[jncfhnb]

As someone who’s done a bunch of DEI analyses for companies, I don’t really believe you understood what you’re saying happened. That really does not make sense. It would be a massive organizational change for some niche cherry picked reporting stats that few people look at. Does not sound plausible at all. This stuff is genuinely hard to implement.

You absolutely need to normalize for level when determine pay discrepancies. As well as hiring, retention, and promotion rates. It’s silly to suggest otherwise. Frankly a lot of companies fail to do this and are convinced they have huge problems when in fact things are pretty fair at the individual level and on track to gradually diversify over time. But you can’t just snap your fingers and diversify the top of an org. It takes a long time.

[korkoros]

I work for a federal defense contractor that is required to prove in Department of Labor audits that pay is not discriminatory. The possibility of losing those federal contracts is an existential threat to the company. Definitely not "niche cherry picked reporting stats that few people look at."

The significant restructuring (affected several hundred people) that you describe did in fact occur.

[jncfhnb]

Hmm, no, still don’t believe it. That’s just absurd. I just refuse to believe that they systematically demoted women / promoted men to try and obfuscate pay differences at original levels.

This idea is surely much more expensive to implement than just paying the women more. It’s also fairly easily discovered by an audit of any competence or whistleblower. And the women would surely have a strong negative reaction to this which is an operational risk of them just leaving.

What you are proposing happened is illegal discrimination to begin with, but it’s also really difficult to do. Seems more likely a willing company would prefer to simply lie

[moneywoes]

Very interested, what type of analysis do you do?

[jncfhnb]

Most of the time it’s companies concerned that they’re not doing a good job on equal opportunity stuff. Most of the time (mostly east coast white collar jobs) these orgs are doing just fine. A lot are concerned because top level stats suggest minorities are doing worse. But when you look at hiring, retention, promotions, comp, employee engagement/happiness surveys, they tend to be pretty equal when normalized. Companies that are interested in doing these analyses that I’ve looked at are generally doing the right thing and are on track to diversify to the maximum extent that the candidate pole sensibly allows over time, which is pretty slow, but it’s there. Generally speaking if you’re in a liberal cohort of people you’re not going to see a lot of impact structural biases that hinder folks at the organizational stat level. You very well might at the individual manager level and that’s basically impossible to catch aside from personal conversations and astute leadership.I wouldn’t generalize this across all areas or industries mind you.

To some extent imo, provided an org isn’t overtly discriminatory, the most important thing is to make sure that hiring channels include diverse sources for candidates.