'Damn Right You Have to Do It More Than Once a Year'
With a New Set of Standards, Syndio Points Toward a Pay-Gap-Free Future
B
y now you know the statistics like the back of your hand. According to Pew Research Center, women make 85 percent of what men make, black people make 75 percent of what white people make, and Hispanic people make about 70 percent of what white people make.
It's not from lack of trying, according to Maria Colacurcio, CEO of Syndio, a software company that produces tools designed to help organizations understand and address the underlying behaviors and policies that contribute to their pay gaps.
"We take the approach of assuming Racial and gender pay gaps are best intent, and we've seen so many widely acknowledged and roundly of our clients really struggling with condemned, but little progress has Matthew Kosinski how to address pay inequality," Cobeen made in closing them over the lacurcio says. "We've never come past few years. For example, a March 2019 analy- across a client company that was really rubbing sis from Pew notes the gender pay gap "has nar- their hands together and saying, 'How can I game rowed since 1980, but it has remained relatively the system?' The fact is there is not a lot of edustable over the past 15 years or so." cation out there right now about the right way to do a pay analysis." According to Colacurcio, most companies rely on an outdated, inapt, and prohibitively expensive approach to addressing their pay gaps. "The way most companies do it today — the only option they're often given — is that they go to their outside counsel, who contracts an economist, who goes through a lengthy and expensive process to produce a huge, 150-page crosstab report that gets dropped on the company's desk," Colacurcio explains. This inefficient and costly process is not in a company's best financial or operational interests. It also fundamentally misunderstands the nature of pay gap analysis: It's not a onetime thing, but an ongoing process that must be repeated regularly to ensure the company is maintaining pay equity as it evolves. "We want people to know there is a right way and a wrong way to do pay equity analysis," Colacurcio says. That's why Syndio worked with the National Women's Law Center (NWLC), a nonprofit dedicated to gender justice, to draft a set of pay equity standards any company can follow.
