Canadian HR Reporter

PM40065782 RO9496 June 15, 2015 INSIDE QUESTIONING BIG DATA There can be big bene ts, but are we measuring the right things? Damaging verdict It's not a good idea to charge a worker for equipment damage page 3 Unhappy hour More women are indulging in binge drinking for work page 6 Playing to win Coaching is an essential habit for good managers page 10 page 16 Reddit CEO Ellen Pao (left) leaves a San Francisco courthouse in March, having launched a gender discrimination lawsuit against her former employer. Credit: Stephen Lam (Reuters) No room for haggling Reddit CEO bans salary negotiations BY LIZ BERNIER IT'S an unpleasant fact but a per- sistent one — women consistently tend to earn less than men. In fact, women earn about 24 per cent less, according to a global average calculated by the U.N. Women Re- port released this year. Over her lifetime, the average woman will earn just one-half of what a male counterpart earns. Ellen Pao, interim CEO of Red- dit — and the former plaintiff in a high-profi le Silicon Valley gender discrimination lawsuit — wants to change that. She made the bold move of banning salary negotia- tions for new employees, in an ef- fort to create greater pay equity. Pao's reasoning is that a signifi - cant body of research shows men tend to negotiate much more ag- gressively than women — one po- tential factor behind the wage gap. "Men negotiate harder than women do and sometimes women get penalized when they do nego- tiate. So, as part of our recruiting process, we don't negotiate with candidates," Pao told the Wall Street Journal. "We come up with an off er that we think is fair. If you want more equity, we'll let you swap a little bit of your cash salary for equity, but we aren't going to reward people who are better negotiators with more compensation. We ask peo- ple what they think about diver- sity, and we did weed people out because of that." Pao deserves credit for attempt- ing a new solution to an age-old problem, said Katie Donovan, salary and career negotiation con- sultant and founder of Equal Pay Negotiations in Boston. " ere's defi nitely a need to try new things that haven't been tried ELEMENT > pg. 8 Off -duty tracking off side, say legal experts California case involving GPS raises privacy concerns BY SARAH DOBSON A CALIFORNIA case involving the 24-7 GPS tracking of an employee has many people north of the border wondering if the same situation could happen here. In a lawsuit fi led in the Superior Court of the State of California in May, Myrna Arias made a com- plaint for several damages, one being invasion of privacy, against her former employer. As a sales executive and account manager, she and other employees were asked to download an app onto their smartphones in April 2014 that tracked the exact loca- tion of the devices. When questioned, the regional vice-president of sales admitted employees would be monitored while off -duty, according to the lawsuit. But Arias objected, con- tending it was an invasion of her privacy and likening the app to a prisoner's ankle bracelet. In late April, Arias uninstalled the app and, on May 5, she was fi red. She fi led the suit one year later, contending her whereabouts and conduct while off -duty were private and highly confi dential, and a reasonable person would want to maintain that privacy. Privacy cases will evolve as tech- nology evolves but when it comes to Arias' situation, it's hard to fath- om how a privacy commissioner in British Columbia or Alberta (which have similar privacy legis- lation) could fi nd this reasonable, said Nicole Skuggedal, an associate at Lawson Lundell in Vancouver. "If you had the ability to go in and monitor an employee, what they're doing outside of the work- place — that I cannot see as being reasonable." And while some commentary on the U.S. case suggested it's OK to be monitored during work as long as there's privacy after work, that also is diff erent for Canada, she said. "In Canada, employees don't check their privacy rights at the door — we have a right to privacy in the workplace as well." Canada has a more robust pri- vacy framework, according to Da- vid Fraser, a partner at McInnes Cooper in Halifax. "So making somebody have it on 24-7… unless that person is on call and meant to be available at a moment's notice, I can't imagine that a privacy regulator in Canada would fi nd that to be reasonable. And, in fact, it might even creep into an area where it could be a EMPLOYEES > pg. 2 LGBT community still facing misperceptions Coming out at work, discrimination still issues: Poll BY LIZ BERNIER MANY employers are well-in- tentioned about creating a truly diverse and inclusive workplace, but it's possible they're not quite getting it right. at's because there are persis- tent misconceptions and misun- derstandings about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) employees, according to a sur- vey by the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion (CCDI) produced in partnership with the University of Guelph Sexual and Gender Diversity Research Lab, and Pride at Work Canada. ere are still signifi cant diff er- ences between heterosexual and LGBT respondents around the importance of being out at work, found the survey of 1,400 Cana- dians. Nearly one-half of hetero- sexual and cisgender respondents indicated it is not important to be out at work compared to less than 20 per cent of LGBT respondents. "We really see a distinction between what individuals who identify as LGBTQ+ and domi- nant groups, so individuals who are heterosexual, cisgender… identify with," said omas Sas- so, a researcher at the University of Guelph and co-author of the study. "There's this really intricate distinction or confusion going on between what individuals in the workplace are prioritizing and what they're experiencing." e survey found 33.4 per cent of sexual minorities are out to ev- eryone at work, in comparison to 13.6 per cent of gender minorities who are out to everyone, said Mi- chael Bach, founder and CEO of CCDI in Toronto. Just over eight per cent of sexual minorities said they don't want to come out to anyone at work, com- pared to 25.4 per cent of gender minorities. This study is important not only because it sheds light on the realities of workplace inclusion but because it presents a specifi - cally Canadian perspective, said Colin Druhan, executive direc- tor of Pride at Work Canada in Toronto. "A lot of times, when we look at data on the number of people who are out at work, people's thoughts and feelings on being out at work, LACK > pg. 17

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