Pay Equity

While the world sees incremental shifts toward more fair and welcoming workplaces, shortcomings in gender pay equity pervade in the global workforce. The global pay equity gap is closing so slowly that The United Nations estimates it will take 257 years to close it—that is, if progress steadily continues at its current glacial pace. Women earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn for work of equal value. That gap is even wider for women with children and women of colour.

According to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, Australia’s gender pay gap is currently 13.4%. That’s down from the nation’s highest disparity in recent times of 18.5%, in November 2014 (although it’s worth noting that just 10 years before that, the pay equity gap was much lower, at 14.9%).

Led by supersonic voices like the soccer star Megan Rapinoe, along with the rest of her champion U.S. Women’s Soccer team, the fight for equal pay for women is gaining visibility but not gaining the swift progress that is needed for true equality. If some of the most prominent professional women in the world who win games in one of the high-grossing sports in the world are still fighting fiercely to receive equal pay, what does that mean for average women working average jobs?

A Pew Research Center report on gender pay inequality shows that little has changed since the 1980s to narrow the gap between men’s and women’s salaries. In 2018, women earned 85% of what men earned, according to the Pew analysis. Multiple studies by McKinsey & Company reveal just how severely women are underrepresented at every level of the corporate ladder and only 38 percent of companies even set targets for gender representation.

Concentrated in lower-paid, lower-skill work with greater job insecurity, and carrying out at least two and a half times more unpaid household and care work than men, women are trapped in the bottom rungs of earnings. But even women doing equal work, armed with equal education levels and expertise, are earning less than men.

The disparity for Black and Latina women of color is even more severe. In the U.S. in 2019, Latina women earned only $0.55 for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men. Black women, on average, earned $0.63 of that dollar, and Native American women earned just $0.60. Asian American and Other Pacific Islander women fared just a little better, at $0.85 on the dollar.

The New York Times paints a starker comparison: since the pandemic, “Black women would have to work until Aug. 3, 2021, to earn what men made in 2020. For Latina women, the date doesn’t come until Oct. 21.”

OrgChart Gender Pay Equity Analysis

The good news is this: employers and governments around the world are intentionally setting aggressive goals and making progress. SHRM reports that the percentage of employers conducting a gender-based pay equity analysis rose to 56 percent in 2020, up from 35 percent in 2016.

Analyse and Visualise Pay Equity with OrgChart

OrgChart allows companies to analyse and visualise pay equity with clarity. The application allows you to drill down into specific departments or geographies within the company to identify areas for improvement. The results can be exported into a variety of formats; PowerPoint, Excel Spreadsheet or Interactive PDF among others to best accommodate the audience. Conducting a regular gender-based pay salary analysis is the first step in correcting this still pervasive workplace discrepancy. See how to analyse the diversity of your workplace by signing up for a free demo with one of our experts or try for yourself with a free trial.