A friend’s girlfriend, Delilah, was called into her boss’s office yesterday for some great news. “I was ecstatic!” Delilah told my friend. “First, I got the small cost of living raise, as I expected. But then he said the strangest thing,” Delilah added. “He said, ‘We are going to also increase your pay because of gender parity. Your annual salary is now being brought up by $XX,000 per year.’” Should Delilah happily take her raise or should she be furious that she hasn’t been receiving equal pay, simply because of her gender?
I am blown away. To make matters worse, because she is relatively young, Delilah initially was so ecstatic about the raise that she didn’t ask if the pay increase is adjusted to accommodate equal pay for time already worked. She later learned it is not. Additionally, she was exploited as much for age and inexperience as she was for being female. Not only did her employer take advantage of her based on her sex, but they exploited her age and inexperience by giving her the “raise” with no mention of for how long and by how much she was previously underpaid.
In a complete coincidence, Delilah’s so-called raise came the day before “Equal Pay Day.” Yes, there is such a thing, the second Tuesday of April, today. The date marks how far into a new year a woman has to work to earn what her male counterpart earned during the previous year. I wish Equal Pay Day didn’t have to exist as a call-to-action, some 54 years after the passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and 46 years after the Equal Rights Amendment. By now, it should be a day to celebrate the end of a dark era and the beginning of a better one, along the lines of Independence Day.
It’s a sad reality that pay parity is still a novelty.
Still, despite the pay increase, I want to know if Delilah’s employer really thinks that they are dealing with pay parity in the best possible way. Did they want to be a fair employer? Or were they hoping for a headline or looking to appear on a list somewhere? Maybe they were trying to avoid a class-action lawsuit. We don’t know yet.
What I do know is that righting a systematic injustice is important and must happen as soon as an injustice is discovered. Pay adjustments aren’t enough. Delilah’s employer has an opportunity and a responsibility to right this injustice on a much bigger playing field.
It’s called accountability. Don’t just admit you made a mess and wipe it up. Delilah’s company needs to conduct a thorough evaluation of what went wrong, and for how long, before publishing a report on how they came to discover the pay disparity and the steps they are undertaking – besides “raises” – to assure pay decisions are never again linked to sex or gender.
Maybe they’re scared. Maybe they’re worried current and past employees will sue for lost wages and retroactive pay adjustments. Maybe they’re right and should be scared. But maybe they should make an example of themselves before someone else does.
Around my company, we celebrate Equal Pay Day the new-fangled way by conducting business as usual where all human employees receive the same wage for the same job, regardless of sex. Our office robot and the office dog make less than the humans. But they still get greater respect than women at some other companies.
