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Coffee Talk

#34 - Two big questions about the Equal Pay Gap

Where does the Equal Pay Gap come from? Are there any patterns? Like with all good questions, it depends!

The last Coffee Talk of 2022 focuses on the big questions: Where does the equal pay gap come from? Are there any patterns? Margrét and Henrike discuss and give helpful advice for companies on their pay equity journeys.

The equal pay gap, Margrét says, is “not equally smeared over the whole organization. There are pockets with more bias than others.” The pockets can be job roles, grades, locations... There are also no patterns — no job or organization types with bigger gaps.

So how can these “pockets” best be fixed?

Margrét says managers often focus on the workers whose pay is lower than expected given their job roles. But that’s only part of the picture. The gap “is not from a lot of women falling far from where we’d expect them to be — it’s from a lack of well-paid women.”

For example, in many organizations, 50% of male workers are paid at or below what they would be expected to earn. The other 50% of male workers are paid more than expected. But for female workers, about 65% are paid at or below expected and only about 35% are paid more than expected.

This means that yes, the organization will need to give raises to underpaid workers. But it will also need to address the lack of well-paid women. Progress can be made by coming at the problem from both sides.

Friday Coffee Talk from Planet Fair is a YouTube series co-hosted by PayAnalytics founder Margrét Bjarnadóttir and her friend Henrike Von Platen, founder and CEO of the FPI Fair Pay Innovation Lab in Berlin.

#48 - Are U.S. Pay Transparency Laws Working?

In our first Coffee Talk after a short summer pause, Dr. David Ryberg Anderson joins Margrét to discuss his recent research into the efficiency of pay transparency laws in the United States. Are employers complying in these States by posting salary ranges with job advertisements? Listen to the Coffee Talk to get the how, why, when, and what.

#47 -  Proactively Monitoring Bias in HR Tools

In this week's coffee talk, Henrike and Margrét followup on questions raised in Episode 46 about the applications of AI in HR. AI can make us faster and more efficient in some ways—speeding manual, tedious tasks, for example—but, if we aren't careful, biases can slip in and catch us off guard. Watch this coffee talk to learn about proactively monitoring AI tools in HR.

View all Coffee Talk episodes