Gender at Work: How to reach pay equity for women and people of color

Sign up here to receive our newsletter Gender at Work in your inbox twice a month.

This month, Insider Inc. (my employer) released data on employee compensation.

The results were, in a word, disappointing.

Across the company, the median salary for all female employees is $75,000. For all male employees, it’s $85,000. BIPOC employees earn $81,000 to white employees’ $85,000. Female BIPOC employees make $70,000. (BIPOC stands for “black, indigenous, and people of color.” It’s the term Insider Inc. used to describe minorities in the pay report.)

That means all females earn 88.2% of what men earn, and female BIPOC employees earn 82.4% of what all males earn.

Racial and gender wage gaps aren’t unique to Insider Inc., or to the media industry. In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, the median full-time, year-round female worker in the US earned 81.2% of her male counterpart’s earnings. One subsection of female workers, Black women, made 66% of the average earnings of white men.

This is a twice-monthly newsletter that takes an expansive look at how your gender identity informs your career. In the last two installments, I wrote about the career implications for women and working parents during the pandemic. This week, I’m talking about pay equity, at my own company and in general.

Cultivating diversity, equity, and inclusion should be part of employees’ goals

I asked Melanie Naranjo, who is Insider Inc.’s vice president, people and culture, to share her perspective on the company’s pay data. Naranjo joined Insider Inc. in 2015 and was recently promoted to this new role, in which she’ll focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Naranjo said she was dismayed, but hardly surprised, by the results. “We’ve known for a while that we have a representation issue,” she told me. Specifically, Insider Inc. has a higher representation of diversity in junior positions than in senior positions — and senior employees make more money.

Along with the rest of Insider Inc.’s talent team, Naranjo is thinking about how to create a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace — and not just in a pay-equity context. Two strategies she mentioned stood out to me.

First is incorporating DEI into all employees’ goals. Insider Inc. hasn’t done that yet, but Naranjo shared a hypothetical example of how it might work for an editorial employee, like me. “How are you making sure that you’re reporting on a diverse set of perspectives and communities? How are you making sure that you’re reaching out to a diverse set of sources?”

Other companies have already linked executive compensation to diversity numbers. The New York Times’ Peter Eavis reported in July that, according to an analysis of public pay disclosures, 78 of 3,000 companies said CEO pay depended on whether they met certain diversity goals.

Eavis reported that part of…