Closing the Gender Pay Gap

CEO at Pipeline. They use AI to work with companies on gender biases, so they pull in all the data and she joins us on the phone from Paris. Kataka, good to be talking with you again. Tell us a little bit about your perspective on what's going on in the labor market, especially when it comes to women. Yeah, Carol, thank you, it's great to be here. You know what we saw in today's jobs report is that across all

cohorts of women, they've actually lost jobs. And since the beginning of the pandemic, we actually have one point eight million women missing from the labor force. And if we brought those one point eight million women back, we could actually close uh, the the the the gap of workers by almost a quarter. And so we could actually make our jobs market a little less hot Kataka. To be fair, I do think we're all trying to figure out why so many women and men are staying away from the

labor force. We talked about the available labor pool, right, this is so participation. You know, it's been down coming off of the pandemic. What are the reasons that women in particular are not coming back. Yeah, we have a couple of reasons. You know. One is you know, certainly Childcrison talked about and that is part of the solution, but it's not the only solution. There are two pieces. One is actually equity in the labor force, and so this goes beyond pay but actually ensuring that they have

equity of opportunity. Just to give you one example, women are fifty eight percent of college graduate percent of the labor force, and yet only eight percent of the fortune five d CEO. That's one. The other piece is skilling. So we actually leaked forward five years in terms of digital acceleration during the pandemic. So the jobs that existed at the beginning of that pandemic, yeah, don't necessarily exist right now. So we've got a mismatch between skills that

companies need and the actual available workers. And so if we skilled folks and ensured equitable skilling that is, equitable access to skilling, but also the ability to apply those skills, we could close that gap exclosure quickly. May Kodak, I guess you're My question would be, what would you recommend to policymakers given the data that you have and what you know, like, how do we fix this from a

policy perspective? Well, you know, certainly the pay transparency laws that have both gone into effect and are slated to go into effect in the first of the year step in the right direction. Okay, Well, let's let's break down what we're talking about here, because not everyone knows what those mean. You're talking about you know, recently a New York City about a month ago, jobs that were posted for certain companies had to include some sort of pay range.

Is that what you're referring to? Exactly? So on jobs postings, Colorado was the first state to do that in the New York City. Uh is the is the second area to do them that We've got three more states that will go live with that on January feet So that's exactly what I'm talking about. And so it's a step in the right direction in terms of putting guard rails up. But what we really need from polishy makers is true equal pay, and we don't have that in the United States.

That is actually ensuring that we're paying people equitably and that companies are proving that they're paying people equitably. And that's not only an issue of fairness, it's actually an issue of economic growth. Because if we closed the gender pay gap in the United States, we could close the gender we could we could add five twelve billion to the U. S economy. And every American taxpayer subsidizes the pay gaps because women in particular are more likely to

rely on social welfare programs. Kataka one thing I don't kind of get. And if if we're relying on policy makers, it may take a little while to get that parody right. I feel like we've been waiting for a long long time already, so you know that to me continues to be a slow process. But what about the private sector, And I'm thinking about corporations. We see E s G policies put being put out in a big way, d E I policies being put out in a big way.

So what's the onus actually on the private sector and companies to really move more aggressively on party. You work with companies, you look at their data points. What's the conversations that you're having as to why or what you're hearing is to why companies aren't being kind of better when it comes to making sure there's parody, especially on pay an opportunity for men and women. Yeah, it's a great question. The the the the issue isn't awareness in

the execution. So about percent of companies put equity in their top priorities. The only the issue has been only

of employees regularly see it shared and measured. So it's really a different between employer branding and the employee experience and and what pipeline the company that High Run is designed to do is to actually close that gamp, which is to get ahead of the decisions that companies were making, but to actually insure that they Yeah, no, I listen to what you say, Kada like this high idea, Like they have the awareness that's pretty high, But it's the execution.

And I know this is what you help companies do, but why aren't they executing if they see the data they understand just got about thirty seconds left here. Why aren't they doing it? I think in the past they haven't had the tools and the systems to actually do that, and now they do with companies like Pipeline, and we actually now just in the last month, UM expanded our offerings to companies that have two hundred or more employees as well as they can get a free equity baseline report.

So if there's not even a cost to it right now, alright, We're gonna leave it on that note. Kodaka. Always good to catch up with you, Kardaka Roy. She is chief executive officer founder of Pipeline. John Gus on the phone from Paris