Tag: pay equity

Equity, human services

Study: Human Service Wages Are Even Worse Than You Imagined

By Erica C. Barnett

It’s well-known that human services workers, particularly those who work for nonprofit agencies, are underpaid, making less than both private-market workers with similar backgrounds and skills and government employees who do similar work. A new city-funded study, initiated by the Seattle Human Services Coalition and conducted by researchers at the University of Washington found that nonprofit human-services workers are paid 37 percent less than workers in other industries with comparable jobs, and that people who left jobs in human services for jobs in other fields saw their wages increase more than 14 percent.

The study took a novel approach, comparing jobs based on factors like responsibility, skills, and effort required to perform them, regardless of whether they were in the same field or had a similar job description. The idea was to eliminate some of the disparities that are built into many job types; jobs that are mostly held by men, for example, tend to pay significantly more than jobs that are mostly held by women even if the jobs require a similar level of education, experience, and skill.

“Previously, a lot of us would use different surveys that would compare nonprofit to nonprofit without really looking at the underlying factors of what makes up our jobs,” Ballard Food Bank executive director Jen Muzia said. In this “comparable worth” analysis, for example, a school age enrichment worker (average salary: $45,000) has a similar job worth as a journey electrician (average salary: $79,000.)

Using this method, along with a straightforward market analysis of average wages for different jobs in human services and non-human services positions, the researchers concluded that “human services workers are systematically paid less than workers in non-care industries, with estimated pay gaps of 30% or more.” To reach parity, the report concludes, human service workers would need an average pay boost of 43 to percent.

In the short term, the researchers recommend pay increases of 7 percent across the board for nonprofit human service workers, on top of annual adjustments for inflation, with longer-term substantive changes—such as new salary standards with minimum pay for various types of jobs—by 2030.

“We’ve had to delay the start of some of our preschool classrooms for about two months because we didn’t have the staff to open the classroom. It impacts kids’ and families’ access to the programs and services that they need.”—Neighborhood House director Janice Deguchi

Nonprofit leaders say they’re losing talented workers—and struggling to recruit new ones—because they can’t offer competitive wages. Janice Deguchi, the executive director of Neighborhood House, said the nonprofit recently lost a teacher who had been working to connect a developmentally delayed child to the group’s early-learning program and other services.

“She worked all year to help this family,” Deguchi said, “and then she left the entire field of early learning to work in marketing for more money.” Faced with the prospect of starting all over with a new set of teachers, the family left the program. “That was just a huge missed opportunity,” she said, “because that teacher couldn’t stay in the field.”

More broadly, Deguchi said, low wages have made it hard to hire qualified staff. “We’ve had to delay the start of some of our preschool classrooms for about two months because we didn’t have the staff to open the classroom. So it does impact kids’ and families’ access to the programs and services that they need.”

Steve Daschle, the director of Southwest Youth and Family Services, said another issue with high turnover is that nonprofits have to constantly train new workers, which means “we don’t have the opportunity to develop relationships—which is key to building successful human services efforts. People leave as they gain the expertise. They move to a different sector. And so we have to start from scratch with new staff in those positions and that, I think, hampers our ability to fully support the community.”

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The Human Services Coalition will use the study as part of its advocacy campaign for higher wages at nonprofits, which organizer Jason Austin says will go beyond annual requests for funding from the city and King County. “We’re going to take these results to all of the community groups and to our members and really have a live conversation about what it’s going to take to raise [new] revenues, because it’s not necessarily just the traditional policy advocacy,” Austin said. “Jen’s program [the Ballard Food Bank] is mostly funded by from non governmental sources. So we also need to take this information to individual donors to the philanthropic community, to private funders, and also implement the recommendations of the report in those spaces.”

Getting the city and county to support large wage increases won’t be easy. For years, both governments have struggled to fund cost of living increases that would keep social service providers’ wages from declining in real terms—much less raise them to livable levels. Last year, Mayor Bruce Harrell proposed capping wage increases for homeless service providers well below the rate of inflation, an effective pay cut. Although the city council restored the inflationary increases, which are required by law, the bump will only keep these workers’ real wages at the same level as last year.

Meanwhile, the King County behavioral health crisis center levy, on the ballot in April, includes funding for higher wages at the new county-run crisis centers, but does nothing to increase pay for other workers whose wages are funded through county contracts..

Addiction, Affordability, City Council, Density, Development, Election 2017, gender, homelessness, housing, human services, land use, Police, Renters

The C Is for Crank Interviews: Teresa Mosqueda

As the lobbyist for the Washington State Labor Council, the campaign chairwoman for Raise Up Washington (which ran last year’s successful minimum-wage initiative), and legislative director for the Children’s Alliance, City Council Position 8 candidate Teresa Mosqueda has credentials in Olympia a mile long. Most of the causes she has championed involve historically marginalized or disempowered groups, particularly women and children; this year, for example, she worked behind the scenes to pass a paid family leave law that’s the most generous in the nation. Her work as a labor lobbyist, however, has led her opponent Jon Grant to criticize her as a pawn of “Big Labor,” a term that some on the socialist end of Seattle’s political spectrum consider synonymous with Big Business. Mosqueda has endorsements from every Seattle labor group and the support of a political action committee, Working Families for Teresa, that is backed by the grocery workers’ union (UFCW 21), the home health care workers’ union (SEIU 775), the Teamsters, and the AFL-CIO.

I sat down with Mosqueda at her office at WSLC headquarters on South Jackson Street.

The C Is for Crank [ECB]: If you win, the council will have a six-woman majority for the first time since the 1990s. Do you think a majority-female council will emphasize different issues or produce different policy results than the majority-male councils we’ve had for the vast majority of Seattle’s history?

Teresa Mosqueda [TM]: I hope so. I think part of the lived experience that I’m going to be bringing to this seat is one of creating greater economic stability for working families and women. Women are part of the workforce now. We do not have affordable child care. We do not have affordable family leave yet. Although Seattle has made some good strides to push the state in the right direction, [the new statewide family leave plan is] not going to start coming onto the books until 2019, 2020. And, frankly as women, we are often left out of conversations about what retirement security looks like. Because we have to step out of the workforce so many times [to do unpaid work as mothers and caregivers], because we tend to get tracked into lower-paying jobs, our retirement security also suffers when we don’t have people proactively thinking about how to create equity.

One of the things I want to do is help prevent folks from getting retaliated against for speaking about their pay on the job. Right now, there are zero protections. It says on the books that you have protection from retaliation, but the reality is, talking about your pay at work gets people fired, it gets them demoted, it gets their hours cut. So we need to make that a protection. Second, I’m also very interested in looking at the data in terms of [job] tracking. Let’s take an organization like Safeway, for example, or Whole Foods. If you look at who’s in floral versus who’s in meat-cutting, it’s women in floral and men in meat-cutting, and meat-cutting pays significantly more than floral. And you can see that people are tracked into certain jobs in various industries based on their gender, and I want to make sure that is something that we look at and do an analysis of and seeing how we can prevent that. And then, lastly, I do think that it’s important that we ask companies to display their pay, to give more folks transparency in the workplace.

ECB: You identified child care as an economic issue that falls largely on women. What’s your plan to provide child care for women and families?

TM: The principles are pretty simple. One: We’ve said that nobody should spend more than 9.5 percent of their income on health care. I want to apply that same principle to child care. Seattle, as you know, is the most expensive city in the country right now for a parent to have child care. Right now, it costs more to pay for child care for a year than it does to go to the University of Washington for a year. So there are a few things I would like to do. Number one is creating a sliding scale subsidy, especially for those on the bottom levels of the income spectrum. Number two is to really encourage or try to facilitate people going into the early learning profession, by working with our local colleges to make sure that we’re getting more folks into child care and early learning.

One way to do that is to actually pay them better. One idea I have is to actually subsidize or enhance the pay rate that child care providers receive in our city. I know everyone’s got their eyes on the [Families and Education] levy right now, but I do think there is a direct tie-in [between child care and education]. I also think we should work with the state on the square footage limits that we have on child care. Right now, an in-home child care provider has to have 35 square feet per child inside, and I think it’s 65 square feet per child outside. What home can you buy right now where, if you wanted to have a dozen kids and make it a sustaining business, that you could actually have that amount of square footage? I also think there’s a lot the city could do in terms of zoning and incentives for child care throughout the city.

 

“I’ve seen the Freedom Foundation use very similar tactics that I’m hearing, unfortunately, from some [on the left], saying that labor is not representative. I think it’s extremely dangerous for us to be using right-wing rhetoric when it comes to electing local progressive candidates.”

 

ECB: Your opponent keeps suggesting that you are a tool of “Big Labor,” while he’s the true progressive in the race. Should voters be concerned about the fact that labor groups are spending tens of thousands of dollars on independent expenditures to help get you elected?

TM: People in the labor movement elect their leaders. Those in the labor movement decide through a democratic process who to endorse. It’s workers who’ve endorsed me. Every labor union has endorsed me. The workers, faith communities, organizations from communities of color, environmentalists, health care advocates are behind me. So I say that it’s a false narrative. I’ve seen the Freedom Foundation [an anti-union advocacy group] use very similar tactics that I’m hearing, unfortunately, from some [on the left], saying that labor is not representative. I think it’s extremely dangerous for us to be using right-wing rhetoric when it comes to electing local progressive candidates. I think this is exactly what the right wing wants us to do—to fight against each other, fight over the scraps and to pull our community apart. I’ve seen that language be used in the halls of  Olympia and across our country, where labor is being demonized, and I think now is the time for us to find the commonality between movements and find common interest in fighting the -isms, whether it’s sexism, classism, racism, and uniting against the forces that are trying to divide us.

I entered this race when I was 36. I’m now 37. I am a Latina woman who’s a renter in Seattle. I am a progressive advocate who has proven credentials that I brought to the table, fighting for health care for all kids, including undocumented kiddos, standing up for the rights of all workers, fighting for retirement security and affordable health care for kiddos—the issues that I brought to this race stand on their own.

ECB: Would you revisit any aspect of the city’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda, and can you address Grant’s proposal to require developers to make 25 percent of all new housing affordable to low-income people?

TM: I’ll start with the 25 percent affordability suggestion. I’ve looked into this in depth, and what we saw in San Francisco, which passed an initiative saying they wanted a 25 percent requirement for all new buildings, is that it basically brought development almost to a halt during one of the biggest economic booms in history. Now it’s back with their board of supervisors. They’re trying to make a decision about what is the right number across the city, and they’re looking at what we did in Seattle [where the mandatory housing affordability proposal calls for different density increases] zone by zone. I’m not interested in grinding us to a halt. I’m interested in actually creating the housing that we need right now.

“The two-thirds of our city that is zoned for single family use has got to be reevaluated. We cannot create the affordable housing that we need for the folks who are living here, working here, retiring here, and those who are coming here, if we do not go back and add cottages, duplexes, triplexes, and affordable units.”

 

If there was something that I was going to push for on city council, especially with a new mayor and a new city council, it would be to say, did we lowball it [on affordable housing requirements] before? Twenty-five percent has obviously proven too much of a requirement to actually incentivize building, but instead of looking at [a] 2 to 11 [percent affordability requirement], is there a range that would allow us to move forward in this economic boom and get the affordable housing that we need without driving us back to either the conference room table or into court?

What I’ve been talking about is looking at every developable parcel of land that the city, county, and state owns, and that Sound Transit owns, and turning that into affordable housing options across the income spectrum— working with community land trusts, working with nonprofit housing developers, creating cohousing, coops, and subsidized housing models.

And in addition to that, the two-thirds of our city that is zoned for single family use has got to be reevaluated. We cannot create the affordable housing that we need for the folks who are living here, working here, retiring here, and those who are coming here, if we do not go back and add cottages, duplexes, triplexes, and affordable units for folks who probably rent but would like to buy one day. We have to be creative. We have to think out outside of the box. I don’t know about you, but I think a lot of your readers are tired of people who run for office who make these grand promises and then don’t deliver. What I’m talking about is getting in to office and then delivering the affordable housing that we need across the income spectrum. So it’s not going to be a one-sentence bumper sticker solution, it’s going to be a multifaceted approach.

ECB: The city’s Pathways Home strategy for addressing homelessness is based on a report that explicitly decouples homelessness and housing affordability, and concludes that people may just have to move outside the city or county to avoid being homeless. Do you agree with that strategy, and would you change anything about the city’s current approach to homelessness?

TM: I see them as interconnected. We have a crisis in the city both in terms of the lack of affordable housing and in terms of the number of folks who are living unsheltered on our streets. So I think that we need to take  a comprehensive approach and overhaul how we’re addressing the homelessness crisis. Number one, we have to stop the sweeps. It is retraumatizing people. It is not creating equitable solutions for folks who have already been failed by the system so many times. Getting moved from corner to corner is not a way to make sure they feel safe, and it is not a way to make sure they can access the services they need. We have to treat this as the health issue that it is.

 

“We are going to politicize the process and polarize the process, and it will not result in an actual [police] contract. The Freedom Foundation wants open collective bargaining  because they know it will result in stagnation and finger pointing.”

 

I’ve been talking about building the shelters that we need, building the permanent supportive housing that they need, and getting folks inside navigation centers [low-barrier shelters]. We obviously have to work with the community so people know where they’re being placed and why they’re being placed there, but they have to be placed throughout the city so that they’re in places where people can actually access them. It does us no good to place a navigation center ten miles away from where somebody can actually walk to where the services are needed. But in addition to that, making sure that we have actual inpatient treatment services in Seattle is one big priority that I’d like to address with the county. We do not have inpatient substance abuse treatment in Seattle that is sufficient. Folks end up going to Harborview and they’re let go 12 hours later. What they can do at Harborview is stabilize people. They can’t give them the case management and the substance abuse counseling and the long-term care that they need to be able to actually get sober. They should not be acting as our primary care providers throughout our city.

ECB: You’ve said that, unlike your opponent, you don’t want to open the police union negotiations to the public. Why not, and what would you do to increase transparency in police contract negotiations?

TM: I have constantly said what we need in this city is to rebuild trust. We need to make sure that people are not fearful when they call the cops  because they’re having a mental health crisis or because they are fearful that somebody broke into their home. And without a contract, I think a lot of people are concerned that we’re not going to get that trust. A contract can help us to that, but we’re not going to get a contract if you open up negotiations, like the Koch Foundation and the Freedom Foundation have called for. Because what that will inevitably create is folks sitting around a conference room table grandstanding. We are going to politicize the process and polarize the process, and it will not result in an actual contract. The Freedom Foundation wants open collective bargaining  because they know it will result in stagnation and finger pointing.

What I would commit to is saying, here are the things that I would want to see as part of a collective bargaining process: Be transparent with the public about how we’re going to hold folks accountable, how we’re going to create trust, and then be honest about what actually happens post-negotiations. The other thing I’ve said is, in addition to what the [Community Police Commission] has called for, which is the inspector general being in the room, the Office of Police Accountability being in the room, and CPC being in the room, I want there to actually be a community member at the table.

ECB: Are you talking about this community member being an observer or an active partner in contract negotiations?

TM: An active partner. I would like to see somebody sit in for the duration of the negotiations and be an actual part of the negotiations. Obviously, there’s things that come with that we need to be confidential and we need to be very respectful of the negotiating process, but I think we could have one or two community members sitting at the table bargaining in good faith. I think it can help us get to a base of trust.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue doing interviews like this one, which take an average of about 8-10 hours from start to finish. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers like you. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

City Council, Density, Development, discrimination, Election 2017, Equity, gender, land use, Mayor Murray, Morning Crank, Urbanism

Morning Crank: A Framework for Inaction

1. Nearly every candidate in this year’s Seattle elections, from urban planner Cary Moon to labor crusader Teresa Mosqueda to former US attorney Jenny Durkan, calls herself (or himself) an “urbanist.” (Moon was even endorsed by The Urbanist blog.) But what are the candidates telling neighborhood groups—the sort of organizations that too often stand in the way of the kind of new housing that would move Seattle toward an actual urbanist future?

At a recent candidate forum held by a group of Magnolia, Queen Anne, and Ballard homeowners, Moon said she would “restart” the process of allowing more housing in neighborhoods so that people already living in those neighborhoods—incumbent property owners—can make sure that their “culture” and neighborhood “character” is preserved.

Asked about Mayor Ed Murray’s Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda, which allows modest increases in housing supply in non-single-family areas, Moon responded:

The HALA process was way too insular and top-down. It was a small group of people, behind closed doors, who decided that they had a compromise with each other that they unleashed on the world and said, ‘You shall do this.’ That is not the way we do things in Seattle. A better process would have been to go to neighborhoods and say, ‘We’re growing this much and we need to create a healthy society where people of all income levels and all ages and stages of life can live in your neighborhood. Here’s the target goals for your neighborhood. How can we achieve these goals together?’ And work directly with these neighbors around how they want to grow. Do you want duplexes? Row houses? Backyard cottages? Upzone your urban village? [Put] the whole range of tools on the table and work with neighborhoods to figure out, what is the right way for you to grow that preserves your culture and your character of your neighborhood that you care about. That is what we should have done. And I would restart that process at this point and have a new discussion based in those constructive approaches and that positive future vision, because that’s the only way we’re going to make change in this city.

Moon’s response parroted both anti-development activists like Jon Grant, who’s running on a socialist party platform for council Position 8, and property values activists like Marty Kaplan, the Queen Anne homeowner who sued to prevent the city from allowing more backyard cottages and mother-in-law apartments in Seattle’s single-family areas. (Not to mention former mayor Mike McGinn, who ran unsuccessfully this year on a similar message).

Although Moon has, to her credit, been consistent with this let-the-neighborhoods-decide talking point (she said something similar to Transportation for Washington, the political arm of  the urbanist Transportation Choices Coalition, in their endorsement interview, and to me), she’s savvy enough to know that promises to preserve “your culture,” “neighborhood character,” and even “your neighborhood” are dog whistles,  not neutral policy goals. Assuring homeowners that the neighborhoods belong to them, not newcomers or renters, and defining “character” as “exclusive single-family areas” creates a framework for inaction, not a blueprint for growth.

2. On a more positive note, it’s been fun to see Moon and Durkan try to outdo each other with proposals to advance pay equity for women and in jobs primarily held by women over the past two weeks—something I’ve never seen from any male candidate for local elective office, ever. (This, in case you’re wondering, is one of many reasons we need more women in local positions—try to imagine any of the male council members of the past 50 years adding “gender pay equity” to the mission of a standing council committee, which Jean Godden did, or expanding that mission to “gender equity” in general, as Lorena Gonzalez did after Godden left the council.)

The latest shot across the bow comes from Moon, who on Monday proposed a set of rule changes to promote pay equity and transparency from large employers and an ordinance that would bar employers from asking prospective hires about their salary history. Women in Seattle currently make just 78 cents on the dollar compared to men doing similar work, one of the worst big-city pay gaps in the country. Salary history requests contribute to this gap, because when employers base salaries on women’s current pay in a system that underpays them, it only perpetuates the problem. In addition to the salary history ban, Moon proposed working toward a local version of state legislation that would have banned retaliation against workers for discussing their pay, prevented employers from paying some people less for doing the same work as other employees based on their job title, and tracking women into lower-paying jobs.

The pay gap, unsurprisingly, is even worse in the tech industry, where female programmers make, on average, almost 30 percent less than their male counterparts. Durkan is supported by the political arm of the Seattle Chamber, which includes the Washington Retail Association and the Washington Tech Industry Alliance, organizations that opposed SB 1605 this year. The Chamber’s PAC, Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy, has poured $86,000 into an independent expenditure group, People for Jenny. I reached out to Durkan’s campaign yesterday afternoon to find out whether she supports a ban on salary history or a local ordinance that mirrors 1605 and will update this post when I hear back from them.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, phone bills, electronics, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

City Council, Women

Here’s What the Council Should Ask about Gender Pay Equity

Screen shot 2015-05-10 at 6.02.55 PM

The city council will get a briefing tomorrow on the latest report on gender pay equity, prepared by DCI Consulting Group earlier this year. The report concludes, in short, that there is no “pattern or practice of discriminatory compensation or employment practices by the City”—and that, in fact, city government is doing significantly better than the city as a whole. At the City, women make a little less than 90 cents for every male dollar; in the city, women earn an average of 73 cents for every dollar men earn. That’s an average salary of $81,059 for men, and $72,752 for men.

The report includes a lot of details (not surprising for an 836-page document), including how salaries break down by not just gender but department, part-time status, and ethnicity. It also examines what sort of jobs women tend to hold at the city (no surprises here—women are overrepresented in part-time jobs, overrepresented in the human services, human resources, and neighborhoods departments, and underrepresented in fire, police, IT, and City Light), how often they quit their jobs compared to men, and why women tend to be hired part-time far more often than men.

You can find all those details in the report itself, and in the presentation DCI will deliver to the council tomorrow, and I hope to dig through the numbers more closely later. For now, I’m going to highlight just a few that illuminate questions I think the council, and the city as a whole, should be asking about gender disparities that are happening on their watch. I’m not calling the city out for discrimination—thanks in part to a rigid “step” structure that requires specific pay for certain jobs, and in part to a fairly progressive city culture, the pay gap is far less terrible (to coin a phrase) at the City than citywide. But, as Mayor Ed Murray’s initial report on gender equity concluded back in 2014, “we can do better.” Here are some questions that might help the city map out how.

• Out of around 12,000 city employees, full- and part-time, 63 percent are men and 37 percent are women. What explanation is there, if any, for this overall hiring disparity?

• Of the ethnic/gender breakdowns considered in the report (e.g. white male, Hispanic female), six of the seven top-paid categories are men (the top-paid employees are, of course, white men), and six of the lowest-paid seven categories are women (the lowest-paid workers are Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander women). While white women make 91.3 percent of their male counterparts’ salaries, black women, for example, make 77.3 percent as much as white men, and NHPI women make just 69.6 percent of what white men make. What is the city doing, specifically, to address the intersection of gender inequity and racial inequity in pay?

• Why does DCI’s presentation emphasize the median male-female pay ratio, which is 96.7 percent (women make a median of 96.7 cents on the male dollar), instead of the less-flattering average pay ratio of 89.8 percent?

• Why does the report dedicate so much attention to “similarly situated” employees—that is, male and female employees in the same jobs—when the larger problem appears to be that women are hugely underrepresented in certain jobs and overrepresented in others? Given that the city theoretically has to pay all employees in the same position equally (every Strategic Advisor II is in the same pay band, for example), is it noteworthy that men and women with the same jobs are paid about the same? (And why is this gap, again, represented by the median gap rather than the average?)

• Although the report isn’t designed to deal with the issue of education and job preparation in society as a whole, isn’t it a little glib to spend so much time emphasizing that women aren’t “underutilized” at the city when considered in the context of the number of qualified women “available” on the job market? The conclusion that, as the report puts it, “the City has done an excellent job of hiring women and minorities in comparison to their availability in the relevant job market,” begs the question in exactly the same way as hiring managers who explain their all-male staffs by saying, “But we just couldn’t find any qualified women,” or “It’s not our fault no women applied.”

Why doesn’t the DCI report at least touch on the fact that big institutions have a responsibility to increase the pool of trained applicants put at a disadvantage because society pushes them toward low-paid caregiving jobs, or into lousy schools, rather than simply throwing up its hands and saying, “The city just could’t find many qualified women and minorities, but let’s pat ourselves on the back because at least we didn’t hire even fewer than we could have!”

Instead you get congratulatory slides like this:<

Screen shot 2015-05-10 at 5.41.32 PM

Availability as an excuse for low hiring numbers is a self-fulfilling prophecy

• Why did the report specifically remove the Police, Fire, and City Light departments from the citywide numbers, rather than isolating those three male-dominated departments and providing specific data for them? The DCI report includes a reassuring chart demonstrating that, if you just remove police, fire, and electricity, the city’s gender pay ratio basically disappears. In this completely theoretical world where those three giant departments, which represent nearly half the city’s total workforce (around 5,000 employees) don’t exist, the pay gap magically “narrows from 89.7% to 98.2%… even before controlling for experience, specialized skills, bargaining unit, market scarcity, or tenure.

The presentation continues triumphantly:

“After removing Police, Fire & City Light from Citywide data set: Percent of females in City workforce jumps from 37% to 46%,” and “Without Police, Fire, and City Light, avg. hourly male salary in City decreases by over $ per hour but avg. hourly female salary only decreases by 70 cents.

So in a completely imaginary world where nearly half the jobs at the city are wiped out, pay is pretty equitable and the gender hiring disparity is pretty small! In the real world, meanwhile, pay isn’t equitable and the gender disparity is significant. So why are we focusing on cherry-picked data that seems designed to make the city look good? And why aren’t the abysmal numbers for the police, fire, and City Light departments not being pulled out and emphasized? (Women, for example, hold just 3.6 percent of the police department’s “premium pay assignments,” such as canine, hostage negotiation, and SWAT duties, and three premium SPD assignments—SWAT, diver, and police academy instructor, which total about 75 positions—are held exclusively by men.<

The consultants present their report in tomorrow's 9:30 council briefings meeting in council chambers.