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From: ron@topaz.rutgers.edu (Ron Natalie)
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Re: Discrimination?
Message-ID: <11788@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 7 Jul 88 18:52:12 GMT
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Federal Government salaries are based on GS series.  Essentially this is a
group of pay ranges that correspond to the "type/quality" of work you are
doing.  Within each GS level are steps.  These are used to benefit workers
who've worked in a particular job range with good performance.  For non-
incompetents, you're step increases are your annual range.  If you want to
go up a GS level, you need to have your position changed to reflect that
you are actually working on the type of work that is classified at the
higher GS level.

There are some important things to note:

1.  GS levels, say GS-5 step 1 in your case, are not constant accross all
types of employees.  For example, at BRL where I worked, Engineers at GS-9
were paid about $2000 more than Mathematicians.  This is generally done to
try to keep the government salaries competitive with outside industry (it
still lags pretty badly, but you take what you can get).

2.  There are some rather inflexible rules about who can qualify for various
GS levels and job classes.  You needed a BS degree in some engineering field
to get the Engineering scale.  Had I only had a Computer Science degree, I
would have been on the Math scale and have made $2000 less for the same job.
This is likely to be your problem.

3.  The government is even more inflexible in what positions you can get
if you don't have a degree at all.  No amount of outside review that we
tried could get my coworker who was as fine as a UNIX hacker as you'll
ever see on a reasonable grade.  As far as the OPM was concered, he couldn't
possibly be doing GS-7 work, because he didn't have a degree.

Some things for you to try.  First, a batchelors degree should be good enough
to get a GS-7 if you had good grades at school (better than 3.0 overall, or
better than 3.5 in your major, or on the Deans list, either for the last
two years of your coursework or for everything, whichever makes you look the
best).  You might explore bumping up a grade level.

I doubt that for starting salaries sex plays much of a role.  It is when
promotion time comes that the oppurtunity to not provide the necessary
recommendations comes into play.  Of course, as near as I can tell, the
Army at least, goes overboard in providing Equal Oppurtunity coordinators
to try to avoid these things.

A final piece of advice.  Find out what the promotion rules are for your
job.  You may be eligible for one as soon as 6 months after you start.
Your boss may either not be knowledgeable of the oppurtunities for your
advancement or he may be a bit of a procrastinator with regard to putting
in for them.  My boss was very good at keeping track of our stuff, but I
know some people who suffered, because their boss just never got around
to applying for their raises.

-Ron