Slack, Match Lead Firms Pledging to Find and Close Gender Pay Gaps
/Analyzing employee pay data is hard and expensive, but a Seattle data firm is pushing companies to hew to a common standard
Are women paid the same as men in your office? How about people of color compared with white people? If you work in the U.S., there’s a good chance you don’t know—and neither, to be honest, does your employer.
The only companies legally required to analyze their payroll to assess whether or how they may be contributing to racial or gender inequalities in pay are government contractors. A few others do it anyway, whether out of some altruistic belief in fairness or in response to public pressure, but the vast majority of U.S. companies don’t bother.
To properly assess the sprawling salary data of thousands of employees gets expensive. Large businesses will usually hire an outside consultancy to do it for them, and even then, pay gap reports can take months to produce.
“Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a 150-page report plopped on their desk that took six months to produce. That’s nuts,” says Maria Colacurcio, CEO of theSeattle analytics company Syndio. “This is something that could be automated so quickly.”