Eliminating the Gender Pay Gap

INTRODUCTION

Ensuring equity in pay is a difficult goal to achieve for a number of reasons.

1. Equity is subjective: it depends on a person’s perception, and interpretation may vary between any two people.
2. Equity in pay may conflict with other goals of compensation like merit pay, pay-for-performance, and competitiveness of the organization in the marketplace.
3. The legal environment, while encouraging equity, makes it a burden and creates a cumbersome process to achieve it.

For several decades, organizations have been informed, through legislation and pressure from civil rights groups, of the way discrimination impacts the pay of women in the workplace. The focus has been on employment practices, called access discrimination, a form of discrimination that occurs in the hiring process which rejects well-qualified women applicants for a position or offers them a less attractive position1. Another driver of pay inequity is valuation discrimination. This occurs when the employee’s contributions to the organization are not properly rewarded because of the employee’s race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.

This course focuses on the problem of valuation discrimination towards women, who today receive 84 cents for every dollar men earn.

We will:

• discuss current pay gap statistics
• examine the reasons for this discrimination
• review what U.S. federal law says about rectifying the pay gap
• show you how to screenfor pay discrimination in your organization
• teach you how to close this pay gap and prevent its return
• use a research tool to set equitable pay

Upon completion of this course, you should be prepared to identify and eliminate any gender-based pay differentials within your organization.

Note: In order to get the most out of this course, we strongly suggest that you take the following DLC courses first:

• Course 33: Job Analysis and Job Descriptions
• Course 34: Using Job Evaluation in Your Organization
• Course 82: Creating a Market Competitive Salary Structure