Dive Brief:
- With today's Equal Pay Day as a backdrop, tech giants Microsoft and Facebook are the latest brand name tech employers to declare that they have wiped out the gender pay gap within their workforces, according to media reports.
- The Seattle Times reports that women who work for Microsoft in the U.S. earn 99.8 cents for every dollar earned by men with the same job title.
- Microsoft and Facebook made their data public somewhat in response to Arjuna Capital, an activist investment firm, which released a proposal that would have asked affected employers to commit to closing the gender pay gap. Arjuna has been pressuring the tech industry to disclose gender-based pay practices and pledge to end disparities.
Dive Insight:
“These numbers reflect our commitment to equal pay for equal work, and I’m encouraged by these results,” Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft’s head of HR said in a blog post announcing the figures Monday, the Times reports. Facebook’s vice president of people, Lori Matloff Goler, posted Facebook about the news, but cited no data about reaching the goal.
The gender pay issue has been especially sensitive for Microsoft because its CEO, Satya Nadella, commented in 2014 that women in the tech industry should basically avoid asking for raises but rather should trust that the compensation system would reward them fairly. Soon thereafter, he walked back those comments, calling them incorrect, according to the Times.
The article notes that Microsoft employs about 61,000 people in the U.S., most of them in offices in Redmond and elsewhere in Washington state. It would not disclose gender pay data on its 51,000 employees working beyond U.S. borders.
The tech industry in general has been facing fire on gender pay equality. In one of Glassdoor's recent studies, computer programmers topped the list of professions with "unexplainable" gender pay gaps.
