In his autobiography, Alan Greenspan says he did exactly that: he hired underpriced women and made money from not being sexist. Similarly, I have read of a company or agency which does the same thing in highly sexist South Korea, and for other forms of discrimination, we have companies specializing in hiring discriminated-against people on the autism spectrum and making money off the difference.
If you want to prove a market isn’t efficient, simply reliably make excess risk-adjused returns…
I have read of a company or agency which does the same thing in highly sexist South Korea, and for other forms of discrimination
Thanks for including that. This suggests the idea that you could profit off of looking for places where discrimination is greatest and going against the trend. This seems socially valuable too (assuming you’re not capturing all of the gains for yourself, which you probably wouldn’t be). Gwern, if you’re reading this, do you remember which company this was?
Gwern, if you’re reading this, do you remember which company this was?
Not offhand. I believe I read it in the K-blogosphere, a mention of a legal firm or something white-collar like that which made a point of hiring women because South Korea is extremely sexist. I probably excerpted it to my Evernotes, but it’d be buried in thousands of other clippings mentioning Korea.
Yes, those two were anecdotes, not studies. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least bit if there were studies pointing the same way, though, but I’ve never looked: the point is obvious enough that it doesn’t really need to be argued for.
“Employing women who are excluded by their own countries’ labor markets is a growing trend for firms with international branch offices, says Harvard Business School professor Jordan Siegel. He discusses the issue in a new study titled “Multinational Firms, Labor Market Discrimination, and the Capture of Competitive Advantage by Exploiting the Social Divide”, which he co-wrote with Lynn Pyun of MIT and B.Y. Cheon of Hanshin University and the Korea Labor Institute.”
Edit: Oh, or did you mean that what you’d read before was just anecdotes?
Note though that Greenspan did this a very long time ago. It’s plausible that the feminists were right and the market was inefficient decades ago, but they are wrong and the market is efficient contemporaneously.
He paid them more than they would otherwise have made (otherwise, they’d’ve accepted someone else’s job offer). How sexist, offering them better-paying jobs because he wasn’t blinded by misogyny.
“I know you’re just as good as Bob, but I’m only going to pay you 80% what he makes because if you go anywhere else you’ll get paid 70%.” Yeah, no. Though perhaps ‘sexist’ is only partially applicable - ‘exploitative’ or ‘asshole’ is better.
It could totally be in their best interest to take that offer as opposed to another. Doesn’t make the offer (as opposed to an even offer) less reprehensible.
That’s how markets work: exchange only happens if one can gain from it, otherwise one doesn’t do it. Every transaction follows that same structure: ‘I am only going to pay you X which is the current price for something, even though X is lower than my gain from it’. You’re demanding gifts be made, and how is that ethical?
You’re demanding gifts be made, and how is that ethical?
This question sounds like it’s meant to be rhetorical, as if demanding gifts be made is obviously not ethical. But there are quite widely accepted moral systems (utilitarianism, for instance) that do demand that gifts be made in certain cases—sufficiently wealthy people are morally obligated to donate some of their wealth to charity, for instance.
I’m not saying that in the case under discussion Greenspan had an obligation to pay women as much as men were being paid (it’s a complex issue and I’m not sure what I think about it yet), but I do think that simply pointing out that Greenspan had no economic incentive to pay them that much is a pretty unconvincing response to CellBioGuy’s moral contention.
sufficiently wealthy people are morally obligated to donate some of their wealth to charity, for instance.
Yes, under utilitarianism, but I’ve already pointed out that any such imperative would be vastly exceeded by other imperatives.
I’m also not sure whether it works under deontological systems. One way to universalize such a claim is that you should pay people as much as they could earn under any state of affairs, but naturally that leads to you never making money and going broke as it’s equivalent to demanding you give away all gains from trade: ‘John makes me $1000 and currently costs me $500 in salary; however if the job market were much tighter, then in that counterfactual universe I’d be willing to pay him anywhere up to $999 but not higher, so I must morally pay him $999 right now—anything else would be exploitation and discrimination’.
That’s how economics-textbook idealized markets work. In the real world, many things that can be modelled as market transactions don’t behave exactly like economics-textbook market transactions. For instance, sometimes people leave money on the table in an attempt to behave ethically (“I’m not going to pay her less just because she’s a woman and other companies will offer her less!”) or out of prejudice (“That may be her notional market price, but I just don’t trust women to be good team players—she’ll be wanting to leave to have babies or something”) or for any number of other reasons.
CellBioGuy isn’t (so far as I can tell) trying to force employers to pay women the same as they pay men (that would count as “demanding” and might be unethical); he’s merely saying that he thinks they should pay women the same as they pay men. Do you really think there is an ethical problem with saying that? (Er, of course you might disagree, but it looks as if you’re saying more than that: that CellBioGuy is doing something unethical merely by expressing that opinion.)
In some situations that fit this general pattern—things are bad for some group (in this case: women), and someone else has an opportunity to take advantage of their difficult situation in a way that actually helps them a little (in this case: employers who can pay them the going rate and thereby get cheaper employees) -- it’s clearly reasonable to say “Yeah, this looks bad but actually these people are helping this group and all the blame, if any, should go to whoever is responsible for the group’s bad situation.” But here what causes the bad situation is exactly all those employers who choose to pay women less than men whose work is equally valuable to them, and an employer who takes advantage of the situation by paying women exactly the market rate and merely hiring more of them is part of the problem. (Slightly less so than the other employers who aren’t even preferring to hire women in this situation. But still, part of the problem.)
It seems to me that the argument you’re employing here can be used to defend the continuation of absolutely any sort of pay inequality. If somehow a society gets into a state where people with blond hair are paid 20% less than everyone else for equivalent work, then that 20%-lower figure is the market price, and offering more than that would be (in your terms) “a gift”, and so—if your argument is right—it would be wrong (not merely incorrect, but unethical) to say that employers really shouldn’t be paying blond-haired people 20% less than everyone else. That seems to me like the sort of conclusion that constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the argument; do you disagree?
CellBioGuy isn’t (so far as I can tell) trying to force employers to pay women the same as they pay men (that would count as “demanding” and might be unethical); he’s merely saying that he thinks they should pay women the same as they pay men. Do you really think there is an ethical problem with saying that? (Er, of course you might disagree, but it looks as if you’re saying more than that: that CellBioGuy is doing something unethical merely by expressing that opinion.)
He is of course free to say anything he wants to and I have no ethical opinion on him saying what he believes, but that’s not what is under discussion.
If somehow a society gets into a state where people with blond hair are paid 20% less than everyone else for equivalent work, then that 20%-lower figure is the market price, and offering more than that would be (in your terms) “a gift”, and so—if your argument is right—it would be wrong (not merely incorrect, but unethical) to say that employers really shouldn’t be paying blond-haired people 20% less than everyone else.
If they paid 100% to the blonds, then they eliminate any benefit to them from hiring blondes in particular, and reduce the rate at which this inequity is wiped out. Anyone who establishes a norm of full pay has harmed their cause. This is as predictable as a refusal to buy from sweat shops harms the sweat shop employees and the economic development of that impoverished country. The private good here helps create the public good of an equitable country. If one cares about things like consequences, then yes, it would be unethical to overpay the blondes. You should pay them slightly above market-wage, and you morally owe them nothing further as you have helped to erase the inequity.
Of course, one could give them more money. But this is not ethically superior to other forms of charity like donating to Against Malaria Foundation, and is much worse than many forms of charity: you’re giving money to someone stable, able-bodied, not just employable but actually with a job, and (in the relevant countries which have the luxury of feminists searching out discrimination) who lives in a First World country—the sort of people who least need your charity.
If they pay 100% to the blonds, then they eliminate any benefit to them from hiring blonds in particular
Yes. (Maybe they get some benefit from being able to get all the blonds, though; see below.)
and reduce the rate at which this inequity is wiped out.
That’s not at all clear to me, especially in the case where the number of blonds is large and especially in the case where the employer in question can use lots of them. If Employer A is paying blonds much more than everyone else, then Employer A gets the pick of the blonds, other employers have a severely reduced range of possible employees, and they therefore have reason to offer more if they ever find a blond person they want to employ. Which increases salaries for blond people and thereby reduces the inequity.
refusal to buy from sweat shops
I understand the situation you’re drawing parallels with, but I don’t see that there actually is a parallel. An employer who pays currently-exploited workers more isn’t like a consumer who won’t buy things made in sweat shops, but like a consumer who buys things made in sweat shops but sends extra money to the sweat-shop employees when s/he does. (Which isn’t really possible, but it’s not my fault you picked that analogy.)
not ethically superior to other forms of charity
Oh, quite likely. But the same goes for any form of good behaviour that has a personal cost, whether it’s an act of heroic virtue or just a matter of common decency. Instead of being polite to other people I could be brusque and rude for the sake of efficiency, make a bit of extra money with the time I gain, and send the proceeds to AMF. Instead of being honest I could shoplift, sell the stuff I steal, and send the proceeds to AMF. All true, and it’s (uncomfortably) quite possible that the best thing really is to behave in whatever way maximizes money and send it all to the most effective charity one can find—even if “whatever way maximizes money” would generally be considered odious.
But (1) it does seem that the vast majority of people behaving in that sort of way aren’t actually doing it in order to send more money to effective charities, and (2) the heuristic of treating others decently even if it means passing up some chances of making extra money to feed starving people or prevent malaria does have its advantages.
And (this is of course the point) it’s not at all clear that not paying women 20% less than men for equivalent work doesn’t fall into that category of “treating others decently”.
If Employer A is paying blonds much more than everyone else, then Employer A gets the pick of the blonds,
If Employer A is paying blondes any more than the others, not ‘much more’. They get the pick either way.
other employers have a severely reduced range of possible employees, and they therefore have reason to offer more if they ever find a blond person they want to employ.
One employer isn’t usually going to make that big a difference, but yes, that’s how it works: since Employer A is bidding up the price of blondes, the other employers will need to offer more to remain competitive.
An employer who pays currently-exploited workers more isn’t like a consumer who won’t buy things made in sweat shops, but like a consumer who buys things made in sweat shops but sends extra money to the sweat-shop employees when s/he does.
No, the analogy was otherwise. Imagine the consumer who, having flunked Econ, watches a TV report about horrible t-shirt sweatshops, and resolves to buy only fair-trade certified Mother-Jones-approved t-shirts; these t-shirts will cost more / be produced more inefficiently (if sweatshop t-shirts were worse, then they’d all go out of business and it wouldn’t be a concern anymore) / be inferior, so the consumer will buy less t-shirts (and possibly quite a bit less depending on elasticity). And there goes the export-driven economy which was slowly pulling up that third world country. If I have $17 to pay a bunch of blondes and blondes usually get paid $0.8 and I pay them $0.85, then I can hire 20 blondes, but if I bought into this idea that I owed them some theoretical wage of $1, then I can only pay <17 because I raised prices on myself for no good reason, and the other 3 blondes must go pound dirt or work for employers who will treat them worse.
Instead of being polite to other people I could be brusque and rude for the sake of efficiency, make a bit of extra money with the time I gain, and send the proceeds to AMF.
(No, you probably couldn’t, since IIRC low levels of Agreeableness are not too good for your career earnings.)
(2) the heuristic of treating others decently even if it means passing up some chances of making extra money to feed starving people or prevent malaria does have its advantages.
This isn’t a question of whether you’re treating them decently: you’re giving them a better job than they can find otherwise, that’s quite decent. The question is whether to lavish even more money on them.
Again, that might be true in a textbook-economics world, but in reality people have other criteria besides salary when choosing a job, and don’t always know about all the available options, etc. A company that pays blond-haired people slightly more will have an advantage when hiring blond people, but I wouldn’t expect it to be the sort of advantage that means they simply have the pick of the best.
yes, that’s how it works
So on what grounds do you say that paying blond employees the same as everyone else, rather than 20% less like everyone else, will “reduce the rate at which this inequity is wiped out”?
No, the analogy was otherwise.
Oh, OK, so your proposed mechanism is that paying more means hiring fewer people. I agree that this will happen to some extent. But:
If our hypothetical employer keeps its blond-employee-hiring budget constant and hires fewer blond-haired people precisely in proportion to the bigger salary it pays them, then the total flow of money from that employer to the blond-haired population is independent of the salary. In that case, to a reasonable first approximation, they will be as much use to blond-haired people whether they pay the market rate or (let’s call it) the equitable rate.
But of course they won’t do that, for two reasons. First, the budget that might be fixed is their total hiring budget, not their blond-hiring budget. So some of the people they don’t hire will be non-blond people, and there will be a net benefit to blond people. (You can think of this, if for some reason you want to, as a reduction just in hiring blond people, plus a transfer from non-blond to blond. The latter is probably an overall utility improvement since blond people have been doing worse as a result of prejudice.)
Second, I do not believe that the fixed-hiring-budget model is accurate. If employees become more expensive, then as well as hiring fewer employees employers will spend less on other things and maybe take less profit. So, if again we start from the fixed-blond-hiring-budget baseline, this amounts to a transfer from the employer to the blond population (which they are choosing to make on moral grounds; this seems to be clearly their right).
No, you probably couldn’t
It was only a throwaway example but OK, I’ll be more detailed: be brusque and rude to people outside work and to underlings at work, be polite but very focused with peers at work, and kiss the boss’s ass.
you’re giving them a better job than they can find otherwise, that’s quite decent.
I don’t think this is obvious. Let’s consider an extreme example (warning: mindkilling potential lies ahead, proceed with care). Suppose you live in (a cartoonishly-simplified version of) Nazi Germany where default behaviour to Jews is to beat them up, summon the Gestapo, and have them shipped off to concentration camps. If you see a Jewish person and beat them up a little less than most people would before summoning the Gestapo to have them sent off to Auschwitz, is that decent? I say: of course not. (Even though otherwise they’d soon have been found by someone else, beaten up worse, and sent to Auschwitz, a slightly worse outcome than you gave them.)
From which it seems to follow that treating someone in a particular way isn’t guaranteed to be decent merely because it improves their outcome a bit compared with what they’d have got without you, and compared with what they’d have got if you’d behaved like everyone else does. If what you do is bad enough, it can fail to be decent despite passing that test.
Now, obviously offering someone a job that pays them less than they’d have been paid with different-coloured hair isn’t in the same league as beating them up and sending them to Auschwitz; the above example is intended merely to make the logical point in the foregoing paragraph as vividly as possible. I don’t think it’s obvious what the threshold is for decent behaviour in the situation we’re actually discussing (either the imaginary one with blond hair or the real-world one with double X chromosomes). I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that paying some subset of the population less simply because they belong to a discriminated-against group and you can therefore get away with it counts as indecent.
Now, obviously offering someone a job that pays them less than they’d have been paid with different-coloured hair isn’t in the same league as beating them up and sending them to Auschwitz
Offering anybody a job doesn’t hurt that person. If the don’t like the deal the can refuse the offer. The general idea of a market is that the ability of people to choose with offers they want to take allows them to take offers that are good for them.
Compared with not offering them a job, that’s obviously true. But why should that be the point of comparison?
Suppose you apply for a job. You are well qualified for it; you would do it well; you perform well at interview; you are very keen to do the job; you would get on well with everyone else on the team; no one else better on any of those metrics applies. And your prospective employer offers you the job—at half the salary you’d normally expect to get. It turns out that a wave of misdirected anti-religious prejudice has led everyone in your country to offer half the salary to people called “Christian” that they’d have offered to anyone else.
When your prospective employer offers you that job, at half what would be the going rate for anyone else—have they hurt you? Are you the victim of any injustice here?
I say they have, and you are, and the fact that they could have done even worse by simply refusing to give you a job is neither here nor there.
When your prospective employer offers you that job, at half what would be the going rate for anyone else—have they hurt you?
Discriminating against people because you don’t like their given name isn’t a offense that’s legally banned nor should it.
If someone misleads me to think that I will be payed a certain salary at a certain job and I invest resources into applying for that job, that’s injustice but I don’t think that’s the case here.
If I want to buy a mattress at a store and they owner wants 400$ for it, I don’t do the owner any injustice for offering 200$ for the mattress or even 100$. The fact that I’m a prospective buyer doesn’t mean that I will pay whatever the owner of the mattress wants to have or what other people who buy mattresses are willing to pay.
It’s consenting adult offering to engage with other adults in deals.
I agree, but I don’t understand the relevance. So far as I can tell, no one has been arguing here that wage discrimination of this sort should be illegal. The question is whether we should regard it as immoral.
As far as I’m concerned in areas where there’s no special need of protection, giving people choices that they want to take given fully informed consent isn’t immoral.
To show that an action that offers choices is immoral I think you have to either show:
There a special need for protection in that area
The person with whom you are interacting isn’t really fully consenting. Maybe they don’t have all information. Maybe you are preying on some mental bias of that person.
One point at which our views of this situation diverge might be this: It seems to me that
inaction as well as action can be morally problematic
in some situations something can be classified as an action plus an inaction (i.e., doing X rather than Y = doing X + not-doing Y)
what’s arguably immoral here is not offering the applicant a particular job on particular terms but not offering the applicant a job on better terms, given that they’re a strong applicant and you’d normally do that if they didn’t have the particular name / hair colour / skin colour / gender that they do.
A variant on the thought experiment to illustrate this. Part 1: Instead of everyone only offering you half the pay they’d offer everyone else, none of them will employ you at all—again, just because of prejudice about your name. (And let’s suppose it’s the fact that you were ever given that name that bothers them; or that it’s your official legal name, and you’re in a jurisdiction where you have no way to change it. So you don’t have that way out.) Given that the consequence of this is that you are in serious danger of starving to death, I hope you agree that you are being wronged in this case. (Note: I’m still making no claim that anything should be illegal.)
Part 2: Now all your job applications are “successful”—but every prospective employer, without exception, offers you $1/year for your work. Note that now the consequences are basically the same as in part 1, but in every case what the employers are doing is to offer you a choice that you want to take (because you will starve slightly slower on $1/year than on $0/year). (Assume for the sake of argument that there aren’t, e.g., government benefits available only to the unemployed.)
So on what grounds do you say that paying blond employees the same as everyone else, rather than 20% less like everyone else, will “reduce the rate at which this inequity is wiped out”?
Suppose you live in (a cartoonishly-simplified version of) Nazi Germany where default behaviour to Jews is to beat them up, summon the Gestapo, and have them shipped off to concentration camps. If you see a Jewish person and beat them up a little less than most people would before summoning the Gestapo to have them sent off to Auschwitz, is that decent? I say: of course not.
The Jew in your hypothetical would rather you didn’t interact with them at all than you beat them up less than usual. The blond in the other hypothetical would rather you hired them at a smaller pay than you hire dark-haired people than you didn’t interact with them at all. Also, you lost.
Yup, familiar with it. Would you like to be more explicit about why this means that paying members of a discriminated-against group 20% less than everyone else will lead to a quicker reduction in their pay deficit than paying them the same as everyone else? Thanks.
The Jew in your hypothetical would rather [...] The blond in the other hypothetical would rather [...]
I agree. If you’re intending to make an argument that this means the hypothetical blond person is being treated decently, then I would like to know what general principle you’re appealing to. It sounds like it’s something like this: “If A does something to B, and B would prefer A to do this than not to do it, then A is treating B decently”. But this—I think—is refuted by my Nazi example: the Jew is going to get beaten up and sent to Auschwitz anyway, and would (slightly) prefer the other guy to find him rather than not, because the other guy will beat him up a little less badly.
Also, you lost.
Nope. Let me repeat: “the above example is intended merely to make the logical point in the foregoing paragraph as vividly as possible”. I’m not comparing anyone to the Nazis here; I’m pointing out that a principle to which I think gwern was appealing is incorrect, and showing why. Of course, if you choose to operate a policy of dropping any discussion if it mentions the Nazis then that’s your prerogative.
Yup, familiar with it. Would you like to be more explicit about why this means that paying members of a discriminated-against group 20% less than everyone else will lead to a quicker reduction in their pay deficit than paying them the same as everyone else? Thanks.
If blond employees at market rates give more bang for the buck than dark-haired employees, you should prefer to hire the former, as this will allow you to offer lower prices (and some of your customers will themselves be blond), make more profit (and some of your shareholders will themselves be blond), etc. Your competition will start doing the same so they too will get more bang for the buck (or be outcompeted by you). This will increase the demand for blond workers, bidding their market wages up, until an equilibrium is reached where blond employees will make no less money than equally good dark-haired employees. If instead you pass all of the gains from hiring blond employees to the employees themselves rather than to customers and shareholders, you won’t threaten to outcompete other employers so they will have no reason to start preferentially hiring blonds too.
But this—I think—is refuted by my Nazi example: the Jew is going to get beaten up and sent to Auschwitz anyway, and would (slightly) prefer the other guy to find him rather than not, because the other guy will beat him up a little less badly.
He would still prefer to not be beaten up by anyone at all; conversely, the blond would not prefer to not be hired by anyone at all.
you won’t threaten to outcompete other employers so they will have no reason to start preferentially hiring blonds too.
Sure they will. They’ll have the same reason I had: that by doing so they can get more bang-per-buck. The thing that provides that is the fact of wage discrimination, not the fact that one particular employer started to exploit it.
He would still prefer to not be beaten up by anyone at all; conversely, the blond would not prefer to not be hired by anyone at all.
Sure. But we aren’t in a position to provide either of those outcomes. Again: what is the general principle to which you’re appealing?
[fair-trade] t-shirts will cost more / be produced more inefficiently … / be inferior
I agree with your general argument, but that particular example isn’t true IME—ISTM fair-trade products are cheaper than non-fair-trade products of the same quality (e.g. the fair-trade t-shirt I own cost me €3 IIRC, and after three years I’ve owned it it doesn’t show that much wear and tear). I suspect customers refrain from buying them out of ideological reasons or something.
If they paid 100% to the blonds, then they eliminate any benefit to them from hiring blondes in particular,
Not necessarily (assuming by “they” you mean an individual employer rather than the market as a whole) -- in that scenario, the most qualified blond willing to work for 100 will be more qualified that the most qualified brunette willing to work for 100.
CellBioGuy isn’t (so far as I can tell) trying to force employers to pay women the same as they pay men (that would count as “demanding” and might be unethical); he’s merely saying that he thinks they should pay women the same as they pay men.
Not really. If an employer only hires women than it’s not about paying woman as much as the employer pays men. There no real reason why the employer who only hires woman should pay them as much as a men would get if he worked for someone else.
If a men applies to the company and is willing to work for the kind of wage women usually get in the market place of course he could be hired.
They would still be gaining more than they paid if they paid them the same as a man.
And if I paid for bottled water at the grocery down the street what I would pay them in the desert, they’d be gaining even more! And if I gave them everything I had, their profit would be still higher.
According to gwern,
Thanks for including that. This suggests the idea that you could profit off of looking for places where discrimination is greatest and going against the trend. This seems socially valuable too (assuming you’re not capturing all of the gains for yourself, which you probably wouldn’t be). Gwern, if you’re reading this, do you remember which company this was?
ETA: Found some references:
It Pays to Hire Women in Countries That Won’t (HBS)
Profiting from sexism (Economist)
Not offhand. I believe I read it in the K-blogosphere, a mention of a legal firm or something white-collar like that which made a point of hiring women because South Korea is extremely sexist. I probably excerpted it to my Evernotes, but it’d be buried in thousands of other clippings mentioning Korea.
Oh, once I found the linked articles I assumed what you’d read was about the same study. Do you think it was something independent of that?
Yes, those two were anecdotes, not studies. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least bit if there were studies pointing the same way, though, but I’ve never looked: the point is obvious enough that it doesn’t really need to be argued for.
Did you miss this (from the HBS link)?
“Employing women who are excluded by their own countries’ labor markets is a growing trend for firms with international branch offices, says Harvard Business School professor Jordan Siegel. He discusses the issue in a new study titled “Multinational Firms, Labor Market Discrimination, and the Capture of Competitive Advantage by Exploiting the Social Divide”, which he co-wrote with Lynn Pyun of MIT and B.Y. Cheon of Hanshin University and the Korea Labor Institute.”
Edit: Oh, or did you mean that what you’d read before was just anecdotes?
That. http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/11-011_512c2b3a-2df5-41f9-a4ec-99af4716ba5f.pdf sounds interesting though.
Yup—exactly.
Note though that Greenspan did this a very long time ago. It’s plausible that the feminists were right and the market was inefficient decades ago, but they are wrong and the market is efficient contemporaneously.
Isn’t this practice just as reprehensibly sexist? Hiring people that you know are just as good and paying them less for no good reason?
He paid them more than they would otherwise have made (otherwise, they’d’ve accepted someone else’s job offer). How sexist, offering them better-paying jobs because he wasn’t blinded by misogyny.
“I know you’re just as good as Bob, but I’m only going to pay you 80% what he makes because if you go anywhere else you’ll get paid 70%.” Yeah, no. Though perhaps ‘sexist’ is only partially applicable - ‘exploitative’ or ‘asshole’ is better.
It could totally be in their best interest to take that offer as opposed to another. Doesn’t make the offer (as opposed to an even offer) less reprehensible.
That’s how markets work: exchange only happens if one can gain from it, otherwise one doesn’t do it. Every transaction follows that same structure: ‘I am only going to pay you X which is the current price for something, even though X is lower than my gain from it’. You’re demanding gifts be made, and how is that ethical?
This question sounds like it’s meant to be rhetorical, as if demanding gifts be made is obviously not ethical. But there are quite widely accepted moral systems (utilitarianism, for instance) that do demand that gifts be made in certain cases—sufficiently wealthy people are morally obligated to donate some of their wealth to charity, for instance.
I’m not saying that in the case under discussion Greenspan had an obligation to pay women as much as men were being paid (it’s a complex issue and I’m not sure what I think about it yet), but I do think that simply pointing out that Greenspan had no economic incentive to pay them that much is a pretty unconvincing response to CellBioGuy’s moral contention.
Yes, under utilitarianism, but I’ve already pointed out that any such imperative would be vastly exceeded by other imperatives.
I’m also not sure whether it works under deontological systems. One way to universalize such a claim is that you should pay people as much as they could earn under any state of affairs, but naturally that leads to you never making money and going broke as it’s equivalent to demanding you give away all gains from trade: ‘John makes me $1000 and currently costs me $500 in salary; however if the job market were much tighter, then in that counterfactual universe I’d be willing to pay him anywhere up to $999 but not higher, so I must morally pay him $999 right now—anything else would be exploitation and discrimination’.
That’s how economics-textbook idealized markets work. In the real world, many things that can be modelled as market transactions don’t behave exactly like economics-textbook market transactions. For instance, sometimes people leave money on the table in an attempt to behave ethically (“I’m not going to pay her less just because she’s a woman and other companies will offer her less!”) or out of prejudice (“That may be her notional market price, but I just don’t trust women to be good team players—she’ll be wanting to leave to have babies or something”) or for any number of other reasons.
CellBioGuy isn’t (so far as I can tell) trying to force employers to pay women the same as they pay men (that would count as “demanding” and might be unethical); he’s merely saying that he thinks they should pay women the same as they pay men. Do you really think there is an ethical problem with saying that? (Er, of course you might disagree, but it looks as if you’re saying more than that: that CellBioGuy is doing something unethical merely by expressing that opinion.)
In some situations that fit this general pattern—things are bad for some group (in this case: women), and someone else has an opportunity to take advantage of their difficult situation in a way that actually helps them a little (in this case: employers who can pay them the going rate and thereby get cheaper employees) -- it’s clearly reasonable to say “Yeah, this looks bad but actually these people are helping this group and all the blame, if any, should go to whoever is responsible for the group’s bad situation.” But here what causes the bad situation is exactly all those employers who choose to pay women less than men whose work is equally valuable to them, and an employer who takes advantage of the situation by paying women exactly the market rate and merely hiring more of them is part of the problem. (Slightly less so than the other employers who aren’t even preferring to hire women in this situation. But still, part of the problem.)
It seems to me that the argument you’re employing here can be used to defend the continuation of absolutely any sort of pay inequality. If somehow a society gets into a state where people with blond hair are paid 20% less than everyone else for equivalent work, then that 20%-lower figure is the market price, and offering more than that would be (in your terms) “a gift”, and so—if your argument is right—it would be wrong (not merely incorrect, but unethical) to say that employers really shouldn’t be paying blond-haired people 20% less than everyone else. That seems to me like the sort of conclusion that constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the argument; do you disagree?
He is of course free to say anything he wants to and I have no ethical opinion on him saying what he believes, but that’s not what is under discussion.
If they paid 100% to the blonds, then they eliminate any benefit to them from hiring blondes in particular, and reduce the rate at which this inequity is wiped out. Anyone who establishes a norm of full pay has harmed their cause. This is as predictable as a refusal to buy from sweat shops harms the sweat shop employees and the economic development of that impoverished country. The private good here helps create the public good of an equitable country. If one cares about things like consequences, then yes, it would be unethical to overpay the blondes. You should pay them slightly above market-wage, and you morally owe them nothing further as you have helped to erase the inequity.
Of course, one could give them more money. But this is not ethically superior to other forms of charity like donating to Against Malaria Foundation, and is much worse than many forms of charity: you’re giving money to someone stable, able-bodied, not just employable but actually with a job, and (in the relevant countries which have the luxury of feminists searching out discrimination) who lives in a First World country—the sort of people who least need your charity.
Yes. (Maybe they get some benefit from being able to get all the blonds, though; see below.)
That’s not at all clear to me, especially in the case where the number of blonds is large and especially in the case where the employer in question can use lots of them. If Employer A is paying blonds much more than everyone else, then Employer A gets the pick of the blonds, other employers have a severely reduced range of possible employees, and they therefore have reason to offer more if they ever find a blond person they want to employ. Which increases salaries for blond people and thereby reduces the inequity.
I understand the situation you’re drawing parallels with, but I don’t see that there actually is a parallel. An employer who pays currently-exploited workers more isn’t like a consumer who won’t buy things made in sweat shops, but like a consumer who buys things made in sweat shops but sends extra money to the sweat-shop employees when s/he does. (Which isn’t really possible, but it’s not my fault you picked that analogy.)
Oh, quite likely. But the same goes for any form of good behaviour that has a personal cost, whether it’s an act of heroic virtue or just a matter of common decency. Instead of being polite to other people I could be brusque and rude for the sake of efficiency, make a bit of extra money with the time I gain, and send the proceeds to AMF. Instead of being honest I could shoplift, sell the stuff I steal, and send the proceeds to AMF. All true, and it’s (uncomfortably) quite possible that the best thing really is to behave in whatever way maximizes money and send it all to the most effective charity one can find—even if “whatever way maximizes money” would generally be considered odious.
But (1) it does seem that the vast majority of people behaving in that sort of way aren’t actually doing it in order to send more money to effective charities, and (2) the heuristic of treating others decently even if it means passing up some chances of making extra money to feed starving people or prevent malaria does have its advantages.
And (this is of course the point) it’s not at all clear that not paying women 20% less than men for equivalent work doesn’t fall into that category of “treating others decently”.
If Employer A is paying blondes any more than the others, not ‘much more’. They get the pick either way.
One employer isn’t usually going to make that big a difference, but yes, that’s how it works: since Employer A is bidding up the price of blondes, the other employers will need to offer more to remain competitive.
No, the analogy was otherwise. Imagine the consumer who, having flunked Econ, watches a TV report about horrible t-shirt sweatshops, and resolves to buy only fair-trade certified Mother-Jones-approved t-shirts; these t-shirts will cost more / be produced more inefficiently (if sweatshop t-shirts were worse, then they’d all go out of business and it wouldn’t be a concern anymore) / be inferior, so the consumer will buy less t-shirts (and possibly quite a bit less depending on elasticity). And there goes the export-driven economy which was slowly pulling up that third world country. If I have $17 to pay a bunch of blondes and blondes usually get paid $0.8 and I pay them $0.85, then I can hire 20 blondes, but if I bought into this idea that I owed them some theoretical wage of $1, then I can only pay <17 because I raised prices on myself for no good reason, and the other 3 blondes must go pound dirt or work for employers who will treat them worse.
(No, you probably couldn’t, since IIRC low levels of Agreeableness are not too good for your career earnings.)
This isn’t a question of whether you’re treating them decently: you’re giving them a better job than they can find otherwise, that’s quite decent. The question is whether to lavish even more money on them.
Again, that might be true in a textbook-economics world, but in reality people have other criteria besides salary when choosing a job, and don’t always know about all the available options, etc. A company that pays blond-haired people slightly more will have an advantage when hiring blond people, but I wouldn’t expect it to be the sort of advantage that means they simply have the pick of the best.
So on what grounds do you say that paying blond employees the same as everyone else, rather than 20% less like everyone else, will “reduce the rate at which this inequity is wiped out”?
Oh, OK, so your proposed mechanism is that paying more means hiring fewer people. I agree that this will happen to some extent. But:
If our hypothetical employer keeps its blond-employee-hiring budget constant and hires fewer blond-haired people precisely in proportion to the bigger salary it pays them, then the total flow of money from that employer to the blond-haired population is independent of the salary. In that case, to a reasonable first approximation, they will be as much use to blond-haired people whether they pay the market rate or (let’s call it) the equitable rate.
But of course they won’t do that, for two reasons. First, the budget that might be fixed is their total hiring budget, not their blond-hiring budget. So some of the people they don’t hire will be non-blond people, and there will be a net benefit to blond people. (You can think of this, if for some reason you want to, as a reduction just in hiring blond people, plus a transfer from non-blond to blond. The latter is probably an overall utility improvement since blond people have been doing worse as a result of prejudice.)
Second, I do not believe that the fixed-hiring-budget model is accurate. If employees become more expensive, then as well as hiring fewer employees employers will spend less on other things and maybe take less profit. So, if again we start from the fixed-blond-hiring-budget baseline, this amounts to a transfer from the employer to the blond population (which they are choosing to make on moral grounds; this seems to be clearly their right).
It was only a throwaway example but OK, I’ll be more detailed: be brusque and rude to people outside work and to underlings at work, be polite but very focused with peers at work, and kiss the boss’s ass.
I don’t think this is obvious. Let’s consider an extreme example (warning: mindkilling potential lies ahead, proceed with care). Suppose you live in (a cartoonishly-simplified version of) Nazi Germany where default behaviour to Jews is to beat them up, summon the Gestapo, and have them shipped off to concentration camps. If you see a Jewish person and beat them up a little less than most people would before summoning the Gestapo to have them sent off to Auschwitz, is that decent? I say: of course not. (Even though otherwise they’d soon have been found by someone else, beaten up worse, and sent to Auschwitz, a slightly worse outcome than you gave them.)
From which it seems to follow that treating someone in a particular way isn’t guaranteed to be decent merely because it improves their outcome a bit compared with what they’d have got without you, and compared with what they’d have got if you’d behaved like everyone else does. If what you do is bad enough, it can fail to be decent despite passing that test.
Now, obviously offering someone a job that pays them less than they’d have been paid with different-coloured hair isn’t in the same league as beating them up and sending them to Auschwitz; the above example is intended merely to make the logical point in the foregoing paragraph as vividly as possible. I don’t think it’s obvious what the threshold is for decent behaviour in the situation we’re actually discussing (either the imaginary one with blond hair or the real-world one with double X chromosomes). I think there’s a reasonable case to be made that paying some subset of the population less simply because they belong to a discriminated-against group and you can therefore get away with it counts as indecent.
Offering anybody a job doesn’t hurt that person. If the don’t like the deal the can refuse the offer. The general idea of a market is that the ability of people to choose with offers they want to take allows them to take offers that are good for them.
Compared with not offering them a job, that’s obviously true. But why should that be the point of comparison?
Suppose you apply for a job. You are well qualified for it; you would do it well; you perform well at interview; you are very keen to do the job; you would get on well with everyone else on the team; no one else better on any of those metrics applies. And your prospective employer offers you the job—at half the salary you’d normally expect to get. It turns out that a wave of misdirected anti-religious prejudice has led everyone in your country to offer half the salary to people called “Christian” that they’d have offered to anyone else.
When your prospective employer offers you that job, at half what would be the going rate for anyone else—have they hurt you? Are you the victim of any injustice here?
I say they have, and you are, and the fact that they could have done even worse by simply refusing to give you a job is neither here nor there.
Discriminating against people because you don’t like their given name isn’t a offense that’s legally banned nor should it.
If someone misleads me to think that I will be payed a certain salary at a certain job and I invest resources into applying for that job, that’s injustice but I don’t think that’s the case here.
If I want to buy a mattress at a store and they owner wants 400$ for it, I don’t do the owner any injustice for offering 200$ for the mattress or even 100$. The fact that I’m a prospective buyer doesn’t mean that I will pay whatever the owner of the mattress wants to have or what other people who buy mattresses are willing to pay.
It’s consenting adult offering to engage with other adults in deals.
I agree, but I don’t understand the relevance. So far as I can tell, no one has been arguing here that wage discrimination of this sort should be illegal. The question is whether we should regard it as immoral.
As far as I’m concerned in areas where there’s no special need of protection, giving people choices that they want to take given fully informed consent isn’t immoral.
To show that an action that offers choices is immoral I think you have to either show:
There a special need for protection in that area
The person with whom you are interacting isn’t really fully consenting. Maybe they don’t have all information. Maybe you are preying on some mental bias of that person.
One point at which our views of this situation diverge might be this: It seems to me that
inaction as well as action can be morally problematic
in some situations something can be classified as an action plus an inaction (i.e., doing X rather than Y = doing X + not-doing Y)
what’s arguably immoral here is not offering the applicant a particular job on particular terms but not offering the applicant a job on better terms, given that they’re a strong applicant and you’d normally do that if they didn’t have the particular name / hair colour / skin colour / gender that they do.
A variant on the thought experiment to illustrate this. Part 1: Instead of everyone only offering you half the pay they’d offer everyone else, none of them will employ you at all—again, just because of prejudice about your name. (And let’s suppose it’s the fact that you were ever given that name that bothers them; or that it’s your official legal name, and you’re in a jurisdiction where you have no way to change it. So you don’t have that way out.) Given that the consequence of this is that you are in serious danger of starving to death, I hope you agree that you are being wronged in this case. (Note: I’m still making no claim that anything should be illegal.)
Part 2: Now all your job applications are “successful”—but every prospective employer, without exception, offers you $1/year for your work. Note that now the consequences are basically the same as in part 1, but in every case what the employers are doing is to offer you a choice that you want to take (because you will starve slightly slower on $1/year than on $0/year). (Assume for the sake of argument that there aren’t, e.g., government benefits available only to the unemployed.)
See Markets are Anti-Inductive
The Jew in your hypothetical would rather you didn’t interact with them at all than you beat them up less than usual. The blond in the other hypothetical would rather you hired them at a smaller pay than you hire dark-haired people than you didn’t interact with them at all. Also, you lost.
Yup, familiar with it. Would you like to be more explicit about why this means that paying members of a discriminated-against group 20% less than everyone else will lead to a quicker reduction in their pay deficit than paying them the same as everyone else? Thanks.
I agree. If you’re intending to make an argument that this means the hypothetical blond person is being treated decently, then I would like to know what general principle you’re appealing to. It sounds like it’s something like this: “If A does something to B, and B would prefer A to do this than not to do it, then A is treating B decently”. But this—I think—is refuted by my Nazi example: the Jew is going to get beaten up and sent to Auschwitz anyway, and would (slightly) prefer the other guy to find him rather than not, because the other guy will beat him up a little less badly.
Nope. Let me repeat: “the above example is intended merely to make the logical point in the foregoing paragraph as vividly as possible”. I’m not comparing anyone to the Nazis here; I’m pointing out that a principle to which I think gwern was appealing is incorrect, and showing why. Of course, if you choose to operate a policy of dropping any discussion if it mentions the Nazis then that’s your prerogative.
If blond employees at market rates give more bang for the buck than dark-haired employees, you should prefer to hire the former, as this will allow you to offer lower prices (and some of your customers will themselves be blond), make more profit (and some of your shareholders will themselves be blond), etc. Your competition will start doing the same so they too will get more bang for the buck (or be outcompeted by you). This will increase the demand for blond workers, bidding their market wages up, until an equilibrium is reached where blond employees will make no less money than equally good dark-haired employees. If instead you pass all of the gains from hiring blond employees to the employees themselves rather than to customers and shareholders, you won’t threaten to outcompete other employers so they will have no reason to start preferentially hiring blonds too.
He would still prefer to not be beaten up by anyone at all; conversely, the blond would not prefer to not be hired by anyone at all.
Sure they will. They’ll have the same reason I had: that by doing so they can get more bang-per-buck. The thing that provides that is the fact of wage discrimination, not the fact that one particular employer started to exploit it.
Sure. But we aren’t in a position to provide either of those outcomes. Again: what is the general principle to which you’re appealing?
I agree with your general argument, but that particular example isn’t true IME—ISTM fair-trade products are cheaper than non-fair-trade products of the same quality (e.g. the fair-trade t-shirt I own cost me €3 IIRC, and after three years I’ve owned it it doesn’t show that much wear and tear). I suspect customers refrain from buying them out of ideological reasons or something.
Not necessarily (assuming by “they” you mean an individual employer rather than the market as a whole) -- in that scenario, the most qualified blond willing to work for 100 will be more qualified that the most qualified brunette willing to work for 100.
Not really. If an employer only hires women than it’s not about paying woman as much as the employer pays men. There no real reason why the employer who only hires woman should pay them as much as a men would get if he worked for someone else.
If a men applies to the company and is willing to work for the kind of wage women usually get in the market place of course he could be hired.
They would still be gaining more than they paid if they paid them the same as a man.
And not being subjected to sexist practices is a ‘gift’? Seriously? And people wonder why nobody can take this place seriously on gender issues...
And if I paid for bottled water at the grocery down the street what I would pay them in the desert, they’d be gaining even more! And if I gave them everything I had, their profit would be still higher.