This is the oldest argument against all employment anti-discrimination efforts, namely „The free market will take care of it”
It’s quite obvious that this idea was never true: companies were quite willing to forgo some money to keep their workforce male & white, to not approve mortgages for minorities trying to move to the “wrong” part of town (redlining), etc.
In any case, your suggestion, even if workable, would seem to be eminently discriminatory: changing jobs, and everything it can entail such as moving a whole family, is in itself a harm nobody should suffer just for their gender/skin color/etc.
In practical matters, people are often not aware of discrimination they suffer until long after, because compensation information is regarded as secret, and because it requires aggregation of many data points to show systemic biases.
The free market can only take care of persisting discrimination by adjusting compensating differentials, so as to provide an incentive for hiring those who are being discriminated against. So the fact that females and minorities are both said to be discriminated in hiring and underpaid at some places is per se proof that the free market is in fact working to address discrimination in hiring. Sure, we'd like to see equal pay for equal work too, but you gotta start somewhere...
This is reasonable, but now you've given up the game entirely. Oracle and similar firms receive massive benefits from society. First, they are allowed to exist in the first place, which is not obviously a just decision. Also, so many aspects of society are tweaked to make it easier for gigantic inefficient firms to profit consistently. Because of this, Oracle and firms like it owe us something more than merely responding to market conditions. At the very least, not discriminating against employees in illegal ways is part of what they owe.
You guys seem really interested in this topic, so I thought I'd recommend the book The Economics of Discrimination by Becker.
A lot of seemingly intuitive things about wage discrimination fall apart upon closer inspection. It's a really complex problem that in some cases has counter intuitively gotten worse since the Jim Crow days.
It’s quite obvious that this idea was never true: companies were quite willing to forgo some money to keep their workforce male & white, to not approve mortgages for minorities trying to move to the “wrong” part of town (redlining), etc.
In any case, your suggestion, even if workable, would seem to be eminently discriminatory: changing jobs, and everything it can entail such as moving a whole family, is in itself a harm nobody should suffer just for their gender/skin color/etc.
In practical matters, people are often not aware of discrimination they suffer until long after, because compensation information is regarded as secret, and because it requires aggregation of many data points to show systemic biases.