- Every year, Salesforce is spending millions of dollars to ensure equal pay for equal work. These are the details.
Salesforce Chairman & Co-CEO Marc Benioff recently wrote on Twitter that the company is spending millions adjusting salaries to ensure men and women are paid equally for work. This is a necessary contribution since the World Economic Forum (WEF) estimates that none of us will see gender parity in our lifetimes and nor likely will many of our children. The WEF’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020 reveals that gender parity will not be attained for 99.5 years.
Back in April, Salesforce Executive Vice President of Global Employee Success Cindy Robbins said that the company spent a total of $10.3 million to ensure equal pay for equal work. In the fourth companywide equal pay assessment, the company found that 5% of its 35,000 employees globally required adjustments. And of those who required adjustments, 39% were women, 54% were men, and 7% were due to race and ethnicity. So the company spent $1.6 million to make those adjustments.
In the book “Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change” by Benioff and Monica Langley, the Salesforce co-CEO acknowledged that he did not believe any gender-based pay disparities were pervasive in the first place.
However, Salesforce employee success chief Cindy Robbins went to Benioff’s home in March 2015 as part of a regular meeting hosted with senior executives.
Benioff knew something was off as Robbins seemed reserved and took the unusual step of bringing Leyla D. Seka, another senior woman executive at the company (now a partner at Operator Collective). Robbins and Seka told Benioff that they suspected that women employees at Salesforce were being paid less than men for the same work.
Benioff was surprised because he had announced that at least 30% of the participants at any meeting should be comprised of talented female employees being considered for leadership roles back in 2012. He had made this decision after noticing that the number of the women in the room was nearly zero during an executive meeting and soon discovered that less than 29% of Salesforce’s total employees were women and only 14% were at the leadership level.
The reason why he was surprised by what Robbins and Seka said in 2015 is due to his belief that Salesforce belonged to the tiny minority of tech companies that valued gender equality. At first, Benioff said that the pay disparity happening at Salesforce was “impossible” and said it was “not how we operate.”
Seka said that the men at her level were buying expensive Teslas. “Maybe it’s just a feeling that men make more than women. But maybe it’s an ugly fact,” Seka replied.
Robbins and Seka were not implying that pay disparities were deliberate. There are studies by the US Department of Labor that show women make an average of 79% of what a man did.
“We can either lead on pay equality or we can follow,” Robbins explained. We’re not a company that follows.”
Robbins and Seka proposed that the company order audits to conclusively determine whether men and women were being paid equally. And Benioff agreed that this would be necessary to make things fairer at the company.
One of the biggest reasons why Salesforce has to conduct the audit and spend millions every year making adjustments is due to company growth. When Salesforce buys a company, they also inherit the pay practices and cultures of those companies as well.
“In the end, the most important thing leaders can do to promote equality is to open themselves up, take an honest inventory, listen to people, and never be too proud or defensive to make corrections. There are three mistakes to avoid,” Benioff noted in the book. “First, never convince yourself that you know everything. Second, never refuse to search for the truth. And third, don’t forget that there’s often a strong correlation between your ability to make progress and your willingness to ask others for help.”
