“evidence that this actually helps women is mixed. Meanwhile, such restrictions would have unintended consequences.
“For example, employers who can’t ask about prior salary might assume that a female candidate would accept less money than a man, because women make less on average,” as The New York Times has previously noted. In this scenario, a ban on salary history discussions could lead to women getting lowballed in job offers.
Salary history bans could also cost people—particularly women and younger workers—some job offers. It’s not hard to imagine an employer choosing to hire someone whose salary requirements seem slightly lower than an equally qualified candidate with higher requirements. In this case, prior salary disclosure could mean the difference between getting a job or not.
In other cases, where an employer has a strong preference for a particular candidate, the company may be prepared to offer a higher salary than the baseline in order to recruit them. Without knowing the candidate’s salary history, however, the employer may be lost as to what to offer. They might offer lower than the candidate currently makes, leading the candidate to reject the job that could have otherwise been a good fit.
Which is all to say that surely some women may actually benefit from past salary disclosure—especially now that young women are out-earning their male counterparts.
In general, letting employers and prospective employees exchange more information, not less, seems likely to lead to the best matches and the most satisfaction.”
…
“Today’s rhetoric about wider disparities in male and female incomes tends to 1) rely on research looking at incomes across professions and positions and 2) ignore explanations other than discrimination that might explain pay disparities—things like gender differences in types of work, work schedules, and years in the workforce. Politicians and media then use this distorted picture to spawn outrage and get kudos for addressing the issue, even if nothing they’re doing can actually “fix” the complicated causes behind disparities.
There may be a broader discussion to have about whether female-heavy industries are undervalued or how choosing to have children may harm women’s salary prospects more than men’s. But the issue is nowhere near the simplistic narrative that many modern progressives often make it out to be, in which sexist bosses and companies simply choose to pay women less than men for the same work and everything can be fixed with federal mandates.”