Surveys indicate that worldwide, women earn approximately 35% to 40% less than their male colleagues at the same organizational level. Analysts point at various reasons that gives rise to this disparity, citing reasons such as, women may not negotiate for higher salaries, women may prefer to barter a higher salary for time/work flexibility.
One 16-year-old organization - Salesforce - has done it. Taking the bull by its horn, Salesforce has become one of the first organizations to eliminate the gender pay gap. The issue of women being paid less than their male counterparts holding the same position has been doing the rounds for quite some time now. While some organizations decide to mull over this issue a little longer, Salesforce decided to attack this issue head-on. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, decided to review the salaries of his female employees and has taken measures to bring justice to women on its payroll. Salesforce has approximately 17,000 people in its employ, out of which 30% are women. According to Benioff, the whole process will take a couple of years.
So strong is Benioff’s belief that when he acquired a couple of organizations in 2015, he revised the pay scale of his employees again costing the organization a good $3 million. Salesforce has said that it will keep reviewing this gap on an on-going basis.
Marc Benioff has also put in place an initiative called Women’s Surge when he began to realize about the disparity not only in pay, but also in promotions, hiring, and other advancement opportunities in his organization. There were times when Benioff would look around and count very few females in the conference rooms or meetings. Benioff ensures that women should constitute at least 30% of any meetings, large scale or small, including product review meetings. Even during hiring, Salesforce gives priority to women.
At one time, Benioff had to replace a male speaker with a female speaker when he felt that the female speaker was more promising and would not have secured the opportunity to represent due to her gender or seniority.
At the World Economic Forum, Marc Benioff urged the CEOs of all organizations to initiate steps to eradicate this inequality. He also pointed out that given today’s advancement in HR practices, eliminating such discrepancies is going to be relatively easy.

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