Becker's Hospital Review

27 WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP 5 steps to address pay inequity in your hospital By Molly Gamble H ospital leaders have a choice: Act now to resolve pay inequity in your orga- nization, or wait for employees to cre- ate a shared spreadsheet that shows just how wide the pay gaps are under your watch. (You may only learn about the latter when it's pub- lished in the newspaper.) In a Nov. 3 article for Harvard Business Re- view, former Fortune Global 50 executive and strategic adviser Amii Barnard-Bahn said employees are more likely to take matters into their own hands due to the lack of pay transparency and growing cynicism regard- ing the fairness of employer compensation structures. More than 1,200 Google employ- ees compiled their salaries in an underground spreadsheet in 2017, which was then analyzed and published by e New York Times with the conclusion that the company paid men more than women at most job levels. Even with the pressure of "Google Doc" ac- tivism, as Ms. Barnard-Bahn called it, few companies are auditing their pay structures to identify and correct gaps. "In two recent self-reported surveys, com- panies said that they were taking pay equity concerns seriously. However, a third survey that looked at the disclosures of the 922 larg- est public U.S. companies found that only 22 percent reported performing a salary audit be- tween 2016 and 2020," she wrote in the article. Below are the basic steps of pay equity audits, which compare the pay of employees doing "like for like" jobs, or those that require equal skill, ef- fort and responsibility under similar conditions. ese audits account for reasonable differentials — such as work experience, credentials and per- formance — and investigate the causes of any pay differences that cannot be justified. 1. Hire auditors. Ms. Barnard-Bahn recom- mended organizations employing 500 people or more hire an outside firm to complete the pay equity audit. 2. Make sure auditors have accurate em- ployee data. Key pieces of data for each em- ployee: length of service, job classification and demographic information, including gender, race and age. It is especially import- ant for this audit to ensure data on job titles, job performance and the alignment of "like for like jobs" is clean and accurate. Inaccurate data is a poor excuse to delay an equity analy- sis, said Ms. Barnard-Bahn. 3. Complete an analysis that weeds out pay differentials based on legitimate factors. is leaves outliers based on gender, race and age. 4. Correct the pay gaps. "According to Korn Ferry's 2019 study, most companies find that up to 5 percent of employees are eligible for an increase, and the average salary adjust- ment typically ranges from 4 to 6 percent," wrote Ms. Barnard-Bahn. "e total remedia- tion cost to organizations adds up to 0.1 to 0.3 percent of their total salary budget." 5. Identify the causes of salary gaps. ese may include incorrect job classifications or a decentralized hiring authority that enables vast differences in starting salaries for the same jobs. "Once causal awareness is raised, HR (with assistance from legal) should monitor the hiring, promotion and compensation pro- cesses on an ongoing basis," according to Ms. Barnard-Bahn. "It's natural for compensation programs to need a regular tuneup — pay gaps start to reemerge as organizations ex- perience employee turnover, reorganizations, changes in job duties and subjective bias. It's a best practice to conduct spot checks annually, with a deep dive every few years." n Employers more likely to assign credit to men in group work: 5 study findings By Gabrielle Masson E mployers are more likely to give men credit for group work if they can't directly determine each individu- al's contribution, a pattern that may create or magnify gender segregation in some jobs, according to a study cit- ed by the Chicago Booth Review. For the study, accepted for publication in the Journal of Polit- ical Economy in October, four researchers examined papers by academic economists, a career with a large tenure gap between men and women and a growing amount of group work. Researchers analyzed the number of papers by econo- mists up for tenure between 1985 and 2014 at 23 PhD-grant- ing universities in the U.S. They focused on schools where research was the greatest factor in promotions. Five study findings: 1. All else being equal, men and women who solo authored most work had similar tenure rates. 2. Men were tenured similarly regardless of whether they co-authored or solo authored, while women were less like- ly to receive tenure the more they co-authored. 3. Each additional piece of co-authored research was tied to a 7.4 percent increase in tenure probability for men but only a 4.7 percent increase for women. The difference ex- plains 40 percent of the gender gap in tenure rates, ac- cording to the researchers. 4. The gender gap narrowed significantly for women when all the co-authors were also women, but that doesn't mean it's better for female economists to write papers alone or only with other women, said Heather Sarsons, PhD, study author and assistant professor at the University of Chica- go Booth School of Business. Women are largely outnum- bered in economics, and there are relatively few papers co-authored only by women. 5. All employers, not just those in economic occupations, need to determine if they hold different people to different standards and should develop better systems to establish who did what in group work, said Dr. Sarsons. n

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