How Bolstering Equality Can Help Your Business
September 18th marks International Equal Pay day, and sadly while great strides have been made toward global equality, there is still a long way to go when it comes to equal pay. Equality means ensuring everyone in your setting has equal opportunities, regardless of their abilities, their background or their lifestyle; this includes metrics like race, gender, sexuality, religion and economic status, to name a few. Objectively, almost everyone can agree equality is an excellent thing to achieve in itself and a noble goal to work towards, yet the persisting wage gaps due to racial and gender inequality have grave costs, socially and economically.
According to the National Women’s Law Center, women lose around $17,000 annually due to the wage gap, and women of color lose even more. It is estimated that the gender wage gap in the United States contributes to a $1.6 trillion GPD loss yearly, but this statistic is not contained to just the private sector. Male entrepreneurs are known to raise higher levels of funding than their female counterparts, and investors tend to ask women to explain why they won’t fail, questions male entrepreneurs rarely hear. Another wage gap disparity exists between white workers and workers of color. Black workers are less likely to get hired, less likely to be employed in high-opportunity fields, less likely than their white counterparts to get promoted and experience a myriad of other issues that make advancement in the workplace difficult. The data consistently shows that women of color experience economic inequality partly because they have the most significant wage gaps compared to their male counterparts. Hispanic women experience the largest pay gap, earning just 57 cents for every $1 made by white, non-Hispanic men in 2020. While there have been attempts to correct the wage gap through public policy, more people are losing trust in governmental institutions and are instead turning towards businesses. Respondents to the Edelman Trust Survey believe companies are not doing enough to address societal problems, such as racial inequality and gender pay gaps. Across every single issue, by a considerable margin, people want more business engagement to solve these issues.
It has become evident that companies and businesses must adopt more diverse hiring practices to attract a broader range of talent if they wish to grow and be resilient. McKinsey’s Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters 2020 report showed that teams with greater diversity are more innovative and “...stronger at anticipating shifts in consumer needs and consumption patterns that make new products and services possible, potentially generating a competitive edge.” With substantial economic and social shifts occurring in the last few years, businesses with higher diversity have adapted more successfully to these turbulent times. They have even shown growth while other companies have declared bankruptcy.
Black employees are 41% less likely to view promotions as fair and 39% less likely to believe their company’s inclusivity programs are effective than white employees in the same company. A trust deficit reflects Black and female employees’ perceptions of their workplace as less fair, accepting, and authentic. Businesses today must provide and enable equality of opportunity through fairness and transparency to regain the trust of their employees and the public, including publishing hiring and promotion statistics publicly or establishing credible diversity and inclusion programs in the workplace.
Not all workplaces are the same; thus, the solution to such a nebulous problem as inequality will require a tailored approach to benefit you and your employees. At Probity Marketing, we believe in empowering everyone and that every company, regardless of size or industry, has a role to play in building a better world for future generations.
