Taking on Gender Disparity in the Job Interview
For job applicants, the moment when an
interview turns to questions of salary has always been a difficult one, but the
State of California has joined some of its fellows in making that moment a bit
less fraught.
That relief comes in the form of a law, signed by Governor Jerry Brown this
past October, that went into effect on January 1, 2018. The new law prohibits
prospective employers from asking about applicants’ past compensation,
including both salary and benefits.
While applicable to all applicants, regardless of gender, the law is aimed
squarely at countering gender imbalances in workplace compensation that
adversely affect women and that have done so for as long as records have been
kept.
- In 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women in California who
were full-time workers earned a median income of $814 per week.
- Men, on the
other hand, had median weekly earnings of $925, leaving women earning only 88
percent of what men were paid.
- Amazingly enough in a time when gender equity has gained increasing attention, these numbers are actually a step down from the figures reported in 2005, when women earned 90.2 percent of their male counterparts’ pay.
Given that disparity, regardless of its level, the salary question posed in job interviews inevitably puts women at a disadvantage. Their lower salaries perpetuate themselves and follow applicants from job to job. It is a kind of discrimination that harms the applicant before she has even had the chance to start work, and a kind that would be difficult, if not impossible, to counter without legislative protection.
Women seeking jobs in California have a leg up
It’s relevant to women conducting a job search in California that business interests have consistently opposed the California law, and similar laws throughout the country, on the ground that it prevented employers from obtaining useful and relevant information about their prospective hires.Governor Brown, in fact, had failed to sign a previous version of the bill, one that arrived on his desk in 2015 at around the time he signed the California Fair Pay Act, a law that addressed the wage disparity by requiring that men and women receive equal pay for substantially similar work. While Brown hasn’t offered detailed reasons for his seeming change of heart, one possible explanation is that he wanted to give the earlier law’s effects some time to operate before adding another big piece aimed at solving the gender disparity puzzle.
And it is a big piece, addressing a truly systematic example of how discrimination can be maintained under the guise of seemingly innocuous and “perfectly reasonable” employer behavior. Entrenched discrimination often finds a hiding place in those very qualities. When employers ask about past compensation, as reasonable as that may seem, that question ties applicants to their histories. When their histories are shaped by disparities that are irrelevant to job performance and that arise from some equally irrelevant characteristic like gender, things never change. After all, there’s no incentive for them to change without this law.
Making progress nationwide
California is neither the first nor the only state to try to tackle the problem with legislation. Similar laws are in effect in Massachusetts, Oregon, Delaware and in a number of cities, including San Francisco. Similar laws are in the works in a number of other states, including Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont. It may be too much to expect that those laws will sail through without opposition, but this is a change that is long overdue, and there’s certainly momentum on its side as more states get on board a change that’s clearly beneficial.If you’re one of the happy applicants who is interviewing in a state where the question is forbidden, note that the prohibition only applies to the employer, not to the prospective employee. If you think there’s some benefit to disclosing your past compensation, you are absolutely free to do so. Only the employer’s hands are tied.
And if you're not in a protected state?
What of applicants in states that haven’t made the change and where
questions of salary range are still allowed? In those benighted states, applicants
have no protection, and they need to tread carefully if the question is asked.
When that happens, the best strategy may be to turn the tables in the
interview, avoiding the question by asking with all the tact you can muster
about the salary range that’s being offered by the employer who has brought up
the subject in the first place.For many people, salary is one of the more difficult areas to cover in a job interview. These new laws won’t eliminate that difficulty altogether, just as they won’t eliminate gender discrimination all by themselves, but they are at least a step in the direction of addressing a gender disparity that’s been with us for as long as women have been in the workplace – in other words, as long as there’s been a workplace at all.
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