Grace Zhang· Director of Benefits, Bellwether Consulting
Posted in Pay Equity & Transparency ·
I expect disagreement, which is the reason for posting. I have run pay equity analysis for twelve years, currently at an energy company with about 7,000 employees across the UK and Norway, and I have grown uneasy with how the adjusted figure is used.
Every variable we add shrinks the gap. Grade, function, performance rating, tenure. Each one is defensible alone. But grade reflects promotion decisions, ratings reflect manager judgement, and function reflects who was steered where. We control for the outputs of the very processes we should be examining, then report 1% and call it done.
My view now is that the adjusted number should be a minor diagnostic, and that the board should be held to the raw one. Where do others stand?
8 helpful · 1 insightful · 2 agree · 6 replies · 675 views · 6 following
Compensation Consultant, Cardinal Insurance
I disagree fairly strongly. The raw gap and the adjusted gap answer different questions and collapsing them helps nobody. The adjusted figure tests whether we pay equally for equal work, which is the legal obligation and something I can fix within a year. The raw figure reflects who holds which jobs, and takes a decade. Holding a board to only the second lets them off the first.
Sales Compensation Manager, Lumen Biosciences
I am closer to your position than I used to be. We dropped performance rating from our model in 2023 after finding that women received the top rating at 14% against 19% for men, with no difference in any output measure we could find. The adjusted gap rose from 1.2% to 2.7% overnight. Nothing about pay had changed; we had just stopped laundering one decision through another.
Benefits Manager, Pinehurst Foods
The answer is surely to test each control rather than abandon the method. Before a variable goes in our model we check whether it differs by gender and whether that difference can be justified. Grade stays in, but we run a separate analysis of time to promotion. Tenure stays. Rating is out. That is more work than either extreme, and it is the only version I can defend to both a lawyer and a sceptical employee.
Nina VargasGRS
Global Mobility Manager, Steinbach Industrie
Practical point: whatever you believe, you will be reporting gaps by category of equal-value work under the directive, which is a form of adjustment whether we like the word or not. The debate will shift to whether the categories themselves are fair, which is your argument about grade in new clothes.
HR Business Partner, Meridian Health Systems
Benefits Manager, Steinbach Industrie
Fair challenges, and I accept I overstated it. I do not want the adjusted figure gone. What I want is for every control to arrive with its own equity test attached, as described above, and for the board paper to lead with the raw number. I am going to propose the three-figure format for our next report and see whether it survives the committee.
