
Salesforce Finds Closing Pay Gaps Is a Continuous Process

Salesforce has been on a quest to achieve gender pay equity across its entire workforce since 2015, when CEO Marc Benioff first announced that the company had spent $3 million assessing and closing pay gaps between its male and female employees, affecting 6 percent of its 17,000 employees, or about 1,000 people. However, as Benioff told CBS’s Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes” last weekend, he and his leadership team at Salesforce soon discovered that closing the pay gap once wasn’t enough:
Marc Benioff: We did it the first time. We were so happy with ourselves. It was great. Then all of a sudden we kind of did our audit again and the same thing happened again. We’re, like, “How can this be?” But it turned out we had bought about two dozen companies. And guess what? When you buy a company, you just don’t buy its technology, you don’t buy its culture, you also buy its pay practices.
Lesley Stahl: So they would come in and the men were paid much more and then that got eaten up into your statistics, into your audit. So you had to redo the whole thing all over again, costing as much as the first time.
Marc Benioff: It cost us as much as the first time. In total, it’s now cost us $6 million.
Lesley Stahl: Are you gonna have to do this audit every year—
Marc Benioff: More than every year. We’re gonna have to do this continuously. This is a constant cadence. You’re gonna have to constantly monitor and keep track of that, but that’s easy today. We run our company the same way every company is run with computers and technology and software. … [T]here’s never been an easier time to make this change.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Salesforce Chief People Officer Cindy Robbins provided more detail about this year’s pay equity adjustment and how the company plans to manage the process going forward, now that they have realized the importance of addressing pay gaps continuously: