Gender pay gap and salary transparency

Last Friday, I shared a post about a Forbes article on new research into the pay expectations of women in the tech sector. Then I logged off for the week and went on a long weekend break. When I came back to work, I saw that a lot of people had reacted to the post. It struck a chord, which made me want to dig into the topic further.

The article by Kim Elsesser explores research by the recruitment platform Otta.com about the disparity of salary expectations between men and women. It’s a clever use of member data by a tech platform to highlight trends within industry recruitment.?

“Otta currently has 500,000 U.S.-based users, and 60% are women. The website asks job seekers to enter their work preferences, including minimum salary requirements, when they start their job search. In the United States, women, on average, entered minimum salaries that were a whopping 17% lower than those entered by men.”

Crucially, “this effect [women underestimating their value] disappears when the women know what others are getting paid. In the same study, the gender difference in self-pay vanished when the experimenters let the participants see a bogus log of self-pay taken by previous male and female study participants…?

In other words, when women knew the pay range, they requested fair pay.”

As someone who doesn’t work in Recruitment, this seems like both an evidence-based problem is being highlighted and a viable solution is being offered. These findings obviously resonated with (mostly) women and their lived experiences of work with people sharing comments on my post and sharing within their networks. On seeing the reaction, I felt a bit self-conscious that I’d angrily fired it off on my phone, rather than being thorough and considered. It is a raw topic and the reality is brutal. Data and percentages on a pay gap that is growing alongside a cost-of-living-crisis, have very real impacts on people’s lives.?

While feeling urged to write something more in-depth about this, I quickly thought about the people I know who are more clued-up on the topic, including:

• Members of my team at William Joseph (B Corp) who have worked with Ray Cooper and Collaborative Future to make our recruitment more equitable, transparent and safe, including salary bands being displayed on job adverts.
• Those already campaigning for salary transparency including ShowthePay.com and Show the Salary for the charity sector urge employers and recruiters to display and be open about salaries on job adverts. Ben Luby made the point that this pay gap isn’t unique to gender. It also affects other marginalised people. 100% yes - it was remiss of me to not highlight this in the original post. As Show the Pay summarise: “Lack of transparency hurts those that are less likely to negotiate” for whatever reason and however people have been marginalised in the workplace.
• My partner Rob Cronin , who shared the research with me and is a HR tech specialist. His work includes considering both sides of? this issue for the prospective employee and employer, and is? pushing? to default salary range transparency on all job adverts in the company he works for.

However, I’m pushing against that instinct that tells me “I don’t know enough” because I have a voice, a platform (with algorithmically-defined reach) and I have experienced being paid less than a male counterpart.?

At a previous employer I was doing the same job as a male colleague and I always strongly suspected that he was on a higher salary, based on a comment at the time he was hired. I ignored that niggling feeling for a year or two, convincing myself that I was less experienced in the role. Until I faced that it was unlikely this was the case, and we certainly had closely comparable responsibilities, tasks and performance.?

After I raised it with my manager, I went through months’ of pushing to find out that I was actually being paid 11% less than my male colleague. Leading up to that sucker punch, I was constantly doubting myself, questioning my value and contribution to the business. Magnifying the common feelings of many marginalised people that you must always be rational, reasonable and unemotional. I acknowledge that I have a lot of inherited privilege and that I feel the very tip of a monstrous iceberg. The pay gap for Black women, for example, is much larger. I kept reaffirming to myself that, while it was hard to speak up, this wouldn’t just make a difference to me, but to other prospective employees.?

I rejected an initial offer of a one-off ‘in kind’ payment and persevered for an equal salary, which I did get, through the route of an informal grievance. The employer didn’t acknowledge that it was a gender-based pay gap - I think it risked opening them up to escalated action - and I didn’t pursue any ‘lost earnings’. I found the whole process very cold and at the end of it, I felt relieved but not valued. I donated some of my increased salary to women’s charities and got my head back down.?

I did feel a sense of success when we were next preparing to make an offer to a female team member into a closely comparative role already being done by a male counterpart. Before we made the offer, my manager said (pretty pointedly) that he’d need to check what we planned to offer against other salaries in the team, which is exactly what I’d been hoping to achieve. If there had been a salary band attached to the role, this would’ve been easier and more transparent, while still allowing some flexibility for differing levels of experience.

I’m sharing this, now that distance has been created through time, not to hail myself as a feminist crusader or to have a dig at a former employer, but because we need to talk more about work salaries and benefits. You can’t be an organisation that claims to be committed to creating a more diverse workforce if you’re not prepared to make changes that have a real impact in attracting, welcoming and nurturing people who have been marginalised.

One of the actions that the Fawcett Society is calling for, is a free-standing and legally enforceable ‘Right to Know' what a male colleague is paid for equal work. If this had been in place, I could’ve found out the disparity much sooner and it would create more transparency to accelerate the ‘steps being taken’ to close pay gaps. This 'Right to Know' would be more powerful if it wasn't just along gender lines and was a proactive transparency from employers to be open about salaries rather than any policies that prevent colleagues from discussing it.

The research from Otta.com is based on data from U.S. job seekers, but it’s no rosier this side of the pond. We’re in that segment of the year when women are working for free thanks to the gender pay gap. To mark Equal Pay Day 2022, the Fawcett Society “released a new report and data which reveals that during 2022 women will, on average, take home ￡564 less than men each month - up from ￡536 in 2021.”

The Fawcett Society are calling on Government to:

• Improve pay gap reporting?
• Require employers to offer flexible work arrangements as default and advertise jobs with flexibility built-in
• Reform the childcare system to increase affordability whilst ensuring our children get the best start in life
• Ban questions about salary history during recruitment and require salary bands to be displayed on job advertisements
• Introduce a free-standing and legally enforceable ‘Right to Know' what a male colleague is paid for equal work

Pay discrimination has been illegal in the UK (and has been since the 1970s) under the Equality Act. More than 50 years after it was introduced, this law is no longer fit for purpose and the actions being called to modernise it, would make significant strides toward actual pay equality.

If you’d like to share your experience here, I’d be really keen to read it and I’m sure that it’d help others.