Month: September 2017

How You Can Take Steps to Close the Gender Pay Gap in Your Company

by

Research indicates that pay transparency does result in smaller pay gaps. At the very least, if employees are aware of pay discrepancies in the company, women and people of color can confidently negotiate for higher salaries than those offered. But most companies keep salary information secret and are not transparent. That is why the step taken by employees at Google is so important—they took matters into their own hands to create transparency. Daisuke Wakabayashi of the New York Times reports that in 2015, a female engineer at Google created a self-reported salary spreadsheet that employees are still using. In 2017, twelve hundred United States Google employees posted their salary and bonus information to this spreadsheet, which shows that female employees are paid less than male staff members in comparable jobs at most levels. The spreadsheet does not cover all levels and is admittedly incomplete. Nonetheless, since Google’s board voted against making pay transparent for women’s and men’s salaries, and Google is in a court battle with the United States Department of Labor because it is refusing to hand over data as part of a routine audit of its pay practices, the self-reported data is the only source of transparency for Google employees. Without the spreadsheet, Google would not be held accountable at all. Now, more than ever, employees need to self-organize to collect salary data and make it transparent to expose pay gaps. Why? Because, as Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times reports, the Trump administration just reversed a regulation that the Obama administration put into place to address the pay gap. Miller explains that the Obama administration regulation, which was about to take effect, would have “required companies to report how much they paid people, along with their sex and race.” Europe and Britain require companies to report this information, but now, under the Trump administration, we do not. Without this pressure from the Federal government, companies have no incentive to close the pay gaps and will continue to keep salary information secret and, accordingly, to hide discrimination and avoid accountability. Miller reports that, according to an analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the Pew Research Center, we know the following general statistics about the pay gap in the United States:

  • White women’s median hourly earnings are 82 percent of those of white men
  • Asian women earn 87 percent of what white men earn
  • Black women earn 65 percent of what white men earn
  • Hispanic women earn 58 percent of what white men earn
  • Black and Hispanic men earn less than white men, while Asian men outearn them
An example of the importance of transparency recently occurred in Britain at the BBC. Britain only recently implemented a new regulation requiring that companies report salary data. Steven Erlanger of the New York Times explains that when the government forced the BBC to publish the salary ranges of its highest paid employees, the resulting report showed significant disparities. An open letter signed by forty-two employees stated that the report confirmed a long-held suspicion that “women at the BBC are being paid less than men for the same work.” Until the data was made public, no confirmation of those suspicions was possible. Employees and the government are now pressuring the BBC to close this gender pay gap. If your company does not make salary data public, you could consider following the example of the Google employees and organizing a way for employees to self-report so that people have some information available to them when it is time for them to negotiate for salary increases. I recommend that a group of people, including both women and men, get together to organize this collection of information. If the company finds out and is unhappy, a group is at less risk than an individual when taking steps that the company may find threatening. The gender and race pay gaps will never close if we don’t take some steps to bring disparities to light. Let us know if you have been successful at creating pay transparency in your company. Photo courtesy of businessforward (CC by 2.0)]]>

6 Steps That Can Help Women Advance in Law Firms

by

Progress has been very slow for women’s advancement in law firms. Why is this the case? As Elizabeth Olson of the New York Times reports, women are

  • Slightly over 50 percent of current law school graduates (and have been for a long time)
  • Under 35 percent of lawyers at law firms
  • Only 20 percent of equity partners, where the highest compensation and best opportunities for leadership exist
Olson cites a recent study by Anne Urda of Law360 that found that “only nine of 300 firms surveyed had a lawyer work force that was 50 percent or more female.” Olson notes that a number of recent gender bias lawsuits have been filed against law firms alleging substantial gender pay disparities and discrimination for either associates or partners, reflecting
  • Substantially lower starting salaries for female associates compared to their male counterparts
  • Promotions for female associates without commensurate pay increases
  • Female partners being excluded from meetings about client matters, not being allowed to pitch to firm clients, and being thwarted in their efforts to assume greater leadership
  • Company tolerance for female partners being targeted for harassment and humiliation by firm leaders and peers
  • Being made nonequity partners rather than equity partners, where the compensation levels are higher and the opportunities for leadership available
Shira A. Scheindlin, a recently retired federal district court judge writes that in her courtroom, it was rare for female lawyers to have a lead role or to speak at all. The talking was done primarily by white men, with women sitting at the counsel table, usually junior and silent, although they were clearly the ones most familiar with the details of the case. In a study that she recently conducted with the New York Bar Association, the gender of the lawyers who primarily spoke in court in 2,800 cases over four months was recorded. Scheindlin found that
  • Women were the lead lawyers for private parties barely 20 percent of the time.
  • Overall, women were lead counsel for only 25 percent of criminal and commercial cases in courtrooms across New York.
Without the opportunity to be in the lead counsel role, women find it hard to advance in law firms. What can be done?  Scheindlin suggests the following:
  1. Clients can demand that their legal teams be diverse.
  2. Law firms can take concrete steps to pay women and men at the same rate for the same work.
  3. Firms can ensure that junior female lawyers participate in the same number of depositions as their male counterparts.
  4. Firms can ensure that every trial team has at least one woman.
  5. Firms can ensure that women are meeting clients at the same rate as men.
  6. Law firms can make sure that bright, aggressive women are given the same opportunities for leadership positions as their equally qualified male colleagues.
These are serious and concrete steps that can remove the barriers to success for women in law firms. Isn’t it about time?   Photo courtesy of Cal Injury Lawyer (CC Public Domain Mark 1.0)]]>

How Class-action Lawsuits against Silicon Valley Can Benefit All of Us

by

Anita Hill, an attorney and professor at Brandeis University, is one of my heroines. She had the courage in the early 1990s to accuse her ex-boss Clarence Thomas of inappropriate sexual behavior toward her when he was her supervisor. When she learned that he was nominated for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, she felt she had to testify to his lack of moral character during his confirmation hearings. She came forward and spoke the truth of her experience. While she was not able to stop his confirmation, she did give a voice and a name to the abusive behavior that women have always been subjected to by powerful men—sexual harassment. Her testimony opened a door for women to work together with male allies to make the workplace safer and more inclusive for all women. Recently, Professor Hill weighed in on the revelations from Silicon Valley about gender discrimination and harassment in the technology industry. She suggests that the industry will benefit from the interventions into sexism experienced by Wall Street in the 1990s—massively expensive and successful class-action lawsuits that brought about industrywide change. Hill notes that “while pay and promotion discrimination still exists [at Wall Street firms], more women on Wall Street are advancing in their careers to managing directorships and other leadership roles.” Hill points out that the letter released by a young male Google employee that claimed biological differences make women poorly suited to engineering revealed deep-seated sexist attitudes mirrored by recent incidents at Uber and other technology organizations. When a former female Uber employee wrote a blog about her experiences with Uber’s toxic, male-dominated culture, other female coders and engineers came forward with allegations of sexism at Google, Tesla, Twitter, Microsoft, and Oracle, to name a few. Hill cites the following statistics as further evidence of widespread gender discrimination in the tech industry:

  • Women under twenty-five earn, on average, 29 percent less than their male counterparts.
  • For the same job at the same company, women of all ages receive lower salary offers than men 63 percent of the time.
  • Women hold only 11 percent of executive positions at Silicon Valley companies.
  • Women own only 5 percent of tech start-ups.
  • Only 7 percent of partners at the top one hundred venture capital firms are women.
  • Women quit tech jobs at more than twice the rate of men.
According to Hill, while some tech companies have given lip service to improving conditions for women, there is not much genuine action other than offering diversity training, which has limited impact without systemic efforts to change the company culture. For example, in response to a suit alleging wage discrimination against women, Google lawyers said in May that it would be too burdensome for the company to collect data on salaries. In other words, they are not serious about eliminating gender discrimination. Hill suggests that “women in the industry should collectively consider class-action discrimination cases against employers.” She notes that the existence of confidentiality clauses and arbitration agreements, put into place after the 1990s to preempt class-action suits, do not mean that suits cannot be brought. Now that women in technology are speaking out and refusing to be silenced, they can band together and file suits to bring change to the technology industry. It won’t happen otherwise. It’s in everyone’s best interests that women in technology file lawsuits. As Hill notes, “The economic benefits could be remarkable. Advancing women’s equality, which includes minimizing the gender gap in labor force participation, holds the potential to add $12 trillion to global G.D.P. by 2025.” Let’s encourage women to step forward.   Photo in the public domain courtesy of StartupStockPhotos.]]>

Why Men Need Women at Work: What Men’s Hormones Have to Do with It

by

Therese Huston of the New York Times writes that “history has long labeled women as unreliable and hysterical because of their hormones.” Interestingly, new research shows that men’s hormones fluctuate, too, both naturally and artificially, with possibly dire consequences for the rest of us. Prescriptions for testosterone supplements, often for a condition called “low-T,” are heavily advertised on television and social media and have increased from 1.3 million to 2.3 million in just four years. As Huston notes, the availability and popularity of these supplements makes new research on testosterone possible. She reports the following findings:

  • When men take testosterone, they make more impulsive—and often faulty—decisions.
  • High testosterone can make it harder to see flaws in one’s reasoning.
  • Testosterone may lower activity in the brain’s orbitofrontal cortex, which affects self-evaluation, decision making, and impulse control, and cause overconfidence in one’s reasoning ability.
  • Fluctuations in testosterone shape one’s willingness to collaborate.
So, am I the only one who is nervous about our impulsive president of the United States, who has a hard time seeing flaws in his reasoning and is high on overconfidence and low on willingness to collaborate? He controls the nuclear codes, surrounds himself with military generals (all white men), and threatens war on other nations in early morning tweets. The White House needs to place a lot of strong women in influential positions to offset all this testosterone, but the picture is not a good one. Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post cites research by economist Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute that shows that “the highest-paid staffers in the Trump White House are primarily men: Nearly 74 percent of the top 23 staffers are male. By contrast, in the Obama White House of 2015 only 52 percent of the highest-paid staffers were men.” And did I mention that the gender pay gap has also tripled in Trump’s White House? In a previous article, I wrote about research that suggests that both race and gender diversity improve organizational performance and decision making due to the following:
  1. Better and deeper critical thinking. The presence of cognitive friction might mean that people work harder to examine their own assumptions and deepen their reflections in the presence of conflicting opinions and information.
  2. More engagement with different perspectives. Different perspectives bring new ideas, and working harder to understand a different perspective can bring about a change in position.
  3. Better error detection. Deeper critical thought and engagement provide more opportunity for errors to be revealed.
  4. Less groupthink. Individuals are more likely to form their own opinions in diverse teams than to just follow along with those like them.
We need a balance of perspectives—and hormones—for good leadership in our government and organizations. In fact, our survival may depend on it. Have you ever worked somewhere with an unbalanced team? If so, how did it affect decision making and collaboration at your organization?   Photo courtesy of businessforward. (CC BY-SA 2.0)]]>