Dive Brief:

• Salary.com has launched a pay equity reporting toolkit, the company announced March 24.
• The toolkit allows users to identify differences in compensation "based on gender, race, age, or any basis of comparison that a company finds important."
• The toolkit's standard reports analyze pay by "job, family, level or grade across gender, ethnicity or age," according to Salary.com. Other reports analyze cross-company pay equity; pay equity by ethnicity, gender or age; and "equal pay for equal work."

Dive Insight:

Tools like the one released by Salary.com may be useful to employers, whom attorneys have long urged to audit their pay practices to identify and correct pay gaps.

Federal legislation prohibiting pay discrimination on the basis of gender, race, age and a number of other characteristics has existed for decades. But pay discrepancies have persisted, and the topic has attracted the attention of the corporate world.

Various groups have attempted to calculate the gender pay gap, both globally and within the U.S. PayScale reported last year that women make 98 cents for every dollar men earn when controlling for factors such as experience, industry and job level. And the World Economic Forum estimated in 2018 that it will take 108 years for the world to achieve pay equity between men and women.

Outside of such reports, workers and organizations continue to allege pay inequities. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Dell in 2020, alleging it violated federal law by paying a female IT analyst less than it paid a male employee who performed the same work. More recently, Google agreed to pay millions of dollars to settle charges of pay discrimination brought by California and Washington employees.

Perhaps in response to increased attention to the issue, similarly visible companies have made it a point to announce pay equity milestones. Mastercard said in 2020 that it closed gender pay gaps for similar levels and roles. About a year earlier, Nordstrom said it reached pay equity for employees of all races and genders.