How this website is trying to help close the wage gap at your job
This year, Equal Pay Day falls on April 4th — the date in 2017 that women had to work to in order to earn what men did in 2016. Last year, it fell on April 12th, so it’s clear that progress is excruciatingly slow when it comes to reaching pay parity. Glassdoor’s website has launched an effort to help close the wage gap at your job by providing a guide that tells employers how to determine their pay gap.
The guide, which was created by Glassdoor’s chief economist, goes into extensive technical detail and provides companies with actionable steps that will help them audit their salary practices.
The first step requires employers to ensure that their human resources departments are collecting the right data.
Next, they need to get software that will accurately assess complex statistics for all the following data points: gender, job title, age, department, location, full-time/part-time status, annual base pay, annual bonuses and commissions, seniority level, highest education, performance evaluation score, hire date, and race or ethnicity.
The software allows companies to determine the source of their pay gap — for example, male overrepresentation in higher-paying roles, or pay differences among people in the same roles.
Ideally, employers will use this information to commit to equitable salary offers, assess conscious and unconscious bias in performance reviews, and pledge their commitment to pay parity.
Over 3,000 companies have chosen the latter, including Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter.
Of course, pledging equal pay doesn’t always translate to action — so Glassdoor’s guide is the ideal way to assess whether or not these companies have actually followed through and taken steps to close the gender and racial wage gap.
“The reality is if employers haven’t done the work to truly analyze their pay data, they will have a hard time knowing if a wage gap exists. Our experience shows pay gaps don’t result from overt discrimination, they result from years of unintentional bias that can creep into an organization over time," Glassdoor Vice President of Corporate Affairs Dawn Lyon said. "Analysis is far more involved than printing out a spreadsheet and eyeballing it - you need to go deep and control for a variety of factors to get the real story.
As of today, we won’t achieve pay parity until 2059 — and for women of color, the picture is even bleaker. If things continue as they are, black women will reach parity in 2124 and Latinas will have to wait until 2248.
These depressing numbers aren’t set in stone — we can actively fight the wage gap, and Glassdoor’s guide is an excellent way to do so.
