RESTRICT: 11 states make it illegal for interviewers to ask applicants about prior salaries.
By Guinivere Kimber, Staff Writer
This year, a total of 11 states, including California, instituted salary history bans, making it illegal for companies to ask potential new employees about financial earnings at their previous jobs. These laws are aimed at ending the pay discrimination cycle, and depending on the state, even prohibit employers from using previous salaries as an ‘anchor’ to base an applicant’s new salary off of, a process Harvard Law School (HLS) calls “anchoring bias.”
The cycle works like this: A company holds interviews for qualified potential employees. When the interview turns to potential starting salaries, each applicant is asked how much they previously earned because their new salary will be based on that number. This is where anchoring bias comes in. According to “What is Anchoring Negotiation” on the HLS Daily Blog, employers will “give too much weight to the first number put forth in a discussion and then inadequately adjust from that starting point.” This means, that even though both applicants are qualified for the position, the male applicant would receive a higher starting salary than the female applicant because his previous salary was already higher. This circumstance is only made more likely due to the fact that women who work full time still earn about 82 percent less of what men do, a calculation by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) that illustrates the pay gap. This cycle continues leaving women with no way to catch up.
Mary Pollock, a government relations coordinator for the Michigan Chapter of the American Association of University Women, explains this disadvantage that women often struggle with throughout their career. “[Employers] aren’t basing starting salaries on experience. [They] want to find out the cheapest they can get an employee for, so they offer a bit more than the person is currently making,” says Pollock. That salary directly affects “[…] how much Social Security you have, and how much 401(k) you have, and how much pension you have.”
As 2019 approaches, the pay gap remains a controversial issue, and the statistics are available for those who look. Women are continuing to earn less than men, with discrimination and gender bias acting as two leading causes. To see this, consider the differences in jobs requiring similar education and skill, but are separated by gender. The median earnings of information technology managers, a profession that tends to be mostly men, are 27 percent higher than those of human resources managers, which tends to be mostly women, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Janitors (typically male) make 22 percent more than maids or housekeepers (typically female). As soon as the female workforce enters a field of work, “It just doesn’t look like it’s as important to the bottom line or requires as much skill,” says Paula England, a sociology professor at New York University. “Gender bias sneaks into those decisions.”
One victim of this discrepancy of starting salaries is math teacher Aileen Rizo, who discovered that her male colleagues with similar jobs were being paid significantly more than she was. When she asked why, Rizo was told that employees’ pay was based on previous salaries, and she had been paid less than her male counterparts earlier in their careers. Rizo sued the Fresno, California school district that she worked for and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in her favor, declaring that prior salary cannot be used as justification for a wage gap between male and female employees.
By increasing awareness of the problem, salary history bans might encourage other changes as well, Kate Bahn, an economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth who studies gender and the labor market, explains. “A lot of it is just sexism, and policy can help drive cultural shifts against sexism.” If the public can learn to see that the issue is how the system views female workers, then real change can begin to occur. It’s time for society to start focusing on what the job is worth, rather than who is applying for it.