Silicon Valley's gender problem extends beyond pay gap

Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, earned infamy for his declaration that women should not bother to ask for raises. Instead, he suggested in October 2014, they should have faith that the system will reward them appropriately. Refraining from asking for a raise, he added, is actually “good karma”.

When his remarks were greeted with howls of outrage, Nadella backpedalled at the speed of light. Less than a year later, Microsoft was sued by a former employee, Katie Moussouris, now chief policy officer at HackerOne, alleging gender bias.

Moussouris claimed that she was only one of a number of women at Microsoft who earned less than their male counterparts. Moussouris also alleged that men received preferential treatment in promotions and systematically received more favorable job reviews.

There is no way to know whether Moussouris’s claims are accurate, because Microsoft does not disclose any data about the extent to which men and women are paid differently for doing similar jobs. That may soon change, if Arjuna Capital succeeds in placing a resolution before Microsoft’s shareholders and convincing enough of them to vote in favor of it, thus requiring the company to publicly disclose that information for the first time and helping women make up their minds whether it’s really enough to trust to karma or not.

Arjuna, the activist arm of Baldwin Brothers, an investment advisory firm, is targeting seven high-profile technology firms, in search of precisely this information. Shareholders of eBay, Expedia, Facebook and Google will vote on proposals that would result in the creation of reports detailing the percentage pay gap between male and female employees, spelling out both corporate policies, in an attempt to address how the companies would set about closing or narrowing that gap, and specific targets.

Arjuna is still discussing getting the proposal on to the agenda of Adobe’s annual meeting, and the draft resolution has just been presented to Microsoft, which meets in December.

A seventh company – Amazon – is fighting back. Its lawyers argue that the request to report on plans to reduce the gender pay gap is “impermissibly vague and misleading” since – believe it or not – there are too many possible definitions of “gender pay gap” available.

Amazon, it seems, is struggling with the definition of gender pay gap, and can’t figure out how it would do this properly. Yes, really. It’s asking the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for permission to leave the shareholder proposal off its ballot.

Anyone who has looked in even a cursory fashion at the economics of the technology universe shouldn’t be surprised by the existence of a gender pay gap. Joint Venture Silicon Valley reported last year that men in Silicon Valley reported earning as much as 61% more than their female counterparts.

Of course, some of that happens because women don’t have the same skills and don’t hold the same kinds of high-paid positions. But as top technology CEOs like Marc Benioff of Salesforce and Brian Krzanich of Intel have discovered, sometimes to their astonishment, it’s sometimes due to internal pay policies.

Benioff launched what he called the “women’s surge” after recognizing that all his senior staff members were men. But when two of his senior women came to him to point out that many women probably were being paid less than their male counterparts, in the wake of a review of all 16,000 salaries company-wide he was stunned to realize they were right. That’s now being corrected, one salary at a time.

Intel, which Arjuna hails for achieving 100% equity on pay, set up a $300m fund at the beginning of last year. Those monies were earmarked to improve the diversity of the company’s workforce and make it a more hospitable work environment, as well as to finance scholarships.

Krzanich noted that a key motivation for his backing of the company’s initiatives was that he has two daughters of his own.

“I want them to have a world that’s got equal opportunity for them,” he told reporters at the time, rather than one that is dominated by the “bro” culture of gamers.

The fact Arjuna has already logged Apple in the win column is particularly notable: it confirmed that it has achieved 99.6% equal pay. That is intriguing given that only last month shareholders soundly defeated a shareholder proposal that would have required the company to increase the diversity of both its board of directors and its senior management team more aggressively.

Apple’s executive team currently is almost exclusively made up of white men; its eight-person board includes two women (one of whom, Andrea Jung, is Asian), and an African American man.

With a new pay equity law on the books in California, there is at least the basis for a lot more public discussion about what women in Silicon Valley are paid, in both absolute and relative terms. Women able to document that they are paid less will be able to seek redress.

But even if a wizard or fairy godmother were to appear and level the playing field,, it would not solve all the issues women face in the world of technology. Demographic data doesn’t tell the full story, and even being well compensated doesn’t mean you can put up with everything else that gets flung your way.

As Ellen Pao’s trials (literal and rhetorical) last year revealed, women who try to be in the vanguard can end up in a toxic work environment. Female entrepreneurs report being hit on for sex by potential backers; some female employees recount coping with casual sexism in a male-dominated workplace. More money and “leaning in” may not be enough.

Admittedly, we’ve got a long, long way to go before we can even talk about getting past the quantitative problem, when some companies don’t even acknowledge that there might be a problem.

But it’s all part of the same package. To the extent that women are under-represented in Silicon Valley technology firms, and that they are underpaid, it’s probably linked to the fact that some women who might be qualified to do those jobs feel unwelcome within what is still a “brogrammer” culture in many parts of the technology world, simply because of their gender.

Not convinced? Consider the now infamous 2013 Techcrunch Disrupt hackathon in San Francisco, when entrepreneurs presented ideas that included an app, Titstare, which, as its name suggests, lets you stare at tits, as well as CircleShake, a game app involving simulating masturbation.

So by all means, applaud and support Arjuna’s efforts. But until women are not just present and well paid but also welcomed as genuine peers at every level throughout Silicon Valley and the technology world, and are able to be productive and serve as mentors to younger women and men alike, we’ll just be left staring at data.