How one Silicon Valley company made strides toward gender equality

Dive Brief:

Despite work to the contrary by tech companies such as Google and others, the male-to-female manager ratio among Silicon Valley tech companies is dismal. Not only that, but the median compensation level between the genders in Silicon Valley also is off kilter.
In a New York Times article, Marc Benioff, co-founder and chief executive of Salesforce, reports noticing a couple of years ago that when he was in meetings with managers, they were all men. Silicon Valley’s notorious lack of gender diversity, he realized, was a problem at Salesforce too. “I was really worried that there was something wrong with the company," he told the Times.
Hoping to change the ratio, Benioff started what he called the Women’s Surge in 2013. The goal was to achieve 100% equality for men and women in pay and promotion, and to make sure that at least a third of all participants at any meeting were women.

Dive Insight:

As a first step, Benioff asked managers across the company to identify their top executives, who would then receive additional leadership training. In divisions where mostly men were nominated, Mr. Benioff told the managers to come back with a more diverse list.

Two of the women to receive promotions were Cindy Robbins, who became head of human resources, and Leyla Seka, who took over the Desk.com division, a customer service unit. Robbins and Seka soon told Benioff that women were paid less than their male counterparts at Salesforce. After an investigation, they were proven right.

Now Salesforce is in the process of raising the salaries of underpaid women (and a few men), one at a time. “Many men and women were on par,” Robbins, who is overseeing the effort to review and increase salaries, told the Times. “But some salaries for men and women needed to be adjusted.”

Salesforce still has work to do, the Times reports. In the meantime, author David Gelles writes that overall change is likely to arrive through a combination of more assertive female employees, closer monitoring of compensation data (and possibly more transparency), and continued effort by managers to promote both sexes equally.