[Thoughts below are personal wrestlings, not canonical statements on behalf of my company.  Not citing my company intentionally, and won’t approve any comment that makes the direct tie…]

This question was posted anonymously to our corporate Q&A / feedback site yesterday: “In light of [my company’s] committment to open management and last month’s Equal Pay Day (raising awareness of the gender pay gap), has the management team analyzed our pay/compensation structure to determine whether a gender gap exists?”  Speaker went on to say ” I think increased transparency in this realm would improve morale and make it less likely that employees will jump ship since they would be aware of efforts to ensure pay fairness”.

First reaction: mad – not at the starting question itself, but that it came across as an anonymous question (showing bias on my part – speaking to it in a minute).  Next reaction: mad at the posting itself.

So, first reaction: mad at a topic meant to be taken seriously presented anonymously.  That’s such a weighty topic, and the posting comes across as an implied accusation or implied hurt of an individual.  It  deserves real interaction and a two-way listen to clarify what’s really meant.  It would be a great conversation to have with leadership in person, where there’s a two-way dialogue and some thought.  I’ve had conversations with leaders in my company where I’ve said I’m wrestling with something – each wrestle helps me then more clearly either the company’s culture or my role within it or even something about how I communicate or lead.  These anonymous questions both short-circuit that process for the person asking the original question, and then help set the tone for more anonymous questions.  I assume this person has a real question from her (gender assumed on my part) view of the company.  Would rather treat it as a valid, fair, and intended as respectful interaction with the company, and encourage folks to dare to discuss either online or in person the real things that they need to see answered.

Next reaction, and stronger: mad at the posting itself.  It comes across as “women are being treated unfairly”, “I’m a woman and I need you to prove to me that I’m not being treated unfairly”.  I read it as an implication that a corporation has a responsibility to not only ensure pay fairness and lack of bias but then to make it “transparent” to the satisfaction of the requestor.  Of course, I take particular offense as a woman in technology that that particular factor is the area raised here…  The rub here is that I want women to be treated as individuals, not as a class.  I no more want women to be treated unfairly because they’re women than I want the new hire to always be locked into a salary driven by the market conditions of when they got hired or the older guy to get a larger salary because of years of experience, regardless of their ability to have learned from and apply that experience.  The individual who’s consistently making a high level of impact to the company’s goals should be making a higher salary.

Now, that said, if I recognized a disparity on any particular aspect not correlated with performance or value added to the company and customer, I’d call it out.  I have confidence, in fact, that my company does work to do the right thing here, and has done general salary comparators across the industry before.  Whether it is explicitly sliced/diced for factors like gender, age, market conditions when folks were hired in, etc, I don’t know.  I actually suspect we’re not a large enough company to make statistically meaningful comparisons just treating things mathematically.  But I do know that I’ve seen enough evidence that the company works to adjust salaries as part of the salary review process to have faith here.  Not knowing who the poster was, going to assume they haven’t seen those things in play and just incorrectly assume that believe that we must be like “every other” stereotypical company, motivated to ‘keep salaries down’.

Really interested to see who responds directly on the internal posting.  I’m still digesting myself to sort out personal reaction from dialogue-advancing exchange.  Happy to have conversations with folks where we’re listening to each other’s thoughts; not happy to post something where I’ve gotta assume I’m missing at least some of the real drivers for the individual, and I’ve further gotta assume that anyone who reads my stuff is missing some of my drivers.  Key for me is to not treat folks as a group unless you have evidence that the group is being treated differently or badly.  Note that that would be ‘here, in the current place’, not in a out in the ecosystem in a hear-say kind of way.   Also, work to establish a relationship and understanding of your company and the people within it, and then treat folks as doing the right thing, until experiencing evidence of otherwise.  Next step for me is to go talk with a few folks internally and see if I can help respond to the concern in some way,

Don’t want to not share some great things the writer included.  The writer cited a great TED talk by Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook) about why we have too few women leaders.  I’ve sent that video around before to folks, though my take on Sandberg’s point is to step forward as an individual and lead.  The writer also cited an article which indicated that pay disparity is at least contributed to heavily because women often don’t negotiate their salary.  Both articles are useful things to spread to help people (not just women) understand things they can do to help grow their own careers or understand how they may be in fact contributing to their concerns as to pay gaps.