Facebook and Microsoft, in announcements made on the eve of Equal Pay Day, said they pay men and women the same. The day marks how long into the new year women have to keep working to catch up to what men were paid last year.
As is common, the companies are comparing men and women who do the same work.
“Today, for every $1 earned by men, our female employees in the U.S. earn 99.8 cents at the same job title and level,” Microsoft head of human resources Kathleen Hogan wrote in a blog post.
Facebook’s head of people, Lori Matloff Goler, made a similar announcement in a post on the social-media network, writing that the company does “thorough statistical analyses to compare the compensation of men and women performing similar work” and they “earn the same.”
The approach is pretty standard. And it’s not particularly surprising: Past research, including one 2014 analysis by Harvard University labor economist Claudia Goldin, has found that the gender-wage gap in many tech jobs is less severe than other occupations.
Unfortunately, comparing people doing the same work doesn’t tell the full story of how women struggle to get ahead. It ignores a more pernicious problem: the industry’s position gap.
While men and women might earn roughly the same amount in the same jobs, men are more likely to end up in higher-paying roles.
Last year, long-running tech career site Dice reported that men were much more likely to hold better-paying tech job titles than women.
While average salaries for the top 10 tech positions held by men in 2014 ranged from $92,245 to $127,750, the top 10 roles held by women had average pay between $43,068 and $98,328.
That trend seems likely to hold true at Facebook and Microsoft, both of which have far fewer women in leadership roles than men.
Women make up 23 percent of Facebook’s senior leadership, according to its latest diversity report. Microsoft’s diversity report shows a larger gap, with women holding just 17.3 percent of leadership roles.
Microsoft and Facebook are the latest in a string of companies to talk more about gender pay equity after facing pressure from activist shareholders.
Boutique investment firm Arjuna Capital has filed proposals with nine tech giants this shareholder season, asking them to commit to fighting gender-pay gaps and disclose salary information. Several other targets of the campaign including, Apple and Amazon, addressed the issue this year.
