Canadian HR Reporter

CANADIAN HR REPORTER June 15, 2015 8 NEWS before because (the gender pay gap) has stuck around the same percentage for around a decade now… but not knowing how they decide on the actual offer is the question mark." Pay equity continues to be an issue, said Robert Levasseur, principal and senior consultant at McDowall Associates in Toronto. "Legislatures have been trying to deal with pay equity issues for prob- ably 30 years now, and there really hasn't been that much progress." Is negotiation necessary? Banning negotiation outright may seem like a novel idea, but it's not one Sophie Fleming agrees with. "Negotiation is a natural mar- ket force and in a competitive en- vironment where organizations are fighting for talent, to ban sal- ary negotiations, I don't think is the right approach to engaging talent. I think equity is really the responsibility of the organization and it starts with organizations having really sound approaches to grade their salary structures that provide guidelines around what we pay for certain job lev- els, and then having sound salary administration policies to address things like what's the hiring rate and what's the promotion rate and how salary progresses through ranges," said Fleming, senior con- sultant at Hay Group in Toronto. "It lies with the organization to have the discipline to negotiate fairly within the guidelines they have established." Some organizations have more of a deal-making culture than oth- ers, said Fleming. "But, the reality is, taking nego- tiation away or banning negotia- tion, I think, will take away the or- ganization's ability to really attract and retain their top talent," she said. "Employees who are strong negotiators… organizations want to seek them out and there's noth- ing wrong with that. I'm a woman and I've always negotiated my pay and I would still want to be able to do that whenever I get recruited." It's unclear whether doing away with negotiations will accomplish anything for the average employ- ee, said Levasseur. "(Pao) is speaking very much as a senior executive. When senior executives are hired, they usually walk in with their team of lawyers and the company walks in with their team of lawyers, and it turns into a real negotiation. When reg- ular folks like you and me apply for a job, they usually tell you what the salary scale is and where they want to start you. You could prob- ably ask for a couple of percentage points more but there really isn't that much room to move. So I re- ally don't get what she's driving at other than her own situation — she's the CEO of a major U.S. company… that's not your average employee," he said. e best way to get at pay eq- uity is to have more women in jobs that are male-dominated, he said. "Wage discrimination is prob- ably going to start disappearing when there isn't a preconceived notion of whether a job is 'for men' or 'for women.'" Inherited pay gaps Perhaps a more pressing concern is eliminating the reliance on an employee's past salary to inform the current one, said Donovan. "(Employers should) make sure the way the original offers are made takes away other biases that have been put into the hir- ing process over the years. So, for instance, not knowing where a future employee comes from and their particular history in hiring — you don't know whether anyone has been a person who's been on the other side of a gender bias or a racial bias and then paid inappropriately because of that," she said. "If you use at all previous salary — which is very common in the hiring process — as part of the decision-making process on what to offer them or even whether to give them the job, you're going to perpetuate and compound the unequal pay that has previously been put upon them." Looking at jobs where women consistently are making less is a biased question to ask — so just get rid of it, said Donovan. "Make your decision on what you're going to offer an employee based on their actual experience and education, and their ability to do the job," she said. "e other one is, in advertising the job, to actually put a minimum or range of what the job would pay, so that they are informed." Secrecy versus transparency Another critical issue is the ele- ment of secrecy that shrouds com- pensation practices, said Donovan. "We're consumers of our jobs, so why don't we have some kind of openness on what the pricing is?" she said. "It doesn't mean you have to be transparent on every single person's pay, it just means you're not going to fire someone (or oth- erwise discipline them) because they shared their pay." ere's very little transparency around salaries, said Levasseur. "If you're going to join a union- ized environment, they plop the collective agreement down in front of you and you know exactly where you stand. Well, you don't in a non-bargaining situation. And the irony is that senior execu- tives, their compensation in large public companies is publicly avail- able yet, lower down, it's all con- fidential. So it makes the whole process very secretive," he said. "Maybe more disclosure of salary grade and so on might be helpful." at would also remove the po- tential for dishonesty on the em- ployer's side, said Donovan. "When women do negotiate, they're lied to more than men… and one of the most common mistruths is that, 'You're already paid the most at that job.' Well, if the company has pay secrecy, it's virtually impossible to find out if that is wrong." Element of secrecy 'shrouds' compensation REDDIT < pg. 1

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