Dive Brief:
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Online dating company Match Group, the owner and operator of sites including OkCupid and Tinder, has achieved 100% pay equity as confirmed by an audit, Business Insider reports.
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The company hired an external firm, Syndio, to conduct a pay analysis of its workforce over a five-month period, the report said. Match Group currently employs some 1,300 workers, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data.
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"One of my guiding principles as a leader has always been rewarding employees based on their impact on the organization, whether they ask for it or not," Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg previously said in a statement, adding that the company still had more work to do on its cultural initiatives; "We need to continue to diversify our employee base, invest in career advancement and be vigilant about this topic."
Dive Insight:
The industry momentum around pay equity is projected to continue into the new year, with multiple organizations and government leaders announcing initiatives aimed at closing pay gaps.
Match Group is not the first company to take the route of a pay audit. Last December, tech firm Adobe announced it had achieved 100% pay equity within its U.S. workforce after reviewing pay practices and making adjustments. Salesforce paid a total of $6 million to reduce its pay gaps following an internal push from CEO Marc Benioff.
Legislators across the country have attempted to correct the problem through legislation prohibiting employers from asking applicants about their salary history. The laws aim to prevent previous pay disparities from perpetuating future ones, but the state-by-state nature of the issue has left employers with a patchwork of laws that they say makes compliance difficult.
Pay disparities may be as much a societal problem as they are an HR problem. Previous research shows that while women are more likely to feel they are underpaid than men, 41% never ask for a raise, the latter statistic being attributed to a Paysa study. The same Paysa study showed women were more likely than men to be denied a pay raise after asking for one. Female workers may feel discouraged from asking for pay raises as a result, and at least one commissioner at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has advised employers to think of creative approaches for solving the problem. But the Salesforce approach of dropping huge dollar amounts may not work for every workforce.
"So often and in so many businesses, women don't make compensation demands," Ginsberg said. "And until we raise our daughters to make those demands, we, as leaders, need to be proactive and methodical about how we think about compensation."
Also influencing the debate is the fact that wages have remained stagnant in spite of strong economic growth since the Great Recession. HR will need to balance concerns from employees about wages with total compensation strategy including benefits, which add to overall expense despite being statistically poorly understood by employees.
