The gender gap is still very wide in America. According to the latest Census data, a woman working full time in 2013 earned about 77 percent of what a man earned for the same job.
But one chief executive of a multibillion-dollar company is addressing this issue in his own firm. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff wants to erase the gender wage gap at the San Francisco-based tech solutions firm. He is examining the pay of all 16,000 employees and as a result has given some women raises. “I expect to be giving a lot more,” he told the Huffington Post.
“My job is to make sure that women are treated 100 percent equally at Salesforce in pay, opportunity and advancement,” he said, “when I’m done there will be no gap.”
He expects the process to eliminate the wage gap will take a couple of years.
Salesforce’s pay initiative is part of a broader company program called Women’s Surge, which Benioff established in 2013 to address his concern over the last of female executives at his company. It is still an issue; as of June 2014, men made up 85 percent of the leadership team at Salesforce. But Salesforce is working on this on several fronts.
The company has also formed a women’s group called FemmeForce that provides mentoring and does nonprofit work.
Salesforce isn’t alone in its pay initiative. Interim CEO of Reddit, Ellen Pao, also recently addressed the gap at her company by prohibiting negotiation during the hiring and recruiting process. “If you want more equity, we’ll let you swap a little bit of your cash salary for equity, but we aren’t going to reward people who are better negotiators with more compensation,” she told the Wall Street Journal.
Economists claim there are a variety of reasons for the gap. Among them: Women tend to enter lower-paying industries or trade pay for flexible hours; sex discrimination; and women often don’t negotiate for higher wages. According to studies, if a worker doesn’t negotiate for higher pay in her first job, low wages could follow her whole career.
A decade after completing Harvard Business School, male graduates earn more than $400,000 annually while female graduates get about $250,000, according American Economic Journal, cited by The New York Times in 2013.
