The news this week that Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, gave $3 million more in salary to female employees after analyzing the company’s pay by gender may be a challenge to other tech firms to do the same.
Earlier this year, Benioff said the San Francisco cloud-computing company was conducting a review of salaries by gender to figure out if there was pay parity, as I wrote about then.
Leyla Seka, a Salesforce.com executive who was spearheading the firm’s look at pay equity with another colleague, told me, “I don’t know if we have a problem. But I decided, let’s hold ourselves to task and take a look.”
Turns out, Salesforce had a problem.
The company declined to offer more information except to point to the Fortune interview of Benioff this week. About 4,000 women or 23 percent of Salesforce’s 17,000 workforce are women, and the money would be an extra $750 per female employee.
Benioff, speaking at Fortune’s Global Forum this week, talked about the company’s values:
I think I got called out this year, and it was a difficult moment for me as a leader, for sure. We also believe very strongly in equality. We believe in equal rights for our employees, for them to have those rights, that is. Equal pay for women is critical. We’ve looked at every single one of our female employees’ salaries and we have adjusted it against all of our male employees’ salaries. We actually did $3 million in employee salary adjustments, so we can say we pay women the same as we pay men.
He went on to add that core values for Salesforce are “equal opportunity, equal access for women.”
“Equality is our core value,” he said. “We fight for that.”
Above: Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
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