Dive Brief:
- Men are offered higher salaries than women for the same work 63% of the time, according to a new Hired global report. "The State of Wage Inequality in the Workplace" found that companies pay women on average 4% to as much as 45% less than men in the same jobs — and these numbers haven't changed since the company released its second annual 2017 report.
- Hired also discovered that 54% of women found out that they were being paid less than a male peer in the same role, compared to 19% or men who learned they were paid less than a colleague. Hired says a discouraging finding was that employers paid African-American and Hispanic women 90 cents for every dollar they paid white men in the same roles. However, white women could command a higher salary than black and Hispanic men.
- In looking at the gender gap across industries, the report shows that women in education technology received 10% less than men doing similar work, and women in the health and finance industries were paid 7% less than their male peers. Women at firms in Silicon Valley earned more on average than women in other U.S. markets. The wage gap was 8% in the San Francisco Bay area and 11% in Seattle, which had the highest gender gap.
Dive Insight:
Tuesday, April 10 is Equal Pay Day in the U.S., aka, how far into the year women must work to catch up to what men earned the year before. The Equal Pay Days for black women and Hispanic women are even further in the year. Without the engagement of employers, it's likely the pay gap could continue unabated for years — even as long as 200-plus years, according to a recent World Economic Forum report.
The lack of transparency over compensation may have helped perpetuate the wage gap. Unfair pay practices come to light when employees share information with each other, which is increasingly more likely to happen now that the stigma is lessened and various job sites have dedicated resources to revealing proper pay for certain jobs. Employers that try to keep workers in the dark about each other's earnings risk becoming liable for pay discrimination once the information is disclosed. Transparency not only requires honesty — it also requires pay disparities to be flagged and eliminated.
Employment experts believe it will take decades before the wage gap closes. But some companies are working on closing the gap now, as seen at Starbucks, Salesforce and Citigroup, partly due to the efforts of activist investors asking companies to report on their pay scheme.
