Ways to Close the Wealth Gap for Women
March 15th was Equal Pay Day --the day when women were equal in pay to their male counterparts from the prior year. In case you are wondering, last year’s Equal Pay Day was March 24th, 2021, so 2022 was an improvement of 9 days.
What’s does the data tell us?
According to the U.S. Census, women earn $0.83 to the dollar a man earns; this is an overall ratio blended for all ethnicities. The ratio had risen since 1960, when women earned $0.60. The ratio has not been on a steady “up and to the right” incline.
Dips and lulls are evident and support the notion that we as leaders cannot be on autopilot, thinking the gap will close on its own.
While the national average is $0.83 for women, the ratios for women of color are far worse. If you are wondering, the ratios are worse in 2022 vs. the prior year. Latina equal pay, for example, was $0.57 in 2021 and is estimated to be $0.49 this year.
www.Equalpaytoday.org calculated the estimates based on 2021 U.S. census data on median earnings for full-time, year-round workers.
Any good news here?
Sure, younger women are narrowing the gap as they increase their education levels and move into occupations with higher earning power. However, education alone will not solve the problem.
A goal to actively pursue:
Talented, experienced, and educated women need to continue to rise into higher-paying jobs and leadership positions where higher compensation opportunities exist. If you are a leader with hiring authority and positional power or an operations leader or a business unit chief of staff, you have enough power to start the change.
Grassroots tactics:
As a leader creating change, your job is to be consistent in your message and action. Once team members (aka employees) see you in action, they will emulate your leadership values and pass the word on to others. Changing the environment starts slow, but momentum builds as others see they have more power.
Actions leaders can implement today:
Here are activities we as corporate leaders, entrepreneurs, and non-profit chiefs can do to help close the earning gap in merit-based ways.
Be a Coach
Review your employees’ job tenure for their current role. If more than three years, it’s time to help them find a new position with expanded technical capabilities and expertise. More skilled jobs typically have higher pay bands and higher pay.
Did you recently inherit a team? Take the time and do the work to figure out your team’s tenure and possible future career opportunities. Make the review part of your 100-day plan. Have individual conversations with team members and create a staffing and pipeline plan independent of the current staff.
Create a learning team culture where great talent can join, learn, contribute, and rotate. Staffing pipeline plans are a magnet to top talent. A first-line supervisor can create this for their team. It’s a state of being backed up by actions –that’s it.
Do you consciously focus on your team members and the business? It’s a relationship requiring focus on the business goals and your work partners.
Be Selfless
Let go of your talented folks for better opportunities, whether in or outside your department.
Sponsor strong talent for promotional opportunities through your network into other roles, which would give them more experience and exposure.
We are not there yet, but there will come a time when all leaders will be measured publicly on the quality and quantity of leaders they help foster and flourish. Team members already spread the word to their friends and colleagues of excellent leaders. It will one day be in the public domain.
Have an abundant/growth mindset and let people go. They will stay with you longer, whether as a peer, corporate partner, or community leader. The goal should be to build the best overall life team. A life team is a group of people working together in different roles and capacities over your life span.
Investigate Your Employee’s Job Responsibilities
Review and see if the current roles and responsibilities align with the job key assigned to the team member. With tech advancements, job restructures, work going away, and new work added, your employees’ job responsibilities more than likely have changed. If the duties have materially changed, work with your HR partner and perform a job review to determine if your team member is in the right job title and pay band.
Good companies generally have HR conduct job reviews each year to ensure job alignment as part of their process. Does your company already do the annual review? Excellent! However, do an inspection yourself anyway. Why? I’ve discovered people are typically cautious in what they say on surveys not to cause any commotion.
Be proactive and review the roles yourself instead of waiting for others to tell us (whether a team member or an annual review). Even the most empathic leaders miss things; we are all busy running the business. Your team members will appreciate your genuine interest in their work, and you will directly know if there is a discrepancy or not.
Evaluate Your Personal Power
Have an honest self-assessment of whether you are willing to exert your personal power. Here are questions to ask yourself:
Are you willing to have a potentially difficult conversation with your leader or HR regarding reviewing your team member’s job title?
Are you willing to put your career on the culture radar as someone willing to challenge the system to remedy a difference you have noticed? It might sound silly, but I’ve seen leaders who said there was nothing they could do but later resolved it after their chain of command requested it.
If you are a supervisor, you have more personal and positional power than you think. The main question is whether you are exercising your full positional power bestowed on the job title you hold?
Review Your Job Postings
Take the time to review job postings from various industries and companies. How does your job posting align with others? Here are more questions to consider:
Are you asking for a litany of skills and job expectations that no one can fulfill?
Would you honestly apply for the job yourself? That question is a great filter, in my opinion.
Are you asking for a college degree when a commensurate experience would be just as sufficient?
Are you posting the pay range for the position?
Are you asking the candidates to state their salary requirements but not share the pay range?
Do you include in the job posting what education, exposure, and experience the candidate will receive?
Does your posting speak to the culture of how the team interacts, delivers, and strives? The job posting should be a beacon of what you expect and what the candidate hopes to get beyond compensation.
Are you seeking the same number of years of work experience as your national peers inside the company, competitors, or cross-industry peers?
Are you asking for a reasonable number of years of work experience relative to pay?
A thought experiment:
Are you asking for 5 to 7 years of position experience for an entry-level manager role with an entry-level salary? 5 to 7 years equates to 10% to 15% of a candidate’s traditional working life in expertise to qualify for a low entry salary. For candidates on a fast track to retire (25 years or less), 5 to 7 years’ experience equates to 20% of their earning years’ potential. It will be hard to get strong talent with asymmetrical financial expectations.
Between the lines:
With over 11 million jobs open in 2022, there is a power shift underway between the employer and team members, with more perceived or actual power shifting to employees. The change in power results from the improved personal financial strength over the last 14 years and the democratization of technology. The tech shift has fostered the ease of finding part-time work and migrating to locations that better align with people’s interests and values. And finally, the change is a result of recognizing the power in numbers. The number of employees is far greater than the number of leaders and companies. Talented individuals are searching for work and cultures with a healthy balance of purpose, prosperity, leadership, good health, and mental and spiritual well-being.
Be a force:
Let’s use our existing personal and positional power and be a beacon attracting the best of people and closer of the wealth gap. In the end, our country’s success is dependent on our team’s personal and professional success.
Author:
I’ve been passionate about personal financial freedom topics since 1993 after attending a course at The University of Texas at Austin. I’ve used my life and passions as experiments to help close the gap for myself and others. I’m excited to spend more time on my passion for closing the wealth gap for women and the Hispanic community. As I start this next chapter in my life, you will find me writing on integrative financial well-being, taking the body, heart, mind, and spirit approach into account.
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