Fiona Quintero· Compensation Analyst, Qasr Holdings
Asked in Pay Equity & Transparency ·
We are an Irish insurer with about 1,900 staff. When we briefed our 160 people managers on this year's analysis, the phrase unexplained gap produced an immediate defensive reaction. Several asked whether we were saying they had discriminated.
The honest answer is that we do not know. The model accounts for grade, function, location, tenure and performance, and after that women are paid 2.6% less on average. That residual could be starting salaries, negotiation, career breaks we do not record, or bias. It is not a finding against any individual.
Has anyone found language, or a way of presenting it, that keeps managers engaged rather than defensive?
13 helpful · 4 insightful · 1 agree · 4 replies · 598 views · 4 following
Accepted answer· by Petra Dubois
What changed the tone for us was showing where the residual comes from over time rather than where it sits today. We split our 2.9% by the decision that created it: about 60% was already there at hire, 25% arose at promotion, and the rest in annual reviews. Once managers saw that most of it arrived with people on their first day, set by offers many of them never made, the defensiveness went. The message became: you inherited this, and here are the three decisions where you can stop adding to it. Each manager then got only their own team's flagged cases, never a team-level gap figure.
Read in the conversation ↓
Director, Total Rewards, Halcyon Financial Group
We stopped using unexplained with managers altogether and say the difference our data cannot account for. Longer, but it puts the limitation on the data rather than on them. We keep unexplained in the technical report.
HR Business Partner, Meridian Health Systems
Accepted answer
What changed the tone for us was showing where the residual comes from over time rather than where it sits today. We split our 2.9% by the decision that created it: about 60% was already there at hire, 25% arose at promotion, and the rest in annual reviews.
Once managers saw that most of it arrived with people on their first day, set by offers many of them never made, the defensiveness went. The message became: you inherited this, and here are the three decisions where you can stop adding to it. Each manager then got only their own team's flagged cases, never a team-level gap figure.
Jonas QuinteroGRS, CRP
Head of Reward, Meridian Health Systems
I would be careful not to reassure too much. Some of it probably is biased decision-making, and if the briefing says nobody did anything wrong then nobody changes anything. We say plainly that the analysis cannot tell us why, that the pattern is consistent in direction, and that it is everyone's job to close it.
Omar JimenezGRS, CSI
Head of Reward, Ravenna Chemicals
The decomposition by hire, promotion and review is something we can do with the data we hold, so I will try that for the November briefings. And point taken on not over-reassuring. I think we swung from accusing to absolving in the space of one slide.
