Amazon said in a statement today, “Our recent review of the compensation we awarded a year ago at Amazon – including both base and stock – resulted in women earning 99.9 cents for every dollar that men earn in the same jobs, and minorities earning 100.1 cents for every dollar that white employees earn in the same jobs”.
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On Thursday, Arjuna announced that it successfully got Expedia to disclose its policies and goals to address the gender pay gap.
“There will naturally be slight fluctuations from year to year, but at Amazon (AMZN) we are committed to keeping compensation fair and equitable”, Ty Rogers, a spokesman, said in an email. However, after this latest review by Amazon, Arjuna Capital has chose to withdraw the resolution.
The firm’s announcement comes amid pressure from an activist shareholder to disclose its policies on gender pay equality. “We are very pleased that Amazon is stepping up to investor concerns about gender pay equity, and we will withdraw our resolution”.
“We know that nationally, women are paid 79 cents on the dollar for what men are paid”. Out of them, twenty four percent were in managerial positions. Once, an Apple shareholder pointed out that the executive team at the company was too white for his liking.
“I assume they looked at the numbers and they were happy with the results and now they’re willing to be transparent about it and accountable”, said Natasha Lamb, spokeswoman for Arjuna Capital in Boston, which had been leading efforts to force the disclosure. Intel (INTC) in early February said it had achieved 100 percent gender equity on pay. The SEC disagreed. The company should be able to determine “what actions the proposal requires”, the regulator said.
This survey was conducted by an external labour economist which covered Amazon workers at every level of the organisation in the U.S. Since then it has focused on Apple, Intel, Amazon, Facebook, Expedia, Google, Adobe and Microsoft, Lamb said. The tech sector is dominated by men, and often criticized for unfair pay and working conditions for women.
“At the current rate of change, the gender pay gap is not expected to close for another 40 years”, Lamb added.
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Amazon’s disclosure, coupled with Apple’s and Intel’s, suggest that the gender pay gap may not be as stark in the upper echelons of the tech world as it is in other U.S. industries. Whether to measure gender pay differences based on people in the same (or “substantially similar”) jobs or as cross-company or country averages has been and continues to be a subject of fierce debate.
