Pay Black employees based on their performance, not your bias
The chief people officer of Renegade Partners explains how pay inequity is a form of systemic racism, and reducing bias in the workplace is one way to eliminate it.
George Floyd’s death and the global call for an anti-racist and equitable society sparked a call to make meaningful change now. In my work helping technology industry executives on their human resources strategies and programs, I see a huge opportunity for companies to make immediate change for Black employees, as well as other marginalized groups. Although many companies have quickly introduced anti-bias training for their employees, they have in large part left room for managers, even unwittingly, to introduce bias into their pay decisions.
Uprooting bias is a critical pillar in the fight for equal pay for equal work and one that as yet has been largely ignored.
Unequal pay is shameful and needs to end. But even now, practices that perpetuate unfair and inequitable pay persist. The race wage gap between college-educated white and Black employees has gone up from 17% in 2000 to 21% in 2018. On average, Black women earn just 61 cents for every dollar a white man earns. One key source of this inequity is something known as “manager discretion.”
This means that a manager has the ability to apply their own judgment when deciding how much to pay those who report to them, extending from an initial offer given to a job candidate to an annual raise. Discretion sounds like it would be a good thing. If an organization trusts a person to manage others, and the manager is the closest to the work that needs to be done, surely they are in the best position to determine how to allocate scarce resources among their team, such as bonus pools, raises, and so forth.
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