Does your company know if it has a gender pay gap

Does your company know if it has a gender pay gapDoes your company know if it has a gender pay gapDespite progress, most companies still have a long way to go to eliminate salary gaps by race and gender, according to a2016 PewResearch Center study.While white women make 82 centsfor every dollar earned by their white male counterpart, black women only make 65 cents and Latinawomen make 58 cents, according to Pew.Working towards pay parity for similar jobs is not a one-day pursuit. So, what can employers and employees do to keep the conversation going?Glassdoor offered oneanswer- a 17-page step-by-step guide for how employers can address and tackle the gender pay gap in their own companies.Step No. 1 do an annual audit to figure out how much employees makeWhy data matters It can change behavior.Once employers have the hard data on salaries for their staff - along with their races, genders, and other potentially influential favors, anonymized to protect the privacy of employees - dat a reveals whether there is a pattern of unequal pay and offers a way to resolve the problem.Specifically, for HRworkers, Glassdoor recommends conducting this gender pay analysis at least annually. HR departments also need to provide equal opportunities for performance reviewsto account for unconscious age and gender biases. Since older workers are less likely to negotiate, Glassdoor says employers should leave less room for negotiation, so that offerscan be mora equal.Companies dont need a lot of money to identify pay gapsGlassdoorlisted statistical software that companies can use to calculate the gender pay gap, which they define as the difference between average pay for men and women, both before and after weve accounted for differences among workers in education, experience, job roles, employee performance and other factors aside from gender that affect pay.Glassdoor also provides different models to test gender pay difference across different departments or job titles.Glassdoor said its goal is to prove that you dont need fancy equipment and expensive outside consultants or even a big IT department to do this. With just some equations on an Excel spreadsheet, any Human Resources worker can figure it out.But again, Glassdoor urges, be sure to strip the data of any identifying information. Dont put your employees salaries on a cloud data storage platform that run the risk of being hacked.Stopping unconscious biasesGlassdoor found that companies are not explicitly out to discriminate against their employees. More often than not, it comes down to implicit human biases.Pay gaps dont result from overt discrimination, they result from years of unintentional bias that can creep into an organization over time, Glassdoor found.Thats why employers and employees need hard data and numbers as proof to wake them out of thisstupor, Glassdoor concluded.Analysis is far more involved than printing out a spreadsheet and eyeballing it - you need to go deep and control for a variety of factors to get the real story.