Changing Systemic Bias: On Equality For Women In The Workforce With Katie Donovan

Women in the corporate world don’t hold themselves back, but instead they are pushed back. Today, we have a bonus episode with Katie Donovan, who shares her take and tips on striking a negotiation conversation with corporate as a woman! Kate is a leading pay-equity expert and founder of the consultancy, Equal Pay Negotiations. She provides tangible insights that nobody even talks about, but everybody should be aware of—from systemic bias to gender pay gap! Don’t wait till you hate your job to start negotiating the terms and conditions you deserve. Tune in now!

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Changing Systemic Bias: On Equality For Women In The Workforce With Katie Donovan

How To Negotiate In The Corporate World Podcast Series – Bonus Episode

This episode is a bonus episode for the How to Negotiate in the Corporate World Series. I wasn’t sure if I could secure my guest on time, and I did, so I’m super excited. Let me tell you about my guest. Katie Donovan is a leading pay equity expert and Founder of the consultancy, Equal Pay Negotiations, which advises employers, advocates, individuals, and other DEIJ providers. On Equal Pay Day 2012, Katie started the push for salary history bans and for the inclusion of pay information in job ads. Both measures are now well established in growing laws and implementation by employers.   Additionally, Katie is a sought-after commentator on Pay Equity and women in business by media, including BBC, NPR, Hollywood Reporter, Boston Business Journal, The Washington Post, Forbes, and more. My conversation with Katie is a conversation that you definitely do not want to miss. She literally tells you what you need to say if a potential employer asks you what compensation you’re looking for. We also talk a lot about women not holding themselves back, but instead, they’re being pushed back. I always use the term women hold themselves back so we’re going to clarify what she’s referring to in that situation. We’re also going to talk about how managers can change systemic bias in the corporate world. Again, Katie has already been instrumental in the work that she has done because now employers are posting the pay range on job descriptions, so that’s one big thing that she was instrumental in doing.   The second thing is employers no longer can ask you for your former salary that you made at prior employment. We’re going to talk about why that is, and that is critical. Both of those things are critical to closing that pay gap. I am excited to bring this episode to you because Katie is a wealth of knowledge, and she is going to share everything she knows with us. Stay tuned for Katie Donovan.

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Really quick before we get into this episode, I want to remind you that if you go on my website, NoWomanLeftBehind.com, there are some awesome resources here. First of all, on the homepage, in the top right-hand corner, there is a Kickstart Your Career radio button, and this is a corporate kickstart course. It’s about 45 minutes, and if you don’t know where to start in your career, that’s a great course for you to start with. Next, there is a radio button that says, “I’m Ready For My Corner Office.”   If you are at the point where you want to talk to somebody and want to have a consultation with me, you can click on this, and it’ll take you to my calendar, and you will be able to answer a short questionnaire. You and I can talk for about 30 minutes about where you are versus where you want to be in your career. If you continue to scroll down on that same page, there is a section that says, “Let’s find out where you are in your career.” There’s another radio button that says, “Take The Quiz.” This is the corporate kickstart quiz, so it’ll take you about ten minutes to take that quiz, but it’ll give you some great information.   If you scroll all the way down on that main page, you will see some additional freebies that you can download, which are the Believe in Yourself, the three steps for women in corporate to stop being left behind. If you click on that Learn More button, you can download that one. There’s also the Conversation Starters Checklist. You can click on that Learn More button to get to download that one. Finally, the Productivity Strategies Workbook that you can figure out how to be more productive, and you can download that one by going to the Learn More. These are some awesome resources that I wanted to make you aware of, and now we are going on to our episode.

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Katie, thank you so much for being here on the show. You say that women in the corporate world don’t hold themselves back, but instead, they are pushed back. Can you tell me what you mean by that?   Thank you for having me, Rose. I appreciate the chance to have this conversation. What I’m talking about is the systemic biases throughout almost every industry. There’s no industry. There’s no country. There’s no place where there is equality for women in the work world, whether that’s being paid equally or being represented appropriately based on their representation in the entire workforce in leadership. We’re 1) Not getting paid correctly. 2) We’re not getting promoted at the rate that we should be. We are not getting funded by venture capitalism. We only get 2.4% of all the venture capitalism, which is absolutely mind-boggling. There are many things, and we can’t say that all of this is Rosie’s problem. Rosie has to go fix herself. It is understanding what may seem like a basic norm. “I need to figure a way around it because I’m not meeting the norms of the day to reframe them.” When they created these norms, and we’re thinking of White men because they have de facto become the standard in the work world because women weren’t part of it, marginalized people were put into positions where they wouldn’t be able to be the CEO to start their own firm, and they had to create other ways to do it. Those are the things I’m talking about and that’s where I focus on, which is process and operations. How do we make small changes like not asking about salary history and putting pay in job ads, that will have a huge impact and don’t put the emphasis on the victim fixing the problem? That’s very clear to me because I talk about, first of all, knowing your worth and women holding themselves back. Although sometimes that does happen, I’d like how you made the distinction that we’re already starting with a losing battle. It is basically what you’re saying, which makes a lot of sense to me. I know you have been working for about twelve years in the pay gap world, and you have been instrumental in writing legislation.   As often as I can, I try to tell people, “There are these Pay Transparency Laws.” Last time I checked there were seventeen states that have these Pay Transparency Laws. I’m glad that you’re here because I know you were instrumental in starting to write some of that legislation. Tell me a little bit about why you get into this work and how did you start writing legislation on the pay gap.   I got into this work because I had a dinner one too many with a friend discovering she was underpaid. By happenstance, she discovered she was paid $30,000 less than a colleague that she helped train. You have those moments and with my background of having been in sales and marketing and in the staffing industry. I worked for an applicant tracking company, in a staffing agency and as a Director of a Trade Association, so I very much knew both sides of hiring the employer’s perspective, the employee’s perspective or candidates. I knew way too much detail about the actual hiring process and every line on every application because that was part of when I was in the applicant tracking company. I’m working with the employers, and we had everything from mom-and-pop to international. Consistently, the second thing after your name is, what are you looking to earn? I knew that. It was embedded in me in my blood. I didn’t have to think about it. I knew these things and said, “I’ll start doing some consulting on the side, maybe teach a couple of community classes at the little local gym kind of thing.” That’s how I started. Very quickly, adding that to my LinkedIn, I got reached out by a director of a documentary. It never got released, but in the question-and-answer interview, she asked me, “If you could write legislature or policy, what would it be?” I knew because I knew those job applications so darn well that it had to be getting rid of the question, “What are you looking to earn?” That has nothing to do with it. It’s what’s the value of the job. I may need $1,000 to pay the rent and have food and whatnot, but if the job should pay $3,000, that’s what I should get paid. That killed me. I knew that was part of it. To get rid of that, also the salary history question, it would be like, “Rosie, what’s your job? What are you making now? What were you making at your last job?” They knew you were used to getting jumped back. “Rosie is comfortable getting a 5% increase. That’s what we’ll offer her. Rosie needs a 10% increase. That’s what we’ll offer her.” Again, regardless of the job, you should pay $3,000. Rosie will be happy with $1,500 because that is what we see based on her history. I knew those answers. I answered it, and then I went and did research. I wasn’t thinking about policy at all when doing my little workshops and discovered no one was talking about either of those things. They weren’t part of the conversation. The word pay transparency was about talking, “I could tell you my pay, and you could tell me your pay, and neither one of us would get fired.” I myself had signed a few of those pay confidentiality agreements in my lifetime. The fact that you can get fired is the definition of, “I’m getting underpaid.” The sheer fact that they had you sign that, you should know there’s a problem. Again, focusing on the victim. No, let’s focus on the perpetrator. It’s not the victim’s problem to fix. The policy that you started to write, what state was that for by the way?   My home state is Massachusetts. I started the process on Equal Pay Day 2012 by writing a Change.org petition. Let’s throw this out there. It had those two instances, aspects, and then it had two other aspects. No credit background check and I forget even what the other is. It’s something that’s out there now already included. It’s already covered. I started there and got a little coverage. I actually got some press coverage where it’s like, “You’re crazy. It’s never going to happen. There’s no way job to ever advertisements will ever have pay in them. I don’t know who this lady is.” It’s like, “Now we’re on a fight.” In doing policy work, you have to create coalitions. I knew that I. I come from a family with politicians, so I had the ability to find out. From growing up at the kitchen table, but also from asking people, I was able to know what I needed to do. The first couple of years, I would be talking about this, writing about it, doing Huffington Post things, and whatnot, but it was about creating a coalition and how that starts, as me, first joining their effort. Getting to know the people working on women’s equality at work and hooked up with Mass NOW and AAUWA 2020 Women on Boards, and a bunch of different groups. It was through Mass NOW, which is the Massachusetts chapter of a national organization for women, that I was volunteering in their legislative workforce and was able to get them to buy in that they would be the nonprofit that supports this bill because there’s no politician who will ever sign or file a bill based on Katie says. You have to have an organization and that organization has to have a ton of other organizations. We were able to get sponsors for the bill, both in the House and the Senate. We then merged with another bill that was being filed that same year. This was for the 2015 legislature work being done in 2014. We partnered with the Women’s Law Association. We merged their thoughts and our thoughts and created a bill. Our four sponsors all file the bill. We had amazing support from the very beginning. There had been a lot of history in Massachusetts working towards some change in our state Equal Pay Act. This is built on that smaller momentum. We had a foundation, but it wasn’t very big, and we made it much bigger. We were successful in getting it passed in the first legislative session, which is unique. Credit to all the groups coming together and the person who was leading the group, Jill Ashton. She’s amazing at bringing coalitions together and making headway. In the bill that passed into law, the salary history ban stayed. The pay in job advertisements died a terrible death. Part of this process had us also talking to all these other states and everyone talked to each other working on policy work. We then had a huge coverage of it from the front page of the New York Times. It’s a lot of stuff. People were coming to us, “What are you doing? How do we do the same?” Our advice was, “What’s on the news is the salary history ban.” You need to do both. Salary history ban and no pay, and the pay in job ads. We knew one of them would eventually be successful on the pay part. We have over 50 or it must be much higher now. I haven’t counted in a while, but it’s over 50 actual laws or executive orders banning questions about your previous pay. Now we have California and Washington State. The newly added to requiring pay in job advertisements is New York State right before the end of 2022. It was December 29th, signed into law, and it will go into effect in September that they have to have pay in job advertisements. New York City already had it go into effect. Between New York City, California, and Washington, we have the big tech, finances, companies, and financial of New York City and many different groups. It’s probably about 20% of employers that are already covered that are requiring it. Once they have to do something like that, it’s easier to do it across the board. We’re seeing employers doing it on their own as well, regardless of if it’s required. The other part is with remote work, employers are doing it because they want to make sure they are encouraging other people from those states to come as well. You said a lot there. First of all, the very first thing I want to say is, thank you, Katie, for taking this endeavor because if you had not done it and thought about writing policy, we probably wouldn’t have any of this stuff. I myself have already seen jobs posted in New York specifically that has the pay range right on the job posting. Your work and all of the people’s work that was involved is already paying off because it makes such a huge difference to have that pay range because it goes back to this is what the job is paying not the one person that, as you said, was only earning so-and-so.   This is absolutely incredible because it will help not just women but any individual minority that is not getting paid commensurate to the job description. My hope and your hope obviously is that, at some point in history, we, women and minorities, will be equal to males and this is one major step in the right direction. I know Iceland is a good country with its pay gap and then gender gap in general. They do a good job at trying to empower women and try to treat them as best as possible but it’s still only 91%.   It’s definitely better. It’s been improving. There are different countries trying different things. Some require reporting, some give penalties. At the end of the day, if they can get away with it, and it’s cheaper to not do it, then it’s not going to get done. We have to make it worth doing.

    From my perspective, has there been any pushback from employers to do this pay transparency in their job postings for new hires?   Part of me wants to say, “Define pushback.” There’s pushback in the sense that it wasn’t like, “Can you include your pay in job advertisements?” “Sure. No problem. We forgot.” There was pushback from day one and there are a million reasons that they will quote. One of the classic ones I remember sitting in many different legislators’ offices. I’m interviewing Rosie for the director level. “She’s not quite right, but I want to give her a chance and instead of bringing her in as director, I’ll bring her in as assistant director. Do I have to pay her that amount?” The part of me that laughs internally is, “You described another absolute prejudice that goes against women. We may be the best candidate out of the 200 people who applied, but you’re going to find a reason to give us a lower title and lower pay.” I’ve had many clients in my work do that. I know way too many stories of that, and they don’t even think of it. That’s one of them. They’re trying to figure out if we put the pay, we lose the chance to come in lower if we have the opportunity. They don’t always talk about that. I want to put in a little caveat here. This is because you’re used to it. I’m not thinking anyone’s a bad actor in the sense of, “I am an HR recruiter, and I’m about to kill Rosie.” That’s not what’s going on through your head or the VP or the CEO, but I know staffing is the most expensive cost for most employers. For most employers, every penny saved helps immensely, but whatever you're doing to get an advantage has to have the same impact for everyone.—Katie Donovan Click To Tweet Every penny saved helps immensely, but whatever you’re doing to get an advantage has to have the same impact for everyone and that’s not the case. If you go and look at how many people got hired at a lower title or lower pay, you’re going to see it’s usually not the White men. That’s the issue. That’s the pushback. They’re so used to doing things a certain way they can’t understand it. We got the pushback for the salary history ban, “How dare you? How will we figure out what to pay them?” Long before a job is a job, you have to get it approved and budgeted. You know what you’re paying, you just don’t know who you’re paying it to. They’re so used to adding 10%, now they’re past that, or at least about 50% of the countries past that. It’s getting them used to new things. The pushback is our systems aren’t created that way. To your point, this is a new paradigm that we’re trying to break out of because, as you said, the corporate world or business, in general, is so used to, pardon my expression, but s******g on women and minorities. They’re trying to get a person that does a good job at a bargain price and that’s not fair to us human beings that are as capable as the White males that do that job. Neither Katie nor I hate White males. We’re not man-haters or anything like that, but we are saying that we, women and minorities, should be treated in the exact same way. That’s what we’re saying.   I want to say yes, and most people who are treating people differently don’t realize it. That’s why I stuttered there a little in the sense that most people won’t think of themselves as being biased or doing anything wrong to you or me or whatever. You had the chance to fix it and didn’t come up with the right argument. For example, there’s tons of research showing that women are attempting to negotiate raises as frequently as men but men get the approvals and women don’t. It’s a very different metric. What’s going on in those rooms? You can’t tell me every single woman is an idiot about negotiating. That’s where we need to create operations for even the littlest thing. What’s the answer when someone comes in and asks for a raise? It should be, why? Make sure whatever your checklist is if the answer first is going to be no because that’s going to be your way of engaging, great. It needs to be no for everyone. For the ones who come back with another response, you can move forward or if it’s yes, then it’s a 1%. It needs to be 1% across the board. You need to have operations. That’s not my mood that day or how someone feels because for whatever reason, the knee-jerk reaction is we women are being jerks. What I’m hearing you say is that we need to approach the systemic biases that have always been there that people may not even know that they’re doing it because it’s the way it’s always been. What you are trying to do is break through all of those biases, and at the very least, expose them and educate people to become aware of those biases.   They may or may not know, but once they know, then there’s no excuse. Awareness is one of the biggest things that you’re trying to do. Again, that’s fantastic. Interestingly enough, the states that I had researched have the Pay Transparency Laws, and some of them do list the pay range right on the job description.   Other states won’t list it but if you request it, they will give it to you. It depends on the state if they’re going to print it or not. If you are interested in having this conversation with your employer, go look at the Pay Transparency Laws to see what your state is doing, and then you’re educated on whether you can request the information or not.   You don’t need a law to request the information. Let’s start there. The states or even the counties, some of them were local, regional things started with, “If you are asked, you have to respond.” That was California and that was the first kink, chink in the whole moving forward. Those will be gone given another few years and the ones who started with that got what they could. They will get, since we now have hit a tipping point, to your pay in the job ad. I would ask, even before any of these laws probably 80% answer anyway. If they ask you, “Rosie, what are you looking to earn?” Say, “I’m assuming you have it budgeted. What are you budgeted for?” That’s the conversation. I’m going to ask you to say that again because that’s important.   You’re in an interview and it’s like, “Rosie, I don’t waste your time. You don’t waste mine. How much are you looking to earn?” Instead of saying, “I don’t know, whatever.” Say, “I’m assuming you’ve budgeted this before you even opened up the job. Can you tell me what it’s been budgeted for?” It does two things. One, if you said the exact same number that they are about to say, you, saying it, became the ceiling. They’re going to give you an offer that’s lower than that. If they say it, it becomes the floor. Now you know that’s the bare minimum they’re willing to say, and they have at least one penny more or a million more. We don’t know where, now the game is to figure out what is more, but that’s the floor. Know that. Also, there’s research that if you bring up pay like there’s no information on any job ad, and you can’t figure out, for your dear life, do not be the one that brings up how much this pay because you instantly get viewed as a worse candidate. Hold your breath until the time is when you have power because you won’t have power anyway until you get the job offer. Don’t try to negotiate it until you have a reason to.