Without salary negotiation, the company gets to choose the price. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley has shown that it is willing to collude to keep that price down. Therefore, when companies argue that they're banning salary negotiation to "promote equality", you should assume that this equality is merely a gimmick to hide the true purpose: lower wages.
If there really is a difference in negotiating ability between women and men, it would seem far more beneficial to teach women how to negotiate for a fair wage rather than abolish the entire thing altogether. In fact, teach all employees to quantify their abilities and how much value they will provide to their employer. Demonstrate that if companies are unwilling to pay them a fair wage, that they should not devalue their employment.
But the most recent steps toward banning negotiation will ultimately hurt all employees. When companies like Apple, Google, and other Silicon Valley companies agree not to hire employees from each other, and threaten to replace tech workers in the US with less-expensive H1B visas, we should question their true motives. This newest idea of "banning negotiation" is nothing more than another tactic used by a profit-maximizing entity to reduce costs.
I don't think "teaching women to negotiate" is practical. Is Google or Facebook supposed to send candidates to negotiation classes before offer negotiation time? Is there evidence that a training class can overcome whatever combination of nature and nurture causes the discrepancy?
Let the market drive the compensation level. If "the compensation for the position - take it or leave it" is too low, then the company won't be able to hire anyone, and they will have to alter it over time.
If it's "take it or leave it" from the employee, you wind up underpaying people with humility, and overpay people who are overconfident.
Note: I'm not at one of the large companies that have been in these lawsuits, and lost an internal fight to move to the "one price" policy that I'm advocating for. I'm doing my best to implement it in my part of the organization, and even there it doesn't always work.
Of course Google and Facebook are not going to send candidates to negotiation classes; they would stand to lose from such an arrangement.
Rather, there are many ways to approach this:
1. Salary negotiation could be included within curriculum at CS schools. (Schools would love if alumni made more money!)
2. Techniques could be included in books (like "Soft Skills"), podcasts, etc.
3. The culture in Silicon Valley could emphasize the importance of negotiating a fair wage.
Left to their own devices, companies WILL exploit those who believe that negotiation is "bad". Companies might not even do so intentionally, but might do so merely by hiring the cheapest employees who have the highest skills.
A side effect is that even if only 75% of employees negotiate to higher wages, the "market rate salary" for employees will increase. If, instead, 75% of employees did NOT negotiate, you'd see a depression in wages.
> 1. Salary negotiation could be included within curriculum at CS schools.
This is such a good idea. The modern school system oscillates between industrial training and academic pursuit, and very practical skills like this one (or householding finances) which could directly benefit the actual person, are terribly neglected.
What is it that stops teachers from talking about everyday matters related to money? Is it their own sense of inadequacy on the subject? Fear of letting out how much they (don't) make? Is it "political pressure"? Or simply that they love their academic subjects so much, they'd rather not talk about more prosaic stuff?
Taught software dev for four years in higher ed. I always had modules on resume/cover letter, behavioral interviews, core value matching, self promotion, salary negotiation, and other job-related things.
Student feedback always suggested these were incredibly valuable lessons.
> Is there evidence that a training class can overcome whatever combination of nature and nurture causes the discrepancy?
There is also the issue that the same behaviour is seen differently when coming from men and women. What is assertive in a man can be aggressive and offputting in a woman. Which means you'd have to have different kinds of courses for different genders, and it only starts there (more minority groups with less studies of what happens when they act the same as a white male). So, there is even more of a hurdle for potential training classes to overcome.
Negotiations still take place, they just happen in a different format. For example if the Technical Lead is having trouble hiring due to low salaries for the positions, he would make the case to management that they need to raise the salary range for those positions. And the added benefit to this format (in a transparent organization) current employees would also get a raise which would probably help with attrition.
I think for very senior roles, individual negotiations still might make sense, as the value prop of those hires is highly variable and can have big impacts on the organization. But for roles like Software Eng I, and Software Eng II, etc... in the long run it is better for morale, attrition, and equality to use defined salary ranges. And you can still use bonuses to adjust compensation based on performance.
In these cases, though, we're relying on the employer to institute those salaries. However, the employer usually does not have an incentive to pay more if they can get the same thing for cheaper.
The employer isn't magically immune to market forces simply because they move to a transparent salary system. If they are significantly under-paying their employees, and they are not making up the difference via other benefits (shorter working hours, bonuses, etc...) then they are going to run into a lot of trouble hiring and holding onto employees.
And just because a company has defined salary ranges doesn't mean employees have no voice in the matter. If they feel those salaries are not keeping up with market rates, they can make that known to management, or they can go find greener pastures.
In this discussion you're assuming the "employer" as a separate entity from the "employees". This was an enormously hard dichotomy for us to overcome, because it required me and my cofounder to let go of control over the salary structure and hand that over to the company as a whole. That requires a huge amount of trust that "the employees" care about the company as much as we do, really want it to be a success, are capable of informing themselves to make good decisions on behalf of the company.
It is a very worthwhile path, but it certainly is not easy for the founders (and is probably impossible in a large traditional, top down, public company where "the owners" are a faceless group of shareholders who definitely want to believe they are in control - even though they definitely are not).
At this point, we (my cofounder and I) have pretty much zero control over how much people are paid in the company. We provide advice to people making those decisions but we are not the decision-makers. And the conclusion of that experiment is that people actually seem to care far more about getting the arbitrary salary formula right than we do, so I believe it was very much the right choice to let go of this lever and let the company design its own salary structure.
Thanks to this situation (however difficult it was to get there), the problem you outline is not there because there is no "employer" entity separate from the employees that could collude or have incentives different from the employees.
Women can get (possibly unintentionally, possibly not) punished for exhibiting negotiation and leadership traits that are valued in men.
A friend recently had an offer, ready to sign, but the salary was lower than she wanted. She wrote back asking if there was room to move upward. She had the offer withdrawn.
Sometimes it's worse than that -- women are seen as a cheap ticket.
I remember one of my first colleagues as a professional in this industry had to fight and fight to eke out a lousy 3% raise, despite being s superstar employee.
Later I found out that she was making 30% less than me, and They had just threw a ton of equity at me to try and keep me from leaving.
> When companies like Apple, Google, and other Silicon Valley companies agree [..], and threaten to replace tech workers in the US with less-expensive H1B visas [..]
When did these Silicon Valley companies threaten to hire less-expensive H1B visas? Do you have any citation on this? Are the H1Bs working for these companies paid less than non-H1Bs? Looking at the publicly available salary data for these companies - AmaGoogFaceSoft kind - seem to pay their H1Bs very well.
If there really is a difference in negotiating ability between women and men, it would seem far more beneficial to teach women how to negotiate for a fair wage rather than abolish the entire thing altogether. In fact, teach all employees to quantify their abilities and how much value they will provide to their employer. Demonstrate that if companies are unwilling to pay them a fair wage, that they should not devalue their employment.
But the most recent steps toward banning negotiation will ultimately hurt all employees. When companies like Apple, Google, and other Silicon Valley companies agree not to hire employees from each other, and threaten to replace tech workers in the US with less-expensive H1B visas, we should question their true motives. This newest idea of "banning negotiation" is nothing more than another tactic used by a profit-maximizing entity to reduce costs.