Elif Yilmaz· Total Rewards Manager, Tidewater Utilities
Posted in Pay Equity & Transparency ·
Australian professional services firm, about 2,300 people. This year our published median gap went from 14.2% to 15.6%, and in the same period our adjusted gap fell from 2.4% to 1.1%. Internally this was received as HR claiming success while the number everyone can see got worse.
The cause was hiring. We brought in 140 graduates, 62% of them women, at the bottom of the structure. That is good for the pipeline and bad for the median for several years.
We ended up publishing a short explainer with a projection: if this cohort progresses at the same rate as previous ones, the raw gap starts to fall in year three. I was nervous about putting a forecast in writing. Curious whether others commit to trajectories publicly.
9 helpful · 1 insightful · 3 agree · 3 replies · 269 views · 4 following
Director, Total Rewards, Halcyon Financial Group
We had the identical pattern in a law firm after expanding our paralegal intake. We chose not to publish a forecast, only the composition effect for the current year, on the view that a missed projection would be quoted back at us. In hindsight a range would have been better than silence, because people filled the gap with their own assumptions.
Director of Benefits, Lumen Biosciences
The projection only holds if those graduates are promoted at the same rate as men, which is exactly the thing the raw gap exists to test. I would publish the promotion rates by gender alongside it every year, so the forecast is checkable rather than a promise. Ours were 11% for women and 13% for men at the manager gate, and that two-point difference is now the main item on our plan.
Hannah MüllerGRS, CRP
Global Job Architecture Lead, Steinbach Industrie
We publish a trajectory and it has been fine, but we frame it as what would have to be true rather than what will happen: to reach 10% by 2030 we need women to be 45% of promotions into senior manager each year. That turns a forecast into a target with an owner.
