Apple, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft Sign White House Pledge For Equal Pay (fortune.com)

In honor of Women's Equality Day, an anonymous reader shares with us a festive report from Fortune: More than two months after the White House first announced its Equal Pay Pledge for the private sector, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and other major industry players have signed on. By taking the pledge, which was first introduced at the United State of Women Summit in June of this year, companies promise to help close the national gender pay gap, conduct annual, company-wide pay analyses, and review hiring and promotion practices. The new signees were announced in a White House statement on Friday -- which also happens to be Women's Equality Day, the anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Apple, which announced earlier this year that it has no pay gap, released a statement promising to dig even deeper into compensation. "We're now analyzing the salaries, bonuses, and annual stock grants of all our employees worldwide. If a gap exists, we'll address it," the company said in a statement. Twenty-nine companies signed the pledge on Friday, bringing the total number of signatories to 57. The pledge is part of a $50-million, White House-led initiative to expand opportunities for and improve the lives of women and girls. The consortium members issued a statement via Whitehouse.gov's press release: "The Employers for Pay Equity consortium is comprised of companies that understand the importance of diversity and inclusion, including ensuring that all individuals are compensated equitably for equal work and experience and have an equal opportunity to contribute and advance in the workplace. We are committed to collaborating to eliminate the national pay and leadership gaps for women and ethic minorities. Toward that end, we have come together to share best practices in compensation, hiring, promotion, and career development as well as develop strategies to support other companies' efforts in this regard. By doing so, we believe we can have a positive effect on our workforces that, in turn, makes our companies stronger and delivers positive economic impact." The consortium members include: Accenture, Airbnb, BCG, Care.com, CEB, Cisco, Deloitte, Dow, Expedia, EY, Glassdoor, GoDaddy, Jet.com, L'Oreal USA, Mercer, PepsiCo, Pinterest, Rebecca Minkoff, Salesforce, Spotify, Staples, Stella McCartney, and Visa.

Comments

It's illegal to discriminate this way

[Anonymous Coward]

Signing some imaginary pledge doesn't change anything - it's already illegal to discriminate via pay.

If women could be earning any less for doing the same job, they would be the first to get hired at every occasion, since you could get away with getting the same quality employee for less. Unfortunately, statistics show that women are simply inferior employees. They are less skilled, less confident, introduce unneeded emotional conflicts, take more sick days, take more maternal leaves, their productivity is lower.

It's almost as if forcing women to do the same work men do was an idiotic, unnatural thing to do, but hey, global capitalism can't function with half of the population not being exploited. It was sold to you under the guise of "freedom" - freedom to be taken advantage of.

Re:And the other end of the deal?

[AmiMoJo]

It is a choice to have children and the full consequences of doing so aren't a secret.

Yes, but men tend to get a small boost in earnings when they become fathers, and women tend to be penalised fairly heavily. It's not a choice to be the gender that gets penalised.

It is a choice to listen to people who try to tell you what you can and cannot do in your own future.

That's not how child psychology works. Children are not rational beings with all the facts and the ability to evaluate them as an adult would. That's why most religions focus on teaching their ideas to children, before they become adults and are better able to reject extremely improbable stories about the supernatural.