the contrary. Companies are free to make their decisions on some different basis and more power to them, but there's no escaping the fact that most will cut costs wherever they can. Of the places they might cut corners, geographic salary differences are far from the worst option. If and when salary fairness gets to the top of the list, I'd start with not paying women less.