Communications of the ACM
Five Top U.S. Tech Companies Get 'F' Grade on Gender Pay Equity
Five leading U.S. technology companies got the lowest mark of "F" in the third annual "Gender Pay Scorecard" report by investment manager Arjuna Capital and Proxy Impact. No company in the sector received an "A," though Apple and Intel were graded "B" for their efforts to disclose and act on their gender and racial pay gaps.
Tech companies with an "F" are Verizon Communications, AT&T Inc., Oracle, Qualcomm, and Analog Devices.
Seven tech companies — Alphabet, Expedia, Facebook, eBay, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, and Adobe — received a "C" grade. Hewlett Packard received a "D."
Only three of the 50 U.S. financial, retail, health, and tech firms in the study — Starbucks, Mastercard, and Citigroup — earned an "A" rating, and half received an "F."
The Gender Pay Scorecard report takes a quantitative accounting of current disclosures and goals to help investors navigate best practices on gender and racial pay equity.
"The only question now is which among America's leading companies will be leaders and which will continue to be laggards on gender and racial pay equity," says Arjuna Capital Managing Partner Natasha Lamb. "As today's report makes clear, half of U.S. companies still have a long way to go, and there is room for substantial improvement across the board. Pay equity is going to be a major issue in the 2020 shareholder season."
So far, three companies — Starbucks, Mastercard, and Wyndham Hotels and Resorts — have reported their median pay gaps in the 2020 proxy season. Unadjusted "median" gender/racial pay disclosures — as opposed to statistically adjusted "equal pay" data — expose a lack of female/minority representation in higher-paying jobs, and less women/minorities in leadership. This new level of transparency sought by U.S. investors is in line with the disclosures mandated in the United Kingdom, and provides investors with a baseline to understand broad pay equity at portfolio companies. That is, the difference between what men make and what women make, and what minorities and non-minorities make on a median, unadjusted basis.
The gender pay gap is a global problem and no industries or geographies are immune. On a global basis, the average income for women is only 53 percent of the income of men, and it will take 257 years to close that $10,000 per year gap. In the United States, women working full time earn 82 percent of that of their male peers, a $10,122 per year gap. This disparity can add up to nearly half a million dollars over the course of a career.
PwC's 2020 Women in Work Index estimates closing the gender pay gap could boost the economies of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries by $2 trillion annually.
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