The Gender Pay Gap
by Miki Saxon
In bygone days the ‘my father can beat up your father’ was a favorite taunt.
These days it’s more often ‘my father earns more than your mother’.
So goes the gender pay gap and has since women entered the workforce.
Much has been written and many hands have been wrung over the disparity of pay between men and women doing the same job.
But the bias isn’t always intentional.
A vast majority of them are fair-minded guys who want women to succeed. They’re absolutely certain that they don’t have a gender problem themselves; it must be some other guys who do. Yet they’re leaders of companies that pay men more than women for the same jobs.
Now an intriguing idea has surfaced playing off the SEC’s new rule forcing companies to publish comparisons of how much chief executive officers take home compared with ordinary employees
The idea is to do the same between males/females within each company.
This would be especially interesting in tech, which admits that diversity may be a great goal, but won’t happen any time soon, even in companies which have made it a priority, such as Apple.
In the event the idea gains any traction you can assume enterprise will fight it as passionately — probably more — as it fought the CEO comparison, which took five years to become reality.
Without the force of law, how likely that the comparison could become a reality?
There are two ways that come to mind.
- The first is to have a company step forward and offer the information voluntarily.
- The second is that an internal whistleblower will publish the information anonymously on social media.
The second is far more likely, especially in the data-driven world in which today’s companies must operate.
Flickr image credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
