Asking Job Applicants About Salary History Could Soon Be Banned In Montgomery County Government
Applicants for Montgomery County government jobs will no longer face questions about their past earnings, if new legislation passed unanimously by the county council becomes law.
Tuesday morning, all nine council members approved a bill introduced by Council member Evan Glass called the “Pay Equity” act. The bill has received an endorsement from Democratic County Executive Marc Elrich, who is expected to sign it.
The legislation prohibits county government employers from basing salary offers on applicants’ past earnings. It also requires the county executive’s office to deliver a report on how similar laws have impacted the private sector in other jurisdictions and assess gender pay equity within county government every two years.
The bill takes aim at pay gaps between men and women who work for the county, Glass says. The first-term Council member says he stumbled across the issue when he was hiring his own staff.
“I was being told by members of my team that they needed to provide their salary history in the process,” Glass says, “and I knew that when you rely on salary history, you are perpetuating the gaps that exist.”
Women in Maryland typically earn 86 cents for every dollar earned by men, according to the National Women’s Law Center, which supports barring employers from asking job candidates about their salary history. Black and Latina women face even larger disparities across the state, according to NWLC, making 69 and 46 cents, respectively, for every dollar earned by white men.
“Since wages for women generally lag behind wages for men, and wages for women of color lag even further behind wages of white men, basing a starting salary on a person’s current salary is likely to result in an adverse impact on the future wages of women employees,” says a county memorandum written by Senior Legislative Attorney Robert H. Drummer.
Glass says that as he dove deeper into the issue, he was struck by one situation faced by a group of managers hired within the same period at the county’s Health and Human Services division — 12 of them female and one male.
“The one man got paid nearly $30,000 more than the lowest paid female, and he got paid more than all the women,” Glass says. “That is a problem here in the county.”
But Glass’s proposal has encountered skepticism. In a series of blog posts for Bethesda Beat, former council staffer Adam Pagnucco argued that the legislation wouldn’t address the true causes of wage inequity within county government.
After analyzing salary data for all county workers, Pagnucco concluded that there is a gender pay gap in the county, but it doesn’t stem from basing salary offers on past pay. He says the disparity corresponds to differences between full-time and part-time workers (women are far more likely to work part time); overrepresentation of women within lower-paying county offices, such as the library system; and the fact that men earn more overtime pay than women do.
“None of those factors are addressed by the Pay Equity Act,” Pagnucco wrote. “Much more work needs to be done.”
But Glass says Pagnucco’s analysis compares “apples to oranges.” The council member’s staff compared salaries between employees that hold similar jobs, he says, not across all positions. After narrowing the data in that way, Glass says he found significant differences in pay among men and women in comparable positions.
“[Pagnucco was] collecting everything in one big net,” Glass says, “and we were being more thoughtful in our analysis.”
The Pay Equity Act is similar to legislation that’s been introduced multiple times on the state level that would also apply to private employers in Maryland. So far, the bills have gone nowhere.
Asking about salary history is already banned in some form in 14 states and 13 localities, according to the American Association of University Women.
If signed into law, the Pay Equity Act would only apply to new applicants for county jobs. Going forward, Glass says, he doesn’t expect the measure to have a significant fiscal impact.
“There are no new programs that are being created here,” Glass says. “We are just paying people fairly.”