Tech companies start to close the wage gap

By Eileen Gazzola, Staff Writer

nytimes.com

nytimes.com

Facebook and Microsoft just became the latest technology companies to boast that their female employees earn just as much as their male employees.

This has been a topic of conversation for quite some time, and tech companies are bragging with equality. These two companies just released their figures before Equal Pay Day, on April 12.

In a Facebook post, Lori Goler from HR at Facebook writes, “at Facebook, though, we think about equal pay year- round.” She continues to say, “at Facebook we value those who bring varying perspectives, for many reasons including background, community, culture, race, ethnicity – and gender. We call this cognitive diversity, and we want more of it. It propels our mission: to make the world more open and connected.” She ended her post detailing “there’s always more work to be done, of course. But we’re proud to be a leader in pay equality, and look forward to a time when we don’t even need to call it out.”

Unfortunately, other tech companies are not quite on the same page. Microsoft’s gender pay gap report improved where women earned 99.7 cents to a men’s dollar last year, while they now earn 99.8 cents to a men’s dollar this year. GoDaddy’s report showed that in the executive level, women earn 96 cents to a man’s dollar.

Another company, Salesforce, announced last month that they had spent almost $3 million in correcting the “statistically significant differences in pay.” In addition, CEO Marc Benioff promised CNN’s Poppy Harlow last year that he would hire enough women so the company had equal amounts of men and women employed.

Although these promises and statistics looks like they have improved over the years, a recent study actually shows that the pay disparity between men and women seems to be getting bigger in the United States. Now, our country that used to be placed 65th in wage equality now has made its way to 74th among 145 countries, according to the World Economics Forum’s Global Gender report. Specifically, female to male earnings has decreased from 66% to 64%. Statistics from the National Women’s Law Center show that an average American woman would lose $430,480 in earnings over a 40-year period using modern day wage inequality data.

Hopefully now that some of the leading tech companies in our society have made an effort towards equal pay, others will follow.

Author: Web Editor

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