Laura Adler - Sociology, Harvard University
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"Figuring Out Fair Pay after the 'Salary History Ban'"
Despite extensive research on the causes of gender pay inequality, we lack evidence about one process at the heart of the problem: how employers set pay for new hires. State and local governments have recently taken up this issue, outlawing the practice of basing pay on the job candidate’s past salary. Policymakers hope these “salary history bans” will prevent women from getting locked into lifetime trajectories of lower pay. My research examines the effects of this legal change on firm practices and uses the change in policy to document the moral frameworks use to judge whether pay is fair. I draw on interviews with 60 HR practitioners, experts, and executives to document the central importance of the salary history question in pay-setting, describe variation across industries and occupations in organization’s responses to the salary history bans in practice, and assess the implications of these new practices—and the moral frameworks on which they rest—for gender pay equity.