How one software company resolved its reverse gender pay gap by creating publicly available salary bands

By Jessica Davies

When Chicago-based software company Tandem conducted an internal salary audit ahead of developing and publicly releasing set salary bands for all its roles in March this year, it found something surprising.

The audit highlighted a gender pay gap of 14% when analyzing salaries for people in similar roles, otherwise known as an adjusted pay gap. In this instance though, it was in fact women that were being paid more for performing similar roles to their male counterparts, when historical gender pay gaps usually show the opposite.

But as four employees left the company during the time period of the audited data, they were removed from the analysis. After this, Tandem’s role-specific gender pay gap then became negligible.

The salary for those roles that were removed were set prior to Tandem establishing and announcing its salary bands, which comprise a lower and upper pay level for each role in the company — highlighting that salary bands are an effective way of equalizing pay across a business, regardless of gender. New candidates and internal candidates for promotion can negotiate within this ballpark, rather than have their new salaries pegged to what they were earning previously, which is how pay gaps end up being perpetuated.

Tandem’s audit didn’t cover any unadjusted pay gap, which is the difference between what men and women are paid in general, in the business, which can highlight when there aren’t enough women in senior roles, but it plans to include this in its next audit in 2022.

Tandem is a step ahead of the salary transparency laws coming into effect across the U.S., which at minimum, require disclosure upon request. Tandem founder and CEO JC Grubbs hopes the move will spark a wider corporate trend to boost equity and inclusivity at all levels.

When you are Google or Facebook, you probably have thousands of different job titles so it’s harder to put a framework around them to create clearly defined salary bands. But that doesn’t absolve larger companies from the responsibility of creating equity — it just takes more resources for them to do it.

JC Grubbs, founder and CEO of Tandem

Grubbs acknowledges that calculating and sharing company-wide salary bands is easier in a smaller organization – Tandem has just 33 employees, albeit with some major clients including IBM, Verizon and the U.S. Department of Defense. But he also believes larger companies must make the investment to set an example.

“Salary transparency is very rare in our industry. Smaller companies can be a little more tolerant of the perceived risk that comes along with transparency, larger companies seem to have a hard time with that — especially public companies,” said Grubbs.

“When you are Google or Facebook, you probably have thousands of different job titles so it’s harder to put a framework around them to create clearly defined salary bands. But that doesn’t absolve larger …read more

Source:: Digiday