Peter Mondrose
April 12 is equal pay day and both Microsoft and Facebook are using this time to announce that they have officially closed the gender pay gap at their respective companies.
The tech industry has been traditionally slanted towards men and with it has traditionally arrived larger salaries, an issue that has moved to the forefront of employee concerns in recent years.
Ahead of equal pay day, both companies worked to remedy their own gender pay gaps.
Lori Goler, Facebook’s head of HR, said in a post Monday that Facebook reviews staff pay “regularly” — and that the company has done so for “many years.”
“We complete thorough statistical analyses to compare the compensation of men and women performing similar work,” she wrote. “I’m proud to share that at Facebook, men and women earn the same.”
Tomorrow is Equal Pay Day – a date, April 12th, chosen to mark how much further into the new year women have to work to…
Posted by Lori Matloff Goler on Monday, April 11, 2016
This is the first time that Facebook has talked about its pay practices publicly. It’s also a significant step for the company which employees a growing female workforce that now makes up 32% of Facebook’s 12,000-plus employees.
Microsoft took its analysis further, at least publicly. The company says women make 99.8 cents on every dollar that a man makes, that’s trending up from 99.7 cents to a dollar one year prior.
It’s not perfect but Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft’s EVP of human resources wrote in a blog post.
“I’m encouraged by these results. Our announcement today is another step forward along the path of greater diversity and inclusion progress at Microsoft, and in society as a whole.”
It’s an encourage move in the right direction for the tech industry. Last year GoDaddy announced that an analysis at the company found that women earn more than men on the whole, but in tech roles were earning 99 cents on the dollar to men.
Salesforce announced that it fixed a significant difference in gender gap pay, and Amazon recently found that women in the same positions are earning 99.9% of men’s earnings for equivalent positions.
That’s not to say the gender gap for wages is moving in the right direction on all fronts. The US ranks 74th in wage equality among 145 countries according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender report.
In fact, at many companies and in many industries, the gender pay gap is actually worsening.
