Quick links on pay equity

Last updated on: March 4, 2016 at 12:09 pm by Jane the Actuary

Quick links on pay equity 2016-03-04T12:09:48-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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You can tell it’s the beginning of the month because I can link to the Post and the Times again. (Some day, if I strike it rich blogging, I’ll spluge and subscribe to the Post in addition to the Trib.) But here’s something that, so far as I know, went unnoticed: Apple and Intel have announced that they have eliminated the gender gap and have achieved perfect pay equity in measuring men’s vs. women’s pay. Apple is reported on here, in the New York Times, back on Feb. 26th (their figure is 99.6, but the difference between this and 100 is meaningless), and Intel, in the Washington Post, on February 3rd (which also includes some cringe-worthy statements about what percentage of its new hires were “diverse candidates”, though, not surprisingly, according to the linked Intel report, this actually just means that they hire tons of Asians). Here’s some further background: an item at Morningstar that this is all in the context of shareholder resolutions by Arjuna Capital.

Now, the catch is this: these pay equity measures are determined by evaluating the pay of similarly-situated men and women, that is, measuring pay within each job grade level. This is not “pay equity” as it’s conventionally understood in public discourse, the average pay of women vs. men across all occupations. And it’s thus not a surprise that a company with compensation programs in which pay is reasonably standardized in a given job grade (and especially if the job grades are relatively narrowly defined, including differentiation by job type rather than just advancement level), that there would be little to no pay gap.

Yet, if you look at Intel’s own site, 25% of their overall U.S. workforce is female, but, split by type of workforce, that amounts to 20% of the technical and fully half the nontechnical workforce. Which means that, if one assumes that technical jobs, on average, pay better than the non-technical ones, that women, in the company as a whole, are behind. In addition, women make up 28% of “early career” workers, but only 17% of “senior” employees and “leadership.”

On the other hand: here’s an interesting tidbit: if you look at the ethnic make-up of their workforce, among mid-career workers, there’s a split between 52% white, 38% Asian, 6% Hispanic, and 3% African American. Among the “early career” group, the white share is still the same 52%, but the share of Hispanics and African Americans have both increased substantially at 12% and 5%, with the drop in Asians to 28% accounting for this difference. Now, possibly this might suggest that Hispanics and African Americans are more likely to leave the company before hitting mid-career service levels, but more likely, this suggests that, when Intel was pushed to hire underrepresented minorities, they may have found that they didn’t need quite so many H1-B visas after all.

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