It’s easy to incorporate pay equity in a layered, multidimensional way.A 2018 #ANGELS article about Silicon Valley’s Equity Gap, disclosed their study with Carta which analyzed the gender gap in cap tables. In short, the study showed that women in tech companies receive far less stock (options/shares/RSUs) than men.
“Women make up 33% of the combined founder and employee workforce but hold just 9% of the equity value. The other 91% belongs to men.”
Soon after, ADP released their new study about the gender gap in bonus and incentive pay. Though ADP focused in a different area than the #ANGELS/Carta study, the results are similarly bleak. Women in the ADP study fare far worse when examining incentive pay and bonuses than their male colleagues.
The gender pay gap in wages/salary is well understood. Many people already know about Equal Pay Day (though you may not realize that Equal Pay Day for Latinas still hasn’t happened yet — it’s 1 November). To a compensation geek like me, these new studies are exciting. Both studies are based in large datasets with thousands of companies. And they both focus on relatively unexplored areas gender pay studies.
This is huge.
What does this mean for your company?
Innovative companies who want to grow and retain their best talent are already doing the work to address pay gaps around salary and wages. Earlier this year, Starbucks announced that after 10 years of focused work, they closed their gender pay gap. But you don’t need to be a giant corporation to care about pay equity — and to take action. To be a great company, you should think about pay equity in a multidimensional way.
About the Author
bethanye McKinney Blount, CEO and Co-Founder at Compaas and has over twenty years experience working in technology. She has led engineering teams at reddit, Linden Lab, EMI Music, and Facebook. MailRank, an email productivity startup she co-founded, was acquired by Facebook in 2011. In 2014, Business Insider included bethanye on their list of 22 Most Powerful Women Engineers and, in 2018, Forbes selected bethanye as one of the Top 50 Women in Tech. Joining a team of senior women in technology, bethanye helped found Project Include in 2016 — a nonprofit focused on improving diversity and inclusion in tech companies. She is both a startup advisor and mentor to other founders, focusing on engineering leadership and developing diverse technical organizations.
