How Pay Discrimination Creeps In

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If an employee is subjected to pay discrimination, it’s very often traceable back to the use of candidates’ salary histories in the recruitment process to determine offers. Why?

The idea is that if someone was discriminated against in their pay in a previous job, that lower salary will carry forward to their new employer and throughout their career. In this way, discriminatory practices can linger and spread, usually denmark phone number resource inadvertently. For women and minority groups who have historically been subjected to systemic discriminatory pay practices, it can be difficult to escape these loops that have been essentially ‘baked into’ the economy.

Then, once discriminatory compensation gets locked into an organization’s processes through recruitment, it can easily snowball.

This is especially true for larger organizations that might take a more closed-doors or hands-off approach to discuss compensation. However, that doesn’t mean that smaller employers who are more directly involved in all parts of their business can’t also fall prey to inadvertently implementing discriminatory practices. The systemic and somewhat invisible nature of this type of discrimination is what has allowed it to remain a problem even after decades of regulations.

This concept also applies to internal promotions and performance-based pay decisions. When questions about salary history (or other unconscious biases) have potentially skewed an organization’s compensation and employee development strategies from the very start, discriminatory practices can be unintentionally perpetuated over the long run.

So how do you fight discrimination in your own small business and ensure that it can’t creep in? Start by creating more compliant infrastructures and processes.