Will It Help or Hurt?
But a ban on asking a job applicant’s previous salary could backfire, said Jennifer Doleac, an economist at the University of Texas A&M who has studied “ban the box” laws that forbid employers from asking about applicants’ criminal history.
Because of ban the box laws, Doleac found, employers interviewed fewer African-American and Hispanic men, excluding demographic groups they believed likely to have criminal records.
Without information on pay history, employers will still try to offer women lower salaries, Doleac said. “It’s a pretty good guess that if you’re offering a job to a woman, she’s probably being paid less than men, so you might as well lowball her.”
“Women who are making a better than average salary will have to negotiate all over again,” she said. “It winds up hurting members of the group who don’t have the problem and doesn’t help members of the group who do have the problem.”
In California, the Chamber of Commerce argued businesses need salary information to keep their own pay scales at market rates.
Business groups in Michigan and Wisconsin lobbied for the state laws preventing municipalities from imposing bans.
“There is no reason that businesses in our state should have to worry about expensive HR mandates being enacted by the nearly 2,000 units of local government in Wisconsin,” said Chris Reader, a director at the business association Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, when GOP Gov. Scott Walker signed the bill into law in April.
“We want everybody to be going into a job interview with their eyes wide open,” said Wendy Block, vice president of business advocacy for the Michigan Chamber of Commerce. Prohibiting employers from asking about a previous salary “doesn’t get to the root of the problem and just causes more problems in the hiring process.”
Businesses fear that salary-history bans will result in a patchwork of regulation that is difficult for businesses to comply with, said Mike Aitken, a vice president at the Alexandria, Virginia-based Society for Human Resource Management. “Right now, we can’t even agree what’s causing” pay inequity.
“We think it really needs to be a comprehensive discussion,” he said, “and not be doing it in a piecemeal fashion on a state-by-state and locality-by-locality basis.”
Some major companies have already stopped asking about applicants’ previous salaries, including Amazon, Google, Starbucks and Wells Fargo. Bank of America in January said its move was intended to “ensure we consider new hires for individual qualifications, roles and performance, rather than how they may have been compensated in the past.”
When large states such as California and New York require employers to skip the salary question, large employers adopt the standard for all their operations, Shabo said. Big companies adopt “new norms” because they realize “it’s easier to comply with whatever the highest standard is.”
Major companies are unlikely to be setting their salary ranges according to “something as uncontrollable and unknowable as market rates,” Hegewisch said. But many smaller businesses make offers based on what new hires earned elsewhere. “You take the labor market rate and you give them a little bit extra.”
More Articles
- Women's Health and Aging Studies Available Online; Inform Yourself and Others Concerned About Your Health
- Sheila Pepe, Textile Artist: My Neighbor’s Garden .... In Madison Square Park, NYC
- Monetary Policy Report Prepared at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Expectations for Future Growth Were Mostly Unchanged
- Ferida Wolff Writes: This Holiday Season
- Jo Freeman Reviews: Gendered Citizenship: The Original Conflict Over the Equal Rights Amendment, 1920 – 1963
- Journalist's Resource: Religious Exemptions and Required Vaccines; Examining the Research
- Women's Congressional Policy Institute: Weekly Legislative Update September 13, 2021: Bringing Women Policymakers Together Across Party Lines to Advance Issues of Importance to Women and Their Families
- UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ: ‘I always felt like a pioneer’
- Jo Freeman Reviews Mazie's Hirono's Heart of Fire: An Immigrant Daughter's Story
- Center for Democracy and Technology Report: Facts and Their Discontents: A Research Agenda for Online Disinformation, Race, and Gender