Will you be paying in Male Dollars or Female Dollars?

I recently read a Conference Board of Canada Report titled, “Women’s Leadership: Revitalizing Women’s Initiatives”. The report is written by Toddi Gutner and it describes both how women’s awareness and promotion has plateaued in corporate America, and how different companies are working to achieve gender and pay equity. I found the report to be particularly well written. It ignited within me a sense of desire to do something more, especially given the fact that every person can make a difference.

The conundrum is that as long as companies continue to exclude women from the upper echelons of management, no one will ever know what we are capable of doing. Gutner caught up with Jeffrey Maslow, Managing Director of Investment Banking Services at Goldman Sachs to record these few statements of his,

“We began to realize that there were very successful women with phenomenal results who brought profit to Goldman Sachs … that encouraged us to foster the development of most senior women at the firm”.

I applaud Goldman Sachs for making this realization and acting upon it, as in 2007 they won The Catalyst Award. I encourage the hundreds of other Canadian companies to go out and do the same. Think of what positive benefits we can affect for individuals in our workforce also known as friends, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, nieces, and mothers.

Here’s another way of putting it: women still get paid $0.72 on the dollar. Yes, that is in Canada as of 2008. Women have been underpaid for work of equal value for decades. In fact, if one were to examine the past 10 years of this inequity and study its financial impact on Canadian families and the economy, I expect that the results would be flabbergasting.

I’d like to conduct my own simple experiment here – the operative word being simple. Consider the case of a brother and sister who each perform work that is valued at $70,000 per annum in base salary. Let’s assume their salaries remain constant for 10 years starting in January 1998. Due to pay inequity in Canada, the sister is only getting paid $50,400 per annum because the company simply does not value her work as highly as it does her brother’s. That means that without considering inflation, raises, or the time effect on money, by January 2008 she does not have the benefit of the additional $19,600 that her brother does. If the brother had decided to invest his additional funds in a mutual fund earning the average 10% return over the ten years he would have an additional $343,611. I would demand a change if I were her.

Gutner identifies the success factors of women’s initiatives and promotion within businesses as the successful integration of these initiatives into the company’s business plan, operating women’s networking groups as business units, and engaging men in the equity issue. While I believe that there are other critical success factors in addition to the three listed by Gutner, but I also know that essentially, she’s on the right track. As simple as these statements are they have not yet been taken seriously. What more can be done to achieve this goal? We have passed legislation prohibiting gendered pay discrimination, we have innumerable corporate policies that reflect these sentiments, and we even have Pay Equity Officers in our businesses. Is it possible to make change?

I believe it is. I will fight for this right. I want my full pay-cheque this month and so should you.