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A recent study by Glassdoor found that, not only is the gender pay gap real, but its actually worst, in some respects, for women who work in the tech industry.
A number of tech companies have come out and admitted to having these types of gaps, and have committed themselves to solving them. Now Facebook is claiming that it, unlike so many others, has no such gap between what it pays its male and female employees.
“We regularly review our compensation practices to ensure pay equity, and have done so for many years. We complete thorough statistical analyses to compare the compensation of men and women performing similar work. I’m proud to share that at Facebook, men and women earn the same,” Lori Matloff Goler, Head of Human Resouces at Facebook, wrote in a Facebook post on Monday.
That means Facebook has figured out something that has stymied a great many other companies.
In the United States, there is a 24.1 percent overall advantage for male workers, according to the Glassdoor study. That means that women are being paid, on average, 75.9 cents for every dollar their male co-worker makes.
Obviously the gap is not going to be the same across every industry, or every job. When it comes to tech, it actually has the job with the biggest gap of all.
The average amount that male programmers in the US earn over their female counterparts is a whopping 28.3 percent, meaning they come close to make almost a third more than the women they work with. The women are earning, on average, only 72 cents per dollar earned by men.
Computer programmers also happen to be 81 percent male, by the way.
The gap in the tech industry as a whole is much smaller, 5.9 percent, putting it in a tie at ninth place with retail and construction. That means its pretty much the average in the United States, which doesn’t really mean anything to the people who are getting paid less.
So how does Facrbook achieve this, while so many others have failed to do so? According to Goler, it’s because of the company’s commitment to diversity.
“At Facebook we value those who bring varying perspectives, for many reasons including background, community, culture, race, ethnicity – and gender. We call this cognitive diversity, and we want more of it. It propels our mission: to make the world more open and connected,” she said.
That, however, doesn’t really jibe with the numbers that the company itself has released about its own workforce.
As of June of 2015, the company was 55 percent white, down from 57 percent in June of 2014. It is 68 percent men, down only one percentage point from the year before. In tech jobs, they are 51 percent white and 84 percent men. In senior leadership, it is 73 percent white and 77 percent men.
When it comes to black and Hispanic workers, they represent 2 percent and 4 percent of all Facebook workers, respectively.
So even if Facebook has masters the gender pay gap, there are still plenty of ways it can still be doing better, like hiring more women in the first place.
(Image source: wordpress.philau.edu)
