Across the world, the gender pay gap persists – a fact codified through International Equal Pay Day, which marks the point in the year when women’s earnings finally catch up to men’s earnings the previous year.¹ Longstanding biases, stereotypes about women’s work, and occupational segregation all contribute to the gap.²

Let’s face the facts: the gap is unfair, systemic, and holding us all back from economic progress. Pay transparency is one powerful tool to finally address inequities and close the gap.

1. Pay transparency reduces the pay gap. Research from across the world has linked pay transparency with reducing pay inequities, or in some cases eliminating them entirely, across gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other dimensions of diversity. ³
2. Employees want pay transparency. In fact, most employees would take a job with a different company if they had greater pay transparency, even if the salary was the same as their current salary.⁴
3. Twenty-eight countries across the world have adopted laws requiring employers to report pay in some form. In less than two years, the EU Pay Transparency Directive will add an additional 14 countries to this list and will alter the existing reporting requirements in 13 countries.⁵ Globally, pay transparency is not going away.
4. In the US, about one in three employees will be covered by pay transparency laws by 2025.⁶ These laws, though varying in scope, are proliferating in states, cities, and counties, requiring employers to disclose salary ranges to employees.
5. Pay transparency offers numerous business benefits, including increased employee trust, engagement, and a positive work environment.⁷ Adopting pay transparency practices can also offer companies a competitive edge and save on recruitment costs. ⁸ Leading companies already know the power of transparency to their businesses: 93% of our Catalyst CEO Champions For Change organizations have conducted extensive pay equity reviews in the past three years.⁹

Is your organization practicing pay transparency? Read how you can get started implementing pay transparency in your organization today.

Download the infographic

ENDNOTES

1. International Equal Pay Day. United Nations
2. The gender pay gap. (2024, April 15). International Labour Organization.
3. Obloj, T. & Zenger, T. (2023, February 8). Research: The complicated effects of pay transparency. Harvard Business Review.
4. Bergeron, P. (2022, October 20). Companies embracing pay transparency gain a market advantage. SHRM.
5. Hendrickson, C., Palmiter, A., & Vidales, J. (2024). Global pay reporting laws calendar. Syndio.
6. Liu, J. (2024, June 4). More states are requiring companies to list salary ranges on job ads—here’s where. CNBC.
7. Lam, L., Hayden Cheng, B., Bamberger, P., & Wong, M. (2022, August 12). Research: The unintendend consequences of pay transparency. Harvard Business Review.
8. Maurer, R. (2022, December 12). Study: Pay transparency reduces recruiting costs. SHRM
9. This CEO community is keeping and advancing their best talent. Are you?. (2024). Catalyst.
10. Obloj, T. & Zenger, T. (2023, February 8). Research: The complicated effects of pay transparency. Harvard Business Review.
11. Bergeron, P. (2022, October 20). Companies embracing pay transparency gain a market advantage. SHRM.
12. Hendrickson, C., Palmiter, A., & Vidales, J. (2024). Global pay reporting laws calendar. Syndio.
13. Liu, J. (2024, June 4). More states are requiring companies to list salary ranges on job ads—here’s where. CNBC.
14. Lam, L., Hayden Cheng, B., Bamberger, P., & Wong, M. (2022, August 12). Research: The unintendend consequences of pay transparency. Harvard Business Review.
15. Maurer, R. (2022, December 12). Study: Pay transparency reduces recruiting costs. SHRM.

The post 5 Pay Transparency Facts for International Equal Pay Day appeared first on Catalyst.

Welcome to Season 1, episode 4 of Breaking with Tradition, Catalyst’s podcast that explores trends and ideas that will impact the future of the global workplace. This episode is called Women Money Power.

We know that women across the globe make less money than men. The gap may vary among countries, but it is a persistent pattern caused by a variety of systemic factors including job segregation, differences in education, and a lack of pay transparency, discrimination, and bias.

Some would say, however, that the gender pay gap is because “women aren’t ambitious.” And financial journalist and author Josie Cox has a lot of evidence to the contrary.

Join host Lucy Kallin as she sits down with Josie to discuss her latest book Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality. Together, they discuss the century-old workplace design that holds back working mothers, recent legislative efforts to make salaries more transparent, as well as the trailblazing women who have contributed to the seismic progress in women’s economic empowerment we have today.

How can companies and employees work collectively to close the gap and create workplaces that better support people of all genders, including men? Listen to find out!

Hosts and guest

Lucy Kallin, Executive Director, EMEA, Catalyst

LinkedIn | Bio

Josie Cox is a journalist, author, broadcaster and public speaker. She’s worked on staff for Reuters, The Independent and The Wall Street Journal. As a freelancer, she’s covered the intersection of gender and the economy for The Washington Post, The Spectator, Guardian, Business Insider, MSNBC, Forbes and other publications.

Josie has appeared on CNN, ABC, PBS, CNBC, public radio and a host of other networks. She regularly contributes to the BBC, both as a writer and broadcaster and is a founding editor of The Persistent.

Website | LinkedIn

In this episode

• 1:04 | Are women less ambitious than men? Josie and Lucy discuss the myth of the “unambitious mother.”
• 6:22 | Breaking away from false perceptions. What can individuals and companies do to combat bias?
• 12:54 | Trailblazers in Women Money Power. Josie talks about some of the women who changed history under the radar.
• 20:08 | Is gender equity a zero-sum game for men? We still tend to frame gender as a woman’s issue.
• 24:22 | Pay transparency regulation. Is it effective? What are some of the bright spots?
• 29:12 | The main takeaway from Women Money Power. Lucy asks Josie what she hopes readers get from her book.

Favorite moments

• 4:40 | Josie: And I think what we have to do, and it’s our duty as a society, is to recognize that when it looks like a woman might not be as ambitious as a man, we have to ask ourselves: what are the parameters, the constructs, the infrastructure that are preventing her from being able to make the choices that make her look ambitious in the way that we understand ambition?
• 5:52 | Lucy: It’s not about fixing the women… It’s about changing the infrastructure where women are working and making them more accessible and places where ambitions are allowed to grow, whatever that might look like. Because I do believe that organizations that do that will be the ones that will be around for a long time and will be successful.
• 6:49 | Josie: We need to be able to have conversations in the workplace that shed a light on the lived experiences of people who are perhaps not always given the opportunity to be the most vocal.
• 7:44 | Josie: On an operational level, what I would really like to see is organizations that have the courage to really self-reflect and say, okay, why am I doing the things I’m doing? And what is this design rooted in?
• 10:50 | Josie: And one of the most interesting things that I saw coming out of the pandemic—before corporations snapped back to the pre-COVID way of working—was this openness to hybrid working. We saw a steep rise in women’s labor force participation among women with young kids. And that was because they were finally able to do their work in the paid labor market from home, around their caregiving responsibilities they have.
• 22:49 | Josie: When we talk about gender inequality, a) we still tend to frame it as a women’s problem. In workplaces, conversations about the gender pay gap still tend to be the domain of women. On the other hand, b) we haven’t really spent enough time considering the role of men in the unpaid labor market and really advocating for changes there. I think it is our duty to address the other side of the equation.
• 28:06 | Josie: [Companies need to] spell out the effect that pay transparency can have on your organization. If you abide by not just the letter, but also the spirit of [transparency] laws, if you create that transparency, and therefore that trust within your workforce, you are undoubtedly likely to have a better retention rate.

Mentioned on the Pod

• U.S. Department of Labor: Mothers’ employment has surpassed pre-pandemic levels, but the child care crisis persists
• Business Insider: A History of How the 40-Hour Workweek Became the Norm in America
• PBS: Katharine Dexter McCormick (1875-1967)
• The New Yorker: The Many Lives of Pauli Murray
• Amazon: Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

Research you can use

• Women’s Earnings: The Pay Gap (Quick Take)
• HR, Take Note: Employees Want Pay Transparency. Smart Companies Are Listening.
• Equal Pay Starts With Pay Transparency: Step-By-Step Guide for HR Leaders
• 5 Ways To Close The Gender Pay Gap
• Time Is Ticking for the EU Pay Transparency Directive
• Survey Finds Four in Ten Working Mothers Likely to Change Jobs Because of Childcare Issues

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The post Episode 104: Women Money Power appeared first on Catalyst.

Do you know how much you make and where every dollar goes? In this episode of Catalyst Spills the Tea, a video YouTube series, we spill the tea on “payday routines,” a social media trend where influencers share best practices for saving money and living within your means.

Gen Z and Millennials, whose early careers have been marked by recession, inflation, COVID-19, and other financially challenging moments, are well aware of the importance of fiscal responsibility. They are collectively ushering in a new era of pay transparency by taking to social media to democratize, normalize, and demystify budgeting and salaries.

• Andrew Grissom, Director, Community Growth
• Tara Van Bommel, Senior Director, Statistician
• Host: Isabela Stille, Sr. Associate, Social Media

About Catalyst Spills the Tea

Catalyst Spills the Tea is a video series where we discuss trending topics in workplace culture, gender equity, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. We are all about creating equitable workplaces for everyone, so you won’t find people more obsessed with workplace culture than we are. Yes, we love research, but we also love memes, video shorts, pop culture, and debating hot trends just like the rest of you. We decided to bring our watercooler talk and infuse it with a little bit of our research in this video series. Essentially, we’re bringing the research receipts to #worktok. Buckle up!

Wait, what does “spill the tea” mean?

“Spilling the tea” is slang used to refer to gossip or news. It’s popular on the Internet and social media.

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Transcript

00:00:03:13 – 00:00:04:09
Hi, everybody.

00:00:04:09 – 00:00:06:14
Welcome to Catalyst Spills the Tea, where we break down and discuss trending topics in DEI. Today I’m your host.
I’m Bella Stille, the Senior Associate for Social Media at Catalyst. And we’re spilling the tea on payday routines.

00:00:17:15
Hi, everyone. I’m Andrew Grissom. I am Director of Community Growth at Catalyst.

00:00:22:16
I’m Tara Van Bommel, and I’m Senior Director and Statistician in the Research and Development Department at Catalyst.

00:00:29:19
What are payday routines? It’s a new Tik Tok trend that you might have seen where users share how much they make and where every dollar of their paycheck goes.

So you might have seen also some videos by pages like Salary Transparent Street encouraging salary transparency by asking strangers on the streets of large cities in the US what their salaries are. Now, why is this happening? Let’s ask Andrew and Tara.

00:00:55:06
It’s basically never been more difficult to make ends meet. And so Gen Z is leveraging the tools that they’ve grown up with by going to social media to crowdsource and educate one another.

We’re seeing this not only happening on places like TikTok and social media, but, you know, in laws and workplace norms occurring all over the world.

00:01:16:03
So why don’t we talk a little bit about the implications of this trend?

00:01:19:11
Pay transparency laws and practices are really explicitly designed to shed light on unfair and inequitable pay decisions, particularly in jobs and workplaces where there may be discriminatory behaviors that have really thrived for a long time under pay secrecy.

00:01:36:08
What we’re really talking about here is the racial wealth gaps and systemic oppression.

And so dismantling that requires a movement. And I’m really hopeful that this trend can ignite that progress.

00:01:47:16
Well, in looking further into it, how do you think women are, in particular, impacted by this trend?

00:01:53:08
So much of what I’ve seen on social media is a lot of women talking about their payday routines.
Right?

So in a large part, I see them as driving this trend, which is great. And it sort of demonstrates how women are taking action to empower their own financial security.

But on the flip side, you know, the cynic in me can’t also help but wonder if this could be, you know, at least in some situations, yet another example of women’s unpaid labor.

00:02:22:23
Let’s think about companies. Why should companies care about this trend?

00:02:26:11
Underpinning all these laws is this effort to close the gender pay gap and ensure that pay is fair and equitable.

00:02:34:04
But I’ll also say that we’re sort of concerned about companies taking a little bit of a knee-jerk reaction to this growing sense of, you know, compliance.

So just quickly, oh, I’m going to comply with the new law and then my work is done, you know, particularly in the US, as I said earlier, a lot of these laws are really new and require just disclosing a pay range on job advertisements. Some companies we’ve seen are just simply posting ranges to comply, even taking huge ranges for a post and posting those online.

And that’s not really helpful to job candidates.

00:03:12:18
That’s so right, Andrew, and I think the opportunity here is for companies to embed financial wellness into their value proposition.

So when companies thoughtfully respond by doing things like a pay equity audit and reinventing pay decision processes, you know, they are actively creating a more equitable workplace for everyone.

As this trend shows.

00:03:35:05
A lot of people, Gen Z and people across generations are just, I think, at a point where we’re ready to talk about money and hold our organizations accountable for nondiscriminatory pay.

And if you won’t do it, your employees might feel the need to move on to another employer or maybe even your competitor down the street.

00:03:54:18
It’s really interesting to think about this as working towards demystifying practices at large.

And it’s really, truly what this pay transparency you know, in general, everyone online is talking about it, even if it’s in different ways.

I think employees are just taking greater ownership of their financial health and they want their employers to take a greater role in that too.

00:04:16:06
So, Andrew and Tara, do you have any payday routines?

00:04:20:02
This was something that I was never taught growing up, and I’m really excited to see and learn from this.

And I’m hoping I can stash away a little extra money going forward.

00:04:29:12
Like Tara, I – this is this trend is inspiring me to look at budgeting more holistically.
And so I’m looking forward to doing that as well.

00:04:38:13
Thank you, Andrew and Tara, for helping us spill the tea on payday routines.

Thanks for joining us, and I guess we’ll see you next time.

The post Video: Catalyst Spills the Tea on Pay Day Routines appeared first on Catalyst.

But why does progress continually stall?

In a sweeping epic covering more than a century, Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality by Josie Cox, financial journalist and founding editor of The Persistent, meticulously details the long, winding road of American women’s fight for economic freedom. This work is recommended reading for HR leaders, DEI practitioners, and anyone seeking to better understand the antecedents of the gender pay gap in the United States.

Cox frames the odyssey through vignettes and vibrant portraits of women changemakers, from household names like equal pay advocate Lilly Ledbetter to influential figures who never quite got their due, such as lawyer and activist Pauli Murray. Readers also meet lesser-known women who broke from the status quo, including Mae Burkett Krier, who joined the millions of “Rosie the Riveter” women entering the labor force to support the US economy during World War II.

Their stories shine a light on the courage, grit, and persistence required to stand up to the status quo. But for every incredible achievement, Cox notes, a major setback was not far behind.

Companies quickly replaced the Rosies who developed extensive skillsets and knowledge during their World War II employment with men, and expected women to quietly resume their roles in the home.

The development and approval of the contraceptive Enovid (Cox describes in riveting detail the story of billionaire widow Katharine Dexter McCormick’s resolve to advance women’s reproductive rights) radically transformed women’s educational and professional pursuits by giving them the ability to delay parenthood.

Second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s saw Betty Friedan’s disruptive The Feminine Mystique, passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and pro-choice activism, culminating in the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. All this progress was eventually met with crushing defeat when the Equal Rights Act failed to secure the state ratifications necessary to become enshrined in the US Constitution.

In page-turning prose, Cox unpacks systemic failures, cultural norms, and assumptions that repeatedly left women sidelined, despite their achievements.

Indeed, by the 1980s and 1990s, women’s workforce participation had increased to the point that the notion of women “having it all”—a successful career, family, and marriage—was a prominent cultural talking point. But something was missing.

Throughout these years of disruption, when women were breaking barriers and building careers and wealth, nothing was changing at all for men. Society still expected men to be “providers,” work long hours, and leave unpaid work, such as household chores and childcare, to women. Men didn’t have a stake in the changing world around them, perceiving gender equity as a zero-sum game that only put them at a disadvantage.

This misalignment reverberates today. Women still perform the overwhelming bulk of unpaid labor such as childcare and household chores. Catalyst research has found that the lack of childcare options severely disrupts working mothers’ career ambitions. Two thirds (67%) of women believe childcare responsibilities could negatively affect their careers.

To maximize earnings and manage both paid and unpaid labor, heterosexual couples often forgo a sense of equity, with one partner (usually the woman) taking a lower-paid, more flexible job, and the other partner (often the man) choosing a “greedy,” high-earning and prestigious job—further entrenching gender inequities.

The United States still lacks a national paid parental leave law and childcare infrastructure, leaving women to pick up the slack and provide this social safety net. In doing so, we deprive them of the freedom to choose and optimize their time, a critical component of economic mobility.

In addition to the famous “glass ceiling” metaphor, Cox suggests we examine the history of women’s economic mobility through “glass walls.” With each step towards progress, a glass wall blocks our path toward equality. Every crisis—war, recessions, pandemics—invites old assumptions about gender roles to resurface and questions women’s credibility and authority to make economic decisions.

Can we stop the cycle and deliver a more equitable world?

1. Start by challenging sexist stereotypes and assumptions, yet seek common ground to shift mindsets and behaviors.
2. Ensure children do not adopt detrimental stereotypes or presumptions related to traits, aspirations, or conduct typically associated with any specific gender.
3. Pay tribute to women pioneers by continuing to chip away at each glass wall.

With generative AI and other labor market disruptions on the horizon, it’s time to confront these persisting systemic inequities head-on. We can invite men, through programs like MARC by Catalyst, to interrogate of harmful gender stereotypes that leave women underpaid and underutilized for their potential. Organizations should adopt pay transparency practices, which are critical for reducing wage gaps and are already rapidly becoming the norm in many countries.

Let’s name the systems that contribute to the pay gap and do the long-overdue work to render it part of our past rather than our future.

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The post Women Getting Paid the Same as Men: Hurdles, History, and How to Move Forward (Book Review) appeared first on Catalyst.

These changes are reshaping employer practices to meet the transparency expectations of younger generations. But companies also must overcome myriad forms of discrimination and bias if they wish to attract and retain top talent.

Moderated by Tuesday Hagiwara, Vice President, Content Strategy and Creative Services at Catalyst, the webinar panel featured Sung Yeon Choimorrow, Executive Director, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF); Lelaine Bigelow, Executive Director, Georgetown Center on Poverty & Inequality (GCPI); and Joi Chaney, Founder & Principal, Joi Strategies; along with Raghu.

Data from the National Women’s Law Center shows that AANHPI women working full-time year-round are paid $0.93 for every dollar compared to their non-Hispanic White male counterparts—with figures varying widely by community: Bhutanese women make 49 cents while Indian women make $1.26 for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men. The lifetime financial loss for AANHPI women can add up to thousands of dollars, said Raghu, contributing to the wealth gap.

So, what specifically should companies do beyond heeding legal requirements regarding compensation transparency? The panelists discussed seven additional actions that HR and DEI leaders should take to transform their organizational culture.

1. Bake diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into the organizational culture. “It’s crucial not to view diversity and inclusion as a mere box-ticking exercise based on racial and ethnic representation,” said Choimorrow. ”Instead of fixating on specific demographics to fill quotas, the emphasis should be on transforming the organizational culture organically. It’s essential for companies to prioritize cultural transformation and integrate it into performance evaluations, especially for managers and leaders.” Panelists shared that companies should strengthen diversity among leadership and address underlying structural issues to prevent high attrition rates among AANHPI demographics.
2. Shift DEI responsibility from AANHPI employees to their managers. “The responsibility for promoting diversity and inclusion should not fall solely on AANHPI workers but on managers,” said Chaney, “with their performance in these areas tied to compensation and bonuses.”
3. Acknowledge the wide diversity within AANHPI. Chaney noted that AANHPI “is not a homogenous group, and disparities exist even within this demographic. Cultural biases and ‘othering’ in the workplace need to be addressed.” Biases exist within communities of color, including within the AANHPI community.
4. Learn from the example of UK companies. “Global companies should learn from their UK counterparts,” said Bigelow, “who have seen positive results from mandatory pay data transparency, such as a reduced wage gap and more women tied to higher-paying roles.” They also should scrutinize global supply chains and business partnerships for their pay transparency practices.
5. Leverage Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). “ERGs can be instrumental, providing a platform for explaining policies, addressing concerns, and nurturing a sense of involvement and fairness,” said Raghu. They can aid retention and recruitment by ensuring employees feel valued and understood.
6. Build institutional trust. “A lack of transparency in how pay is set can create perceptions of inequity, leading to resentment and talent loss,” said Raghu. “Proactively encouraging transparency about compensation policies helps mitigate this.” Companies should be prepared to explain wage disparities among people with the same position or job title, such as those based on differences in education or experience.
7. Support the AANHPI community. “Companies should ensure diversity in their contracting practices by tapping into AANHPI small business owners and using resources like employee resource groups and Chambers of Commerce,” suggested Chaney. They should seek out AANHPI contractors, consultants, lawyers, and service providers to promote diversity throughout the company’s supply chain and support AANHPI-owned businesses. Implementing these strategies can help companies create a more inclusive and equitable workplace for AANHPI women, with the goal of driving long-term cultural and structural change.

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The post 7 Actions Your Company Should Take to Overcome Bias Against AANHPI Women (Blog Post) appeared first on Catalyst.

According to the National Women’s Law Center, in 2022 Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander women earned, on average, 80 cents for every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men. But that wage gap can very wildly among subgroups of AANHPI women. For example, Bhutanese women in the United States were paid less than half (49%) of their white male peers’ earnings — a net loss of almost 1.5 million dollars over the course of a 40-year career. 

Overcoming the dual hurdles of racial and gender bias in pay may seem like a tall order, but acknowledging the issue provides organizations with an exciting opportunity to evaluate their own pay gaps and advance the mission of workplace equity from multiple angles and perspectives. Companies pursuing full pay equity for all AANHPI women will need to be proactive, transparent, and take risks along the way. 

Watch this webinar to hear our panel of experts discuss:  

• Stories of overcoming discrimination and bias against AANHPI women in the workplace 
• Tools and roadmaps for evaluating pay equity within your own organization. 
• Strategies and programs to support AANHPI women at work and equalize earnings at every level. 

Speakers

Lelaine Bigelow, Executive Director, Georgetown Center on Poverty & Inequality (GCPI)

Joi Chaney, Founder & Principal, Joi Strategies

Sung Yeon Choimorrow, Executive Director, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF)

Maya Raghu, Senior Policy Advisor, US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Office of the Chair

Moderator

Tuesday Hagiwara, Vice President, Content Strategy & Creative Services, Catalyst

Use your Catalyst Supporter organization email to access the recording.

Read the key takeaways from this webinar.

The post Webinar Recording: Intersectionality and Pay Equity for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islanders appeared first on Catalyst.

A new landmark workplace law will reshape pay practices in the EU—and it’s about time. The gender pay gap persists across the EU, remaining 13% on average as of 2022. ¹ Despite the European Union’s 1957 law enshrining equal pay for equal work, efforts to deliver on this promise have fallen short.² But that is going to change.

Recognising the role that pay transparency plays in reducing the pay gap, the European Parliament and Council adopted the EU Pay Transparency Directive in 2023. All EU countries must implement the Directive into their national laws by June 2026.³ This means that employers across the world with workforces in Europe have a short runway, just two annual pay cycles, to prepare for much higher standards of pay equity and transparency than ever before.

A Directive With Teeth

The EU Directive calls on employers to conduct thorough assessments of their compensation—including in-kind benefits, basic pay, bonuses and other incentive pay—and report their results publicly, provide salary transparency to job candidates, and comply with several enforcement mechanisms. At the centre of the Directive is the expectation that workplaces must analyse and refine their job architecture to be able to categorise employees who are performing the same work or work of equal value, and to ensure discriminatory talent management decisions are detected, remedied, and transparent.

Is your organization ahead of the game? The components of the Directive are more complex than you may think.

Gender pay gap reporting. Once fully in effect, all employers with 100 or more employees ⁴ must provide detailed information related to the gender pay gap to employees, employee representatives, local authorities responsible for gathering and publishing the data, and publish this data on their website. The Directive must be implemented by June 2026, with the first reporting cycle concluding in 2027.⁵

Given the specificity of the information they must report,⁶ organisations will must spend considerable time and effort in advance to ensure that their job architecture is fit for purpose to facilitate comparison of roles to assess equal value. This assessment of roles across an organisation, determining whether they are of equal value, will be new to most employers, introducing new methodologies or analytical tools and comparing roles that may not have otherwise been assessed together in the same way.⁷

Ultimately, employers must demonstrate that objective, consistent, and gender-neutral criteria are applied in compensation decisions. This places a significant responsibility on employers to systematically review their criteria, which may have led to longstanding pay disparities that they must now remedy.⁸

Pay transparency. The Directive also requires all employers to communicate salary ranges or starting salaries of all advertised positions to job seekers, either by including them in job postings or informing candidates before the interview stage. Employers are prohibited from asking applicants about their salary history, which has long disadvantaged women and candidates from marginalised racial and ethnic groups and contributed to gender and racial gaps in lifetime earnings.⁹

Enforcement mechanisms. Simply reporting data on the gender pay gap is not enough. Employers bear the burden of proof in establishing that employee rights are not being breached. When the gender pay gap disclosure reveals a gap of at least 5% in any category of employees, and the gap is not explained by objective, gender-neutral, and non-discriminatory factors and has not been corrected within six months, the employer must perform an extensive pay audit, referred to as a joint pay assessment, with oversight by employees’ representatives.¹⁰

Employers that fail to give adequate attention to preparations ahead of the Directive may bear significant costs as they will be forced to rapidly scale up operations to comply with the law, not to mention loss of employee trust. Investing in the time and effort to evaluate your job architecture, pay structure, and any existing pay gaps now, before the Directive comes into effect, may save your organisation from paying even more in remediation and employee damages. EU member states will be required to establish procedures to compensate employees with full back pay, benefits, incentive pay, and damages from lost opportunities when information from the joint pay assessment reveals that their equal pay rights have been violated. Even outside of detecting and remediating pay disparities, organisations must keep employees informed of pay information, including a breakdown of pay by levels and categories of employees performing the same work or work of equal value, and respond to employees’ pay-related inquiries.¹¹

Start Preparing for the Directive Today

Don’t wait until the Directive becomes law in 2026. Take advantage of the next two years to ensure your organisation is fully ready to comply with the Directive in the EU countries in which you operate.

Analyse your job architecture. This step is critical for ensuring that your organisation can comply with the requirements of the Directive. Reviewing and updating your job architecture—and clearly articulating how roles and responsibilities connect with value, skills, and effort—will lay the foundation for a clear and fair pay system.¹²

Conduct pay equity reviews and proactively address disparities. Leading-edge organisations like the Catalyst CEO Champions For Change already conduct regular pay equity reviews and correct employees’ pay when gaps arise.¹³ Build a consistent cadence of pay equity reviews using statistical and technological tools to run complex analyses efficiently. Align your efforts with your broader talent and DEI goals by examining how talent decisions are made, where bias may create barriers for some employee populations, and which solutions you can employ to create systems of accountability and fairness.¹⁴

Guard against silos. Are others in your organization already preparing for the Directive? Find out who those individuals are and build a cross-functional task force or working group, including those with expertise across legal, human resources, total rewards, talent and workforce analytics, DEI, ESG, communications, and information technology.

Compose a communications plan. The Directive will undoubtedly impact many of your organisation’s internal and external stakeholders. Staff may feel overwhelmed with the demands of meeting the new requirements, while employees may have questions about their rights under the upcoming law. Building effective communication strategies will enable your organisation to manage these concerns and address inquiries.

Tailor your efforts by country. Multinational organisations may experience a range of readiness levels when it comes to job architecture, pay equity, and pay transparency practices in each EU country. While some may be accustomed to conducting complex pay analyses and feel “ready” to take on the Directive, they may need to adjust their methodologies to meet the Directive’s detailed reporting requirements or take further action to address the 5% pay disparity threshold that triggers the joint pay assessment. Others may be taking on these tasks for the first time. Evaluate the maturity stage of your operations when it comes to readiness for the Directive in each EU country in which you operate and develop a tailored strategy to set all locations up for success.

The Directive marks an unprecedented shift toward holding employers accountable for equitable pay. Meet the moment by mobilizing your organisation toward action. Leverage this opportunity to build thorough and efficient talent systems, strengthen employee trust, and play your part in closing the gender pay gap.

Want to learn more about how to prepare your organisation for the Directive? Join Catalyst’s upcoming Measuring for Change community conversations by filling out this form.

Read previous posts on the importance of pay transparency and practical tips on how your organisation can get started.

Catalyst Supporters can watch How to Navigate the EU Pay Transparency Directive featuring an expert panel on the law and pay transparency.

Thank you to Deloitte UK, a member of the Catalyst Measuring for Change Community, for sharing their expertise on the Directive with us.

ENDNOTES

1. Gender pay gap statistics. (2024). Eurostat: Statistics Explained.
2. Kurnatowska, M. & Marsh, R. (2023). Pay transparency directive: Lifting the veil. Global Compliance News.
3. Pay transparency in the EU. European Council, Council of the European Union.
4. When the Directives comes into effect, the reporting threshold will be employers with 150 or more employees. By 2030, this will drop to 100 or more employees. EU member states may impose stricter reporting thresholds in their national legislations, making in possible in some countries to require employers with fewer than 100 employees to report on the gender pay gap. Employers with 250 or more employees must report gender pay gap information annually, while other organizations are required to report every three years. Kurnatowska, M. & Marsh, R. (2023). Pay transparency directive: Lifting the veil. Global Compliance News; Heys, T., Lorimer, D., & Rush, S. (2023). Pay transparency directive FAQs. Lewis Silkin
5. Kurnatowska, M. & Marsh, R. (2023). Pay transparency directive: Lifting the veil. Global Compliance News
6. According to Article 9(1) of the Directive, employers must provide the following information: the gender pay gap, the gender pay gap in complementary or variable components, the median gender pay gap, the median gender pay gap in complementary or variable components, the proportion of female and male workers receiving complementary or variable components, the proportion of female and male workers in each quartile pay band, and the gender pay gap between workers by categories of workers broken down by ordinary basic wage or salary and complementary or variable components. Directive (EU) 2023/970 (2023). European Union.
7. Kurnatowska, M. & Marsh, R. (2023). Pay transparency directive: Lifting the veil. Global Compliance News
8. Kurnatowska, M. & Marsh, R. (2023). Pay transparency directive: Lifting the veil. Global Compliance News
9. Gender pay gap: Council adopts new rules on pay transparency. (2023). European Council, Council of the European Union; Nadeau, S. & Shepherd, M. (2021). Why salary history bans matter to securing equal pay. Center for American Progress.
10. Kurnatowska, M. & Marsh, R. (2023). Pay transparency directive: Lifting the veil. Global Compliance News; Directive (EU) 2023/970 (2023). European Union.
11. Kurnatowska, M. & Marsh, R. (2023). Pay transparency directive: Lifting the veil. Global Compliance News
12. Thoma, C. (2023). How to best prepare for the recently adopted EU Directive on Pay Transparency? EY.
13. This CEO community is keeping and advancing their best talent. Are you? (2024). Catalyst.
14. Shaffer, E. & Torrez, B. (2023). Promises vs. progress: 2 keys to keeping employees feeling good and staying put. Catalyst.

The post Time Is Ticking for the EU Pay Transparency Directive appeared first on Catalyst.

Heather Foust-Cummings, Chief Research & Development Officer talks to lauded labor economist and 2023 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Dr. Claudia Goldin about her research and the significant impact childcare challenges have on women in the workplace. This interview was shared as part of the 2024 Catalyst Awards.

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Transcript

00:00:04.135
Every year businesses lose more than $12.7 billion due to childcare challenges. The lack of stability in childcare has an outsized impact on women. Catalyst found that in the United States,
roughly four in 10 women, or 44% say they will likely need to change jobs to balance childcare with work demands compared to 37% of men.

We sat down with Dr. Claudia Goldin, who recently won the Swedish Central Bank Prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel for her extensive research on women in the labor market. She is just the third woman to win the prize and the first to do so solo.

00:00:54.795
Claudia, your work aligns directly with the Catalyst mission. Could you share how your research has followed the trajectory of women in the workplace?

00:01:04.545
Uh, certainly in the 1970s. And what’s interesting is it aligns perfectly with when Catalyst began and the Catalyst mission. We had revolutionary change, and I call that the quiet revolution. And some of that was set in motion by the fact that women began to be able to do a much better job controlling their own fertility. And the marriage age rose by quite a bit, and we pivoted from addressing and helping individual women to really focusing on corporations and making workplaces more inclusive, recognizing organizations and companies that had successfully advanced women.

00:01:47.775
Given the developments that we’re seeing in the labor force today, what is the work that we still need to do in order to achieve greater equity?

00:01:57.825
So there’s work in terms of care. So what we realized, the other thing that we realized during the pandemic was that school isn’t just teaching children. It’s actually keeping children safe and allowing individuals, mainly their parents to be productive citizens and productive workers. And we realized the tremendous importance of care. Couples are always faced with the problem that if they have care responsibilities, and in general, couples with children have great care responsibilities, both members of the couple cannot take that greedy job. They can both take a flexible job. Mm-Hmm.

But the, to the extent that the greedy job is really greedy, it means that you’re leaving a fair amount of money on the table. Well, it turns out that by and large, uh, when couples give up couple equity and one takes the greedy job and one takes the flexible job, they generally also throw gender equality under the bus with it. Because in general, it’s the woman who takes the flexible job.

She, by the way, also has the joys of seeing her kids do things first and do many things that her husband, the father of the child, might not have the ability to, to see and partake in.

And so even in jobs in which wages are fixed equal for men and women, men make a lot more because they are able to take, even for lower income jobs, the greedier job, it means that couples different sex or same sex couples are no longer going to have to give up as much couple equity.
And that’s important for everybody.

00:04:06.365
I think it’s so telling, when you talk about the contributions that women make, you talk about the value of what women are providing in the home. It, it’s something that is, uh, a personal passion of mine, uh, in terms of really addressing the issues of of marginalized groups, particularly racially and ethnically marginalized groups. And so, um, I think as you tell your story
of the history of, of the women’s movement and, um, women in the United States, I look forward to
that aspect of the story.

00:04:41.315
Certainly.

The post Video: Dr. Claudia Goldin Talks Childcare and Greedy Jobs appeared first on Catalyst.

Anna Edwards, Acting London Bureau Chief & TV Anchor, Bloomberg leads an exciting conversation with an expert panel from Dow, JDE Peet’s and Baker McKenzie to talk about the challenges, pitfalls and impact of the EU Pay Transparency Directive – landmark rules entering into force this year requiring organizations to disclose gender pay gaps and create action plans for parity. This panel is part of the 2024 Catalyst Awards. Watch the replay and learn:

• Practical steps for compliance and using data to promote parity.
• Analysis of pay gap reporting models and impacts.
• Conducting accurate gender pay equity audits.
• Creating pay transparency and wage-setting best practices.

Speakers include:

• Ilham Kadri, CEO, Syensqo
• Luisa Boaretto, Head of Inclusion Diversity and Equity EMEAI, Dow
• Johan Van Gossum, CHRO, JDE Peet’s
• Stephen Ratcliffe, Partner, Baker McKenzie

Transcript

00:00:05,125

Dear all, it is an honor to open the discussions on gender pay equity during this year’s Catalyst Award gala. Let me first start by congratulating Lorraine and the Catalyst team for continuously raising the bar on inclusion and reminding all of us that the road to equity is a race without a finish line. At the current pace of change, it would take us another 257 years to close the global gender pay gap.

This is indeed sobering, and the reason why we need action and a collective one. The chemical industry I represent sorely misses gender diversity like many other industries.

We need more women in science, in technology, in engineering, in mathematics, in academia, in research, in the industry, in management, and in leadership roles. Today, only a few women are leading multinationals.

But let me tell you, it’s not because you put a woman at the top that the problem is resolved. In fact, this lack of diversity at all levels in an organization perpetuates gender stereotypes, biases and injustice, including the gender pay gap. Women, like minorities, face a glass ceiling and they have statistically more family responsibilities.

Therefore, they may have less flexibility and availability at crucial moments in their career, such as welcoming a baby. It is well-known that they face discrimination, such as pay gap in our own corporations. I often say, “Diversity and equity is what you see. Inclusion is what you do.”

I believe that companies that understand the impacts of inclusive and equitable workplaces on their P&L and balance sheets will address and therefore resolve from within the gender pay gaps in order to become an employer of choice.

I have had the honor to lead a company called SOLVE for the past five years, and in December last year, as the company separated into two entities, I took the helm of its specialties businesses called Syensqo. Syensqo’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Heritage stems from the work we have done in the past five years. And to address differently DE&I issues, we did something we believe is different from what I have been doing in my career. We put human dignity at the heart of everything we do. We started creating an environment where everyone feels welcomed, heard, valued, safe and equal.

On pay equity, we did our coming out. We committed to assess the gap and close it, should there be any. Believe it or not, by December 2023, we closed 951 gender pay gaps in our company. And by the way, this goes both ways. In Belgium, men were less paid at equal jobs than women. Yes, it happens, although it’s an anecdote. Now, closing the gap is one thing. Avoiding the future pay gap is another. Going forward, we committed first, we will conduct gap analysis every year just like we run budgets processes. Second, we’ll train again and again our top 200 leaders on unconscious biases and inclusive leadership. To that end, we integrated the MARC, the Men Advocating for Real Change Catalyst program, as well as several other gender equity models from Catalyst in our e-learning platform. Third, we dare change policies where it makes sense.

One of my proudest policies is the launch of 16 weeks co-parental leave back in 2021, available to all parents and co-parents, regardless of their orientation or location. It helps women to be supported at critical times of their lives and careers. Lastly, we invest in youths in high potentials and women who have an ambition, a will, in the pursuit of their passion. We are part of the A Effects, A for Ambition program and as of today, 325 women have participated. And since 2021 and another 110 women will be trained in 2024.

Listen, all of these initiatives are here to dismantle barriers, challenge stereotypes, empower women and minorities, and simply place human dignity and social justice back at the center. Let us never forget that when we close the gender pay gap, we not only uplift women, but we strengthen our entire society. We paved the way for a more equitable future for our kids, and we advance humanity.

Thank you. And I wish you a lively discussion.

00:06:18,666

Thanks, everybody, for joining us.

Good morning.

Good afternoon, wherever you are.

Thank you very much for being with us. We are going to have a conversation now about how to achieve pay equity and we’re going to be looking specifically at the EU Directive on pay. So I’ll introduce the panelists that we have in front of us today. It’s a real pleasure to be speaking to Stephen Ratcliffe, Partner at Baker and McKenzie, Luisa Boaretto, Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Employee Experience for the EMEA region and India over at Dow. Also Johan Van Gossum, who’s the CHRO, the Chief Human Resources Officer for JDE Peet’s.

I’m Anna Edwards from Bloomberg TV and Bureau Chief for London for Bloomberg News.

Thank you all very much for joining us.

This is going to be an excellent conversation. We have legal views represented on the legal expertise on the panel, DE&I expertise, broader HR expertise from the chemical sector, the beverage sector. So a whole host of experience to bring to this conversation and the EU obviously taking action on this front because of that 13% gender pay gap that up until 2021, Eurostat still found to be present in the European labor market.

So let’s dive into the conversation. And just because this centers around the EU Directive on Pay, useful for everybody to get up to speed, for the global audience to be up to speed with what that is all about and what that legislation means. So if I could ask Steve, if you could first give us that brief explanation then of what the new legislation says.

00:07:44,833

Yeah, I’ll do my very best. I mean, look, this directive packs a lot in, so I’m going to do a very high-level summary. I’m just going to focus on some of the bigger issues because it’s called the Pay Transparency Directive. And so you might think its primary focus is on transparency and there is a lot of coverage of transparency in there. There’s a focus on, for example, transparency of pay scales before somebody joins your employment, for example.

But the bigger part of it, the more significant part of it and the bit that’s really game changing is the the section that deals with gender pay gap reporting. So many of us are familiar with gender pay gap reporting already. We’ve got it in the UK, other European jurisdictions. And just by way of reminder, this is a directive, so it needs to be implemented by every EU jurisdiction and it doesn’t impact the UK or Asia or the US or anywhere else outside of Europe. It’s Europe only.

But what it does is it implements a form, or it requires countries to implement a form of gender pay gap reporting.

First of all, not just on basic pay, but on other aspects of pay as well. But more importantly, what it does is it says if you end up, having done your gender pay gap report, if you end up with a differential in pay between men and women, which is more than 5%, then you are, and that differential is not justified by effectively nondiscriminatory factors, then you have to do what’s called a joint pay assessment.

Now that is an assessment of the differences in pay between essentially men and women doing comparable roles. And I’m going to come back to that concept in a second because that’s an important one. The difference in pay, of what you’re going to do to address the differences in pay and correct historic liabilities. Now that, on the face of it, maybe doesn’t sound as significant as it is, but when you think about the way in which this does the comparison, that’s where it gets really interesting, because for years and years and years, the EU has had equal pay laws.

In fact in the UK, we’ve had them since 1970. It’s several decades in the rest of the EU as well. And one of the aspects of that equal pay law is the question of how you compare male and female workers and who’s comparable with whom. And the classic way in which we do it is we compare what’s known as “like work.”

I’m an employment lawyer. I compare myself with a female employment lawyer because we do basically the same job. But there’s another aspect to the legislation known as “equal value,” and that’s where you get people in different jobs and you effectively score the job. You go through, well, how demanding is it in terms of the intellectual rigor? Or what about do you have to, is it physically demanding? Do you have to work in the cold? Is it late at night?

You know, and you effectively score different jobs and you end up in a situation where some quite distinct jobs are found to be comparable. So it’s not the employment lawyer compared with the employment lawyer. It’s the employment lawyer comparing with the accountant, for example. The really interesting thing about this directive is what it requires you to do when it comes to gender pay gap analysis is compare, not just apples, apples with apples, but apples with oranges and pears and everything else.

You have to do an equal value analysis and effectively you do a gender pay gap publication by reference to roles at the same value. And that’s incredibly significant because most employers, in my experience, don’t do that at the moment and not in any sort of sufficiently detailed way. And what we’ve seen in the UK is where that’s been done. There have been some absolutely colossal and colossal equal pay claims.

By way of example, anybody has been keeping up with what’s going on with Birmingham City Council and the fact it’s just effectively announced bankruptcy will know that that was due to an equal pay determination which resulted from an equal value analysis and led to a bill which some suggest is upwards of £750 million.

So it’s big. It’s really big.

00:11:42,333

Okay. So that’s interesting. So that sets out the concept of equal value, which no doubt will come up during our conversation.

That gives us a sense of the stakes as well of what is at stake with this. And just just briefly, Steve, when does this all come in? You said it has to be implemented by the individual nation states across the EU.

00:11:58,000

That’s right. Yes.

So it’s got to be implemented. It’s got to be in local law by June 2026.

The first gender pay gap reports will be 2027 for the larger employers. It then cascades down up to 2031 for smaller employers and employers of 50 or more relevant workers. So it’s sort of imminent, but we haven’t yet seen the implementing legislation locally. And we’ve seen other directives to be implemented, you know, right up to the wire, and sometimes in some jurisdictions, even after the deadline.

So we may not have absolute clarity until quite close to that June 26 date.

And it covers that transparency, that reporting. It does also cover some other areas, which no doubt will come up in conversation around recruitment.

And there’s a new, new guidance in some of that field as well.

00:12:41,291

Absolutely. Yeah. And that boils down primarily to that word, “transparency.” You know, we’ve seen many of us that that there are some employers who’ve started to publish pay scales voluntarily as a means of being kind of open and honest.

We’ve also seen a lot of us, I think, some quite negative coverage of the practice in some quarters of not telling people what the pay scale is until they’re some way down the application process. Part of what the directive does, it seeks to try to address that.  And it also it also restricts the ability of employers to to ask employees, well, what were you paid in your previous role, the theory behind that being, well, statistically speaking, men move more often than women.

00:13:22,416

And generally speaking, when people move, they move for a pay rise. And so, you know, the kind of fact that you’re kind of building in a pay rise on top of what somebody earned previously, if men are moving more than women, then that’s, that’s kind of baking in a pay differentials between men and women.

So it’s part of the recruitment process, an important point to underscore then that it does say that you can’t ask what, what people, what people are earning at the moment or their previous role.

00:13:46,375

Steve, thank you very much for that. So that sets up the the legal backdrop to this conversation and we’ll be back with Steve, of course, during this conversation as well. But let’s also bring in then Luisa from Dow and Johan from JDE Peet’s to get business perspectives.

Luisa, if I can come to you first. Just set out your stall if you could. Give us a broad, a broad overview of what this means for your business, what this new this change in the rules means for your business.

00:14:13,375

Yeah. Thank you.

And thank you for the invitation. And good morning. Good afternoon.

Good evening, everyone watching. And I think Steve did an excellent job introducing and if I look through the lenses of inclusion, diversity and equity first, I want to make sure everybody also tunes in to the purpose of the EU Pay Transparency.

And it’s really not just about rectifying errors, even if that would be an important piece. It’s really the aim to achieve organizational equity and eventually let’s say a fairer society. So keeping the purpose in mind, of course, is that we bring changes. And like any change, I mean, for Dow business, but for any other business, it will bring some internal changes.

I mean, I think the company will need to make sure they have their house in order. And really like Steve mentioned, starting to enter in also equal value kind of mindset. Dow has been doing pay equity studies since over 20 years and publishing in our corporate social responsibility report.

But I think we still have opportunity to look at it in a consistent and formalized manner. Now, I do think as Steve was mentioning, one of the biggest impact and change is also about the external engagement.

It will have a big impact on talent attraction, but also retention of employees and will also be possible for potential talent joining a company to really start seeing, comparing company, understanding more.

And that, in my opinion, is a big and very positive change, that I’m looking for, worth to add.

00:15:46,125

Okay. Thank you. So, Luisa, the interesting there, setting out, putting the house in order, the fact that this takes in that equal value mindset that Steve was talking about and also what it does in recruitment and making the business more attractive.

So those are the areas in focus for Luisa.

Johan, How does this sit with your business, this new legislation?

00:16:03,458

Well, thank you very much for the question. The new or the directive itself would not have an immediate impact for us, as we didn’t wait for this directive to come into play, nor the legislation that will be coming into place. So we know that equal pay is key in fostering diversity, equity and inclusion, and it is also key in ensuring that every one of our people, wherever they may be across the globe, are equally empowered to unleash their possibilities.

So we do, just like Luisa at Dow, we have been doing gender pay equity studies for quite a few years, and we did our first global one a number of years back. And then the when we did that, not specifically for Europe, because today we’re talking about Europe, we immediately covered the whole of the globe because obviously that’s a commitment that you make your people, wherever they may be.

You make that commitment everywhere, not only when legislation is requesting that of you. And when we got the first results back, the first results were showing us the average pay of women compared to the average pay of men. What typically would be called to or referred to as the “raw pay gap.”

And when we got those results back, actually, we found that the average pay of our women is higher than that of our men ever so slightly. However, the variation was less than 1%.  But what we have applied is beyond equal pay.

We look into pay equity.

So we look into just about 20 drivers together with external experts on what are considered to be acceptable drivers for pay differentiation. And when we did that full, proper study and looked at what would be the unexplained gap, then the gender pay gap flipped in favor of men.

But we were, we were we saw that that gender pay gap was equally small, so also below 1%.

What we find most important in this is that there were no statistically significant differences anywhere across the JDE Peet’s group and that with the variation being what it was, it was considered to be not meaningful by the external experts.

So we were we are in a good situation, if you will, because well below 1% to well below the 5% threshold that the EU is looking to request and which we fully subscribe to.

So we are starting from a good position.

So no immediate impact, but obviously not complacent because as Luisa said, you need to keep your house in order. This is in every decision that you make, wherever you make it on every one of your people, that this comes into play.

So for us it is and maintaining what we have in place and ensuring that equity in anything and everything that we do that involves our people.

00:18:33,500

Steve, just worth reiterating that point, as Johan was suggesting, if you find a pay gap that is less than 5%, that’s deemed to be compliant, is it? Is it any more detailed than that?

Well it’s, I wouldn’t say it’s compliant.

I mean, it doesn’t mean that in an individual case somebody can’t bring a claim because you are looking at a statistic, you know, an average basically, but it doesn’t push you over into that territory of having to do that mandatory joint pay assessment, which is kind of like the thing Johan’s just explained actually.

So that kind of audit that Johan did, that’s a lot like the kind of thing that will be required under the directive. But the big difference is you’re going to have to bring in employee representatives and sort of, you know, open up the books in a way and kind of show the pay differentials, which of course means that claims are in and of themselves more likely to arise.

00:19:18,625

Okay.

Let’s talk a little bit about some of the positives around this, the experiences you guys have had in in looking in detail at your pay structures, the organizations, the pay scales and the like, and how you’ve managed to work your way through this.

Johan, if I come to you to find out a bit more detail perhaps about how you’ve gone about this, you mentioned bringing in a host of experts, I think to, to help to do this or to measure yourselves up against a host of criteria.

Give us a bit more detail as to how you went through doing that.

Well, actually, because you will need those experts and Steve will be happy for me to say that because it is, it sounds very easy when you start the conversation.

00:19:55,000

Comparing pay does not sound to be that overly complicated.

And making sure that you do that properly doesn’t seem to be overly complicated. But this is not something that you would do on a rainy Wednesday afternoon. This is actually very complex and and requires a lot of work and a lot of preparation if you want to do this properly, if you want to do this right.

So the first piece of advice that I would have on this journey is plan ahead so that you have the proper time to collect all the information, all the data, structure it properly, make sure that you scrub that information, that you learn from what the analysis are telling you, that you have the opportunity to course correct.

And yes, we did this together with external experts so that we would also know that we would have someone that is looking over our shoulders, that is that is judging our homework, that helps us to assess what is indeed deemed acceptable, what is not acceptable.

And what also helped us is that we started with a pilot group. So we started small, to truly get the learnings from this before you start asking HR teams across the whole globe to be preparing for this and to help in the analysis for that.

So start early.

And the education of your stakeholders, equally most important, because many stakeholders will not understand why you would even need to do this, because as an organization you have one rewards philosophy. You have one pay benchmark that you apply for everyone. You have one set of pay ranges that you apply for everyone.

So how could you even end up with a pay gap?

The mere insinuation that there could be a pay gap is taken personally by a number of our leaders because that could be seen as suggesting that they themselves may be biased or may have inequitable practices at play that they’re not aware of.

So that education and that communication and the onboarding of your leadership, most important in this journey. So preparation, communication, I would say were two key ingredients on setting this up for success.

That’s really interesting,

00:21:51,416

Johan. Yes, and bringing winning hearts and minds and bringing people along with you on this exercise will dedicate a bit more thought to that in a little while.

And Luisa does the process that Johan was describing there, does it ring true to you?

How did you go about doing this at Dow?

00:22:06,166

Yeah, I think Johan did an excellent job in describing what corporations and big companies with multinational impact are doing at the moment.

Again I do compare may be simplistic to a big change management project and in every change management project you start with the stakeholder alignment. So what Johan was referring to is very important.

If a charge is legal, it’s IT.

There is a system component.

The companies like ours, Office of Inclusion, Inclusion, Diversity and Equity, Employer Resource Group. And of course, as Johan said, very, very well, external help is fundamental. Nobody I think should expect to do this job by themself, especially because it’s the first time we’re going through that.

So it’s — and it’s evolving.

So also definition of scope and continuing to monitoring the legislation because again we will have at least in the EU 27 countries adopting that legislation and that again Steve will be happy to talk about that.

But there’s many local nuances that we need to continue looking at. And then Johan pointed to that. Education, communication. Again in every change management program, they are key and because we are talking pay, it’s going to be pretty sensitive, I would say, for certain employees.

Now I do think, and again Johan was already alluding to that, when we define the scope, there is an opportunity for big company to decide if you just want to be compliant with a directive in Europe, in the European Union, some 27 countries. Or if you want to adopt that approach globally.

But that means depending on, you know, many countries and different legislation, you are operating in may bring another level of complexity.

But again, if we talk about equity, that definitely something companies should evaluate that because it would make the workforce as external stakeholder feel that the company is approaching in an equitable and fair way.

00:24:10,041

Yeah, Steve, maybe you could just help us set this in an international context, actually. And obviously you referenced how, you know, you’ve got experience in the UK setting, but obviously the US will be doing its own thing, parts of Asia doing their own thing around this.

I know Japan taking action on these things. And Europe has its own policies. What are we learning from outside Europe? Or how is Europe influencing other geographies in the way that this is being done?

00:24:37,166

Well, I mean, the short answer is very considerably, because I agree completely with Luisa. You know, global organizations will very typically want to take a if not a one size fits all approach, then then certainly apply a level of consistency to the way in which they’re approaching pay equity.

And on individual laws, I’m sorry to say, don’t necessarily always lend themselves to that.

So, for example, this concept of equal value, which doesn’t exist in the States, it was considered,  I believe, in the eighties and sort of you know, wasn’t invented because of concerns about the, honestly, the level of science in it. So what you would need to do, I think as a global organization and those organizations with whom we’ve worked on multi-jurisdictional pay audits have done this, is decide for yourself what is the standard we’re going to apply?

Are we going to apply the approach that is typical of the states, which for various reasons may not fly under the directive?

00:25:31,666

Are we going to apply the approach into the directive unto Luisa’s point?

Which countries approach under the directive? Because it might be that Germany is different, France is different from Spain and effectively set an approach which you are comfortable with from an internal policy perspective and which ticks as many of those legal boxes as possible.

Now, my experience of multi-jurisdictional audits is very typically the the sort of processes is kind of similar,which basically the same regardless of how many countries that you are you’re addressing.

You identify gaps in pay, you try to analyze the reasons for the gaps in pay.

You assess whether those reasons are themselves discriminatory and then you deal with remediation.

Those are the full steps. The bit that gets a little bit tricky is that there are some common factors relied on to explain differences in pay in, for example, the States, which just wouldn’t work under legislation in the EU in particular, things like tenure which are considered very broadly speaking to be somewhat discriminatory indirectly in the EU.

00:26:33,375

That’s interesting. Tenure. Okay, so that’s an interesting one. We’ll park that for a moment but perhaps come back to it. So, we talked a little about the way that your businesses, Luisa and Johan have managed this so far and the way you’ve got ready for this, for this directive to come in.

And we talked about the international context.

I got a hint at some of the hurdles you’ve had to overcome or some of the areas where this could go awry and maybe other businesses can learn from your experience, or just from some guidance. And Luisa, I think you referenced this.

So even within the EU, it’s going to be implemented perhaps differently in different places.

00:27:04,583

I mean, your business no doubt operates in lots of different European geographies. Do you have any sense of how it’s going to be different in different places yet?

Or we wait to find that out still, I suppose.

00:27:14,791

Well, I think again Johan referred to that there is many steps companies are already doing and they’re already preparing for.

But we shouldn’t forget that’s the very first ever time we’re going through that.

And again, it’s implementing in 2026.

So I’m sure there will be a lot of learning when we look it back. But now, you know, we have to learn, as we’re going.

You reference to it, I mean, there is a natural complexity because we talk about many different countries and jurisdiction and that what we are also very careful and making sure we do involve local stakeholder, we do involve local external partner, we do involve local firms.

I think there is an element of legal risk that companies are looking at and that is natural is naturally at global but is natural, especially in individual countries how things are going. Now something I believe we are doing and we are really looking intentionally is making sure that we are reviewing the full talent lifecycle.

So there are many touch points.We talk about attraction, promotion is another piece, performance reviews and making sure that all those touchpoints are set up in a way that are gonna be useful for the pay equity transparency.

I give you an example. In Dow, we are applying, since years now, inclusive hiring standards.

So when we hire talents, we do have the process, an inclusive process, that makes sure that every talent is going through a fair interview with diverse talent pool, with diverse talent and interview panel, but also with a standardized process so that we try to eliminate in this cloud all potential personal biases.

Why I’m saying that is because, in the spirit of the EU Pay Transparency, that helps to get the process as unbiased as it can be.

00:29:03,458

And then again, back to Steve’s point and to the legislation, pay is one of the elements that will come into play, but with a rigorous process for that.

00:29:12,125

Yes, Johan, so that I mean, that takes you down into that conversation you were just hinting at earlier about training and about educating managers and perhaps you were getting some pushback along the way around, around some managers who thought they might be found at fault through this process.

What kind of training did you have to do for managers to make sure that, for example, in recruitment, they don’t ask, they aren’t in the future or now going to ask questions around. What was your last pay packet? What did that look like? Can we match or improve on that?

What kind of training have you had to put in place?

00:29:44,625

Well, excellent question. And if you allow me, I’m first going to take a small step back and I’m going to build on what Luisa was also saying, because that will help with answering this question too. What you can see clearly see from Luisa.

And then Dow is that they’re starting at this from an authentic commitment to pay equity, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. And then you don’t need to be concerned about the actual implementation of the legislation across all of the EU member states, because if you have the fundamentals right, if you’re committed as an organization and as leaders of an organization to pay equity, then the implementation is simply a follow on or something to adhere to.

If you start on the other hand from compliance, then yes, you will be concerned about all the different implementations that you’re going to find.

00:30:29,583

And the same applies, Anna, to the question that you just asked. How do we prepare our leaders for this? It first comes from why we are doing this, why we believe in this, why we are committed to this. And that has nothing to do with the EU directive, per se. So that has nothing to do with compliance, per se.

This is our commitment to our people.

And when you first get everybody to understand where this fits in and when you get people to also understand what the true value of diversity, equity and inclusion for an organization is, that this is not an HR thing that everybody is expected to do, but actually has real business value and is most important as the role that we have in society.

When your when your leaders understand that, the training becomes easy because they will become self-regulatory or regulating, they will be self filtering themselves as well.

So first get everybody on board. That, I would say, is most important. Then the training is just practical guides that you add on board.

00:31:23,916

Okay, Luisa this, thinking about the long history that pay has takes us into another point which you raised with me ahead of this conversation, which was about considering overall compensation and the benefits that people were awarded with decades ago when they first joined a business might not be the ones that people get now, and I wonder how that really complicates things when you’re looking across the piece and trying to work out where, you know, how equitable these things look when you’re taking into account not just their pay but also all of the other areas of compensation.

00:31:57,375

Yeah and thank you, Anna. I think that it’s an excellent point also to highlight for our audience because as you correctly said, that we are not only talking about compensation and salary, but we are looking to the broader lenses of benefits and rewards and how equitable they are.

And historically again, take retirement benefit plans.

There is a different age at which men and female are going to retire, depending on different countries, and that may cause a difference in their total reward system.

And that’s something that the company will need to look at. Parental leave. Usually that burdening parent, you know, the mother in a traditional family, will have maybe a longer extended period of unpaid leave or unpaid work, and that will lead again in a difference in pay.

So I think, you know, there is a lot to consider, but also to keep in mind this should be taken as a broader approach.

And I think Johan’s put it very well. It’s not about complacency and compliance.

It’s really about a fundamental philosophy and approach that the company are taking towards this topic.

00:33:05,416

Okay, so not about compliance, per se, but about the approach and about the overall culture. Steve, thinking about some of this, I mean, some of this it sounds simple at one level, but then also you quite quickly get into some complexity and I’m sure there’s even more complexity beneath the hood here.

People on different contract types thinking about that and doing it, thinking about how that adds complexity. Yeah, contract workers, intermittent workers, trainees, apprentices. Are you going to have, are businesses having to think carefully about all of these different groups and how this applies to them?

They absolutely are. And that’s the most challenging thing I think about this, which is that you’re going to have to find some way of assessing value across the entirety of the organization.

Now we’re, you know, we, Baker & McKenzie, that is, we’ve built a tool which is intended to assist employers to do that.

We’re getting ahead of the curve because, as I say, it may well be that local implementing legislation, which gives us more detail of how that value analysis is done, isn’t enacted until the 11th hour or possibly past the 12th hour, frankly.

So we’re trying to get ahead of the curve and build something that we think will be a representative example of how value will be analyzed.

But there’s still a huge amount of leg work to be done. I really would encourage people to start early because as you say, that there is such a myriad of data that you need to you need to put into that sort of tool and your analysis more generally.

And even once you get to the stage of well, we’ve decided that this apple is comparable with this pear, you then have the further, deeper dive on, well, each element of pay, where are the differentials and what are the reasons for the differentials?

And that gets very, very tricky because my experience is every time I’ve done an equal pay audit, whether it’s a domestic one or a global one, there’s a problem somewhere.

You just don’t know where it is yet. And a lot of the time the reason for that problem is because, look, we think there’s probably a very good reason why employee A is paid this much, employee B is paid that much.

But that differential in pay has been there for 20 years and nobody has a record of the decision that was made 20 years ago.

So, you know, organizations which are mature in their pay philosophy often find that that they have a they have a point in time where the data just sort of ceases to exist because they became mature only after that point.

And that itself could provide challenges.

00:35:20,041

Lusia, Steve was mentioning earlier some of the ways that the international backdrop complicates things, and one he referenced was that in the United States, maybe he wants a reward for tenure in a way that might cause problems in Europe being an international business, how do you manage to overcome some of those issues?

Well, it’s a great point.

Again, to be honest, instead of really looking at the legal backdrop as an issue, I think the organization can can look it through the other lenses of seeing it, that a way to align, as Johan was referring before, to a broader society, value and expectation.

And then if you frame the pay transparency as also the proactive step because there is an element of compliance, but there is also an element where companies can bring their own perspective into that, then I think that can really announce reputation for sure.

00:36:11,541

But for me what is very important is also building trust among employees. And trust, I think nowadays is one of the element, one of the values that company want and should relook at that.

So again, yes, for sure there’s legal risk, legal backdrop. But again, it’s going back. What’s the purpose?

What’s driving company?

And if it is done in an authentic way, I think it’s amazing opportunities for companies to go into that path.

Yeah.

00:36:40,500

Johan, would you would you go along with that, that assessment?

Absolutely.

And if you look at it from a global perspective and you build in all the drivers that you would expect to be, except the drivers, then you’re also able to switch off one driver for one location versus another. So for instance, when tenure is not allowed, then you switch off that driver as an explained driver. Or then, and then, you look at what remains as unexplained and whether that variation is what is within acceptable or not acceptable. So if you build the model such that that you immediately look at any potential drivers that would under the strictest of regulations be accepted, then it’s easy to switch one off versus others.

00:37:21,833

And you’re set, also at a global level. Luisa, for businesses that have been managing this risk or thinking not about the risks that happen, but the opportunity that this presents for a very long time, it’s clear that this is something that’s quite resource intensive and quite systems intensive, that if you’re going to be managing this properly, I suppose that’s something you’ve had to learn along the way.

00:37:42,833

Yes, I mean, definitely resource and system can be some of the areas that companies want to keep an eye because as Steve is educating us, is very complex and nobody is trying to undermine it. At the same time, I think organizations do have resources and it is a matter of being very clear what they need to achieve, as we said before, also getting help and making sure that they start now. Again, one of the beauty of the legislation is to have two years to start preparing.

00:38:11,041

Hopefully local legislation will not come in last minute. That’s definitely something everybody’s looking. But I think whatever step can be done now, in order to anticipate, that should be taken. And again, it’s an invitation for companies who haven’t start yet really to put their heads down.

And as we said, start with alignment, start with the scope, start to understanding it better and do your own due diligence internally and making sure what you know you can rely on and what maybe areas you want to start looking more intentionally to fix.

00:38:42,000

Johan, if we speak more about how you win those hearts and minds and how you take a workforce along with you on this particular endeavor, I mean, there can be areas that you might get pushback around.

I mean, we were hearing earlier, as Steve was talking about, how there’s a trend towards putting pay scales on jobs and putting pay on jobs more openly than perhaps in the past.

And many people who are in the job market might think that’s a brilliant idea. But people who already have jobs with businesses might say, hang on, that person’s getting recruited at that salary.

And it adds transparency in a good way, but also might cause some people to push back.

00:39:14,666

How do you manage that kind of protest within an organization? That’s an excellent question and I wish I had a real solid answer on that yet, but I can already explain our journey on this.

Actually, winning hearts and minds on gender pay equity is really hard because everyone, everyone of your people, all of your employees will automatically assume that there is a pay gap because that’s what they’re reading about it.

That’s what they’re hearing about. So they never –  you hardly ever hear that that there is a region in the world where there is no pay gap. So everybody automatically assumes that there is a gender pay gap.

And when you come back with results that actually are quite, that some would assess as being quite good, well that would not be celebrated because all that you’ve done is you’ve confirmed that you’ve done what you should always have done.

You pay people equitably.

So it’s not that that is winning here. It is, if anything, you’ll be met with skepticism when you would come back that there is no gender pay gap or that the gender pay gap is mine, that I can easily be addressed because that would be met with with skepticism.

And so, yeah, as such, winning hearts, hearts and minds on this is not easy.

And Anna, I’m sorry, but I forgot the second part of your question.

00:40:25,791

No, no, that’s fine. That’s fine.

Luisa, I was going to come to you on, you know, have you have you had people pushing back and how have you gone about winning hearts and minds on this?

00:40:34,583

Well, I think going back also to what Johan was sharing true, you know, you’re touching something very sensitive for people, but it’s also true you really have an opportunity, as I said before, to build and rebuild trust.

And when you are able to build a culture of trust in the company, then it becomes a totally different ballgame. It’s not about employee versus employers, but becomes becomes about a general culture of the company, which is important.

Now pushbacks. I think if you look from the top of the house, from senior manager, from the C-suites, there is no need to convince them. They think strategically. They do understand the strategic impact.

As we said before, we can add on companies, on talents, on reputation. So it’s more a matter of equipping both senior manager and middle managers. That’s maybe the area where he needs a little bit more education, communication, understanding, because those middle managers, those people leader, will need to have a big conversation with their employees.

They will need to be the first one that employees go back and say, “What’s going on?” Again, “Why this job is posted at this range?” And level set.

So I think again, important, important piece would be education, good communication, and as we are talking about it, transparency is going to be key.

00:41:57,708

Right. And perhaps those are important things to consider here as well. If I if I think about some of the ways that the DE&I conversation is evolving and I look at the US, which often leads some of this narrative, Luisa. And there we’ve seen obviously legal challenges in some contexts around some DE&I initiatives and they’ve made news of late.

Now, obviously, this is athis is a directive in Europe. So this isn’t something that people are perhaps going to be able to change within organizations. It’s just something that companies have to comply with.

But I wonder if it makes it a harder sell if the news is running stories around pushback to wider DE&I initiatives.

Is that something you’ve encountered, Luisa?

00:42:37,208

I think it’s something definitely to keep in consideration. As I said, there is a lot of noise and drama and different opinion about that. But it goes back to what we were saying at the beginning with Johan is really depending where organization wants to position about that.

And again, I think everybody is really seeing as an opportunity. Now there will be huge learnings on the way. There will be probably also some cases where corporation will look at with I didn’t want to use too much about fear, but that definitely with some good level of attention.

But it’s a journey and I think everybody, at least I would say in the EU, does appreciate and is comfortable with this type of legislation getting into place, learning through that, leveraging best practices.

One of, what I hope would be one of the positive factors and maybe that will also help corporations, it will be the increased best practices sharing. There will be corporations who are going to do it best in class.

And then it’s an amazing opportunity for everybody because inclusion, diversity and equity is a space of collaboration and not of competition.

So there is going to be an opportunity for everybody to benefit out of those frontrunners. So, best practices, which again, I think eventually will lower the risk piece because there will be best practices and good example to leverage.

00:43:58,041

Yeah.

And Johan, in your, in your case, I mean a lot of these legal challenges around DE&I have maybe taken place in the States, but this all comes back to New York via news, and we’re all aware of those kinds of stories.

Does it make any of this a harder sell taking on board?

00:44:12,750

It is a directive, so it’s not as if people have a lot of wiggle room here, but this is it a harder sell internally if the news is full of those kind of stories?

00:44:20,916

It is if you’ve waited until now or if you’ve waited full stop and it has become a compliance matter because it’s not, a lot of people get very excited about compliance.

So Luisa is spot on when she just said, well, if as an organization, your intent and your commitment are authentic and real, and were not driven by regulation that may be coming your way, then you got ahead of this.

00:44:43,375

Now, indeed, the regulatory the regulatory space is changing around us, litigation is picking up, etc.. Now you’re at a more difficult period of time.

But then my advice would be the same on get ahead of this and start from an organization and your commitment to this rather than that compliance, that conversation, because then it becomes then it becomes more difficult.

00:45:04,250

But at the same time, global organizations always have the beautiful complexity of having regulations across the globe being different. No different here.

So yes, this is typically whenever you talk about people and as Luisa said, especially pay, that is a very sensitive topic.

But just like any other beautiful complexity with a global organization, this one fits in that as well.

00:45:25,958

Steve, does this get into conversations with clients? Do clients look around the world and see what’s going on in the US and ask, you know, what’s the future of this kind of of directive in Europe?

Or do European clients just put that to one side and say, no, this, this is where we’re at, this is the directive we focus on and let’s get to it?

00:45:42,458

Look, I think this directive is, and I should I should say I agree completely with what Johan and Luisa just said.

This isn’t about compliance.

This is about your wider pay philosophy, your DE&I philosophy, frankly. This is just the cherry on the cake.

Right.

That there have been multiple regulatory moves towards greater transparency when it comes to pay towards gender pay gap reporting. Whether you look at the EU or the US or elsewhere, there are cases there are pieces of legislation, there are the movement, the trajectory, frankly, of this topic is is very, very clear. The other aspect, of course, is your employee populations. They are demanding increasingly transparency over what’s going on in fact, they are implementing their own transparency, whereas 20 plus years ago when I started at work, you got a pay rise. You didn’t tell anybody else about your pay rise. This is much, much more likely that the next generation of employees will compare notes. So we talked a lot about trust. I mean, that the other side of that coin is transparency. And as I say, this directive seeks to kind of codify that.

But we were already moving in that direction.

00:46:53,416

Yes, I mean that’s worth mentioning isn’t it. I think one of the other parts of the directive is that you can’t stop people from talking about their salaries in the way that perhaps some industries might have wanted to in the past.

00:47:03,083

Luisa, just to bring this to a close then, and Johan, you talked, Luisa, earlier on about how this was part of a wider, you know, organization organizational shift towards more equity and then even further than that, about a fairer society.

00:47:17,791

In a sense, we’re asking a lot of businesses bottom up, aren’t we? To make our societies fairer through the way they operate.

This is this is quite high stakes stuff in that sense. It is. But let’s be honest, you know, corporate world, the companies do have a role to play in society.

You know, we cannot just delegate that to create and build a fairer society to individuals or to government, business is playing a fundamental role in creating a more equitable society.

And I would even go sometime business have even local presence, resources, strategic view, all that it takes, I’d say, resources to really progress in this journey.

So yes, it’s a lot to take, but let’s be honest, business plays a fundamental role in society and as such you need also to play also on the advancing the society to a more fairer.

So I think companies just to live up to these roles they do have and not just hide behind saying that is not their task or not an expectation from them.

00:48:19,375

Johan, we’re expecting a lot of business here. It seems.

00:48:22,916

Absolutely. And we have to contribute to the society that we are part of. But what I personally find very encouraging when I look at the leadership of our company and I’m pretty sure that Luisa will see the same when I look at our leaders, they want to do this, they want to do what’s right. They know that this is right. So, yes, they will be playing our part.

We have to play our part as an organization as well.

00:48:45,250

Okay.

Thank you all very much.

Thank you to Steve.

Thanks to Johan. Thanks to Luisa.

Thanks very much.

Thank you.

Pleasure.

The post Video: How to Navigate the EU Pay Transparency Directive appeared first on Catalyst.

Opportunities for women have expanded since Felice N. Schwartz founded Catalyst over 60 years ago. In 1962, “Help Wanted” advertisements were segregated by gender and race, and the law permitted companies in the United States to pay women less than men. And yet, women continue to face myriad systemic challenges with gender parity, from the gender pay gap to the glass cliff.

Trailblazing changemaker Hillary Rodham Clinton—a champion of democracy and human rights for women and everyone—joined the 2024 Catalyst Awards Conference. In a fireside chat with former Catalyst president and CEO Lorraine Hariton, Clinton shared her candid observations on what we have accomplished, and where we go from here.

Clinton reminded us that until recently, US girls and women were blatantly and unapologetically treated as second-class citizens, “with a very clearly designated lane girls and women were supposed to follow.” She presented herself as a living example. When she was 14, inspired by President Kennedy, Secretary Clinton wrote a letter to NASA, saying she wanted to become an astronaut and asking what she would need to do to accomplish her dream. The letter she received in response said that NASA was not interested in women.

As a young married woman in the 1970s, Clinton was not legally able to obtain a credit card in her own name. “This may seem like ancient history,” she said, “but Lorraine and I lived through it.” She reminded us that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was instrumental in knocking down many legal obstacles, as was Title IX, the 1972 landmark federal civil rights law that provided equal opportunity to girls and women in athletics and academics.

In the mid-1980s, Sam Walton, the legendary founder of Walmart, called Clinton and asked her to serve on the Walmart board. Was it because of her qualifications? Yes and no. He told her that his wife and daughter said he needed a woman on the board. “’Okay, would you be that woman?’” he asked. Clinton continued, “And, of course, I was the one woman on the board. It was an extraordinary opportunity for me to be involved in when we were beginning to recognize the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the corporate boardroom.”

Clinton punctuated the lack of gender parity she and millions of others experienced with anecdotes about what they wore in the workplace. As the first woman partner at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, Clinton shared, she dressed in the same outfit that many professional women did in the 1970s and 80s—a navy blue skirt suit with a white blouse and a ribbon tied around the neck. Standing out by wearing clothes with a personality was simply too risky. “It was not a great look,” Clinton said with a dry laugh.

Many Awards Conference attendees were familiar with the “uniform” corporate women previously wore to work, and laughed ruefully along with Clinton as she spoke, but then Clinton added an anecdote that elicited gasps. An expert witness with short hair was told to go out and buy a wig with long hair before entering the courtroom in order to be taken seriously—which she did.

A woman’s appearance was no trivial matter; women were constantly devalued if they deviated from feminine norms. “We faced what I call the ‘talking dog syndrome,’” Clinton explained. “There was bewilderment that a woman could be in a courtroom trying a lawsuit.” She reminisced about an Arkansas trial at which a number of local hunters who were in town picking up supplies made a trip to the courtroom, filling the front row as if they were visiting a zoo. “I asked the bailiff who they were, and he said, ‘They heard there was a lady lawyer in town, and they couldn’t believe it and wanted to see it for themselves.’”

Today, we have four women on the US Supreme Court. Yet, Hariton noted, we are experiencing a backlash—for every step forward, there have been two steps back. “What should we be doing at this moment?” Hariton asked, in the face of the Supreme Court decisions rolling back women’s constitutional right to an abortion and affirmative action in higher education admissions, along with a general climate in which diversity, equity, and inclusion are demonized.

Clinton offered these practical actions everyone should do to achieve gender parity:

Speak up for other women in the workplace. When a man repeats what a woman already said in a meeting as if he were the originator of the idea, call him in. “I like to say, ‘John, I’m so glad you amplified Mary’s point of view.’ Be a good colleague on behalf of other women—and it’s not just for women to support other women. Men also should support women.”

Vote in local and state elections. “There’s a global pushback against women’s rights,” Clinton said. Just as authoritarian and repressive governments around the world are consolidating power at the expense of equity, so too are women’s health and IVF at risk in the US. “Do not be deluded. This is about controlling women’s lives and opportunities to choose their own path,” she said.

Be optimistic. Clinton quoted Madeline Albright, the Secretary of State who had fled the Nazis and communist Czechoslovakia, and never took democracy for granted. When asked if she was an optimist or pessimist, Albright responded, “I’m an optimist who worries a lot.”

Clinton encouraged us all to fight for our freedoms, but always reserve a dose of optimism for better days ahead.

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The post Here’s What Hillary Rodham Clinton Told the Catalyst Community About Gender Parity appeared first on Catalyst.