Back To Compensation Today

How to Identify Gender Pay Equity Issues With PayScale Reports

The gender pay gap stubbornly persists into 2018. PayScale’s recent State of Gender Pay Gap report found that into 2018, women earn 77.9 cents for every dollar earned by men, when we compare all women and all men.  

While citizens and civic organizations have continued to put pressure on businesses to promote pay equity, many new legal measures have been put into place to better protect women from continuing in the same path of “being paid less for the same job”. California Fair Pay Act (SB 358) and Massachusetts Equal Pay Act (MEPA) are two notable acts that require business to speak to and report on the way that pay is distributed across their workforce. The intent of these laws is to promote pay equity based on merit and quality of work rather than demographic characteristics.

All that to say, many business have bought into the “Why” of promoting gender pay equity. The question that comes up next is ”How do I actually do it?”

At PayScale, we’ve designed many of our products to help businesses make fair and equitable pay decisions. In our newest salary survey management product — PayScale Insight Lab, HR and compensation professionals can quickly pull reports to identify trends in their workforce including differences in pay between different segments of workers, such as men versus women.

For example, let’s say that you wanted to get a high-level view of all of your software engineers broken down by average pay by gender. You can get your key metrics with just a few clicks in Insight Lab.  

Even more, raw data can be pulled from these visual analytics in just a few clicks. In this example, after clicking into the “Raw Data” tab, a user can identify there is one male in this role that is paid significantly higher than the closest female in this same job title. This could be a red flag, especially if managers or employees in this department has raised their voices about this gender pay equity issues in the past.  

Raw_data

With numerous prebuilt and configurable reports, users are provided with multiple ways to identify outliers. This can be a great way to do a proactive “pulse check” on your highest impact departments and, even more, ensure your highest performing employees are paid fairly.

Let’s say you know you’re Sales department has seen a lot of turnover and you want to look at how your employees, especially your level 5 performers, are being compensated within their internal ranges.

After selecting a department, and isolating your highest performing employees (Level 5) you discover several of these team members are underpaid (green circle). These are potential flight risks in a department that has already seen high turnover!

Obviously, there are many other factors that can and should determine pay for an any individual at your company. But with reports like this, you can easily keep an eye on important pay trends for your business and start investigating potential pay equity issues before employees, managers start to complain.   

With PayScale’s best of breed compensation management products and a proactive stance on pay equity issues, our customers have seen significant improvements in their ability to attract, motivate and retain high caliber talent.

Learn More About Our Compensation Software


 

Dave Osborne
Product Marketing Manager at PayScale Inc
Read more from Dave

Leave a Reply

avatar
  Subscribe  
Notify of
Start the Transformation

We can help you bring modern compensation to life in your organization.