#34 - Two big questions about the Equal Pay Gap

The last Coffee Talk of 2022 focuses on the big questions: Where does the equal pay gap come from? Are there any patterns? Margrét and Henrike discuss and give helpful advice for companies on their pay equity journeys.

The equal pay gap, Margrét says, is “not equally smeared over the whole organization. There are pockets with more bias than others.” The pockets can be job roles, grades, locations... There are also no patterns — no job or organization types with bigger gaps.

So how can these “pockets” best be fixed?

Margrét says managers often focus on the workers whose pay is lower than expected given their job roles. But that’s only part of the picture. The gap “is not from a lot of women falling far from where we’d expect them to be — it’s from a lack of well-paid women.”

For example, in many organizations, 50% of male workers are paid at or below what they would be expected to earn. The other 50% of male workers are paid more than expected. But for female workers, about 65% are paid at or below expected and only about 35% are paid more than expected.

This means that yes, the organization will need to give raises to underpaid workers. But it will also need to address the lack of well-paid women. Progress can be made by coming at the problem from both sides.

Friday Coffee Talk from Planet Fair is a YouTube series co-hosted by PayAnalytics founder Margrét Bjarnadóttir and her friend Henrike Von Platen, founder and CEO of the FPI Fair Pay Innovation Lab in Berlin.