Tech companies with more women in leadership enjoy some unexpected perks. In addition to improving salary equity among men and women, they also have higher rates of employee satisfaction and lower employee turnover, according to a new report from Redfin and PayScale.
The two Seattle-based companies worked together to study how a higher percentage of women executives impacts a company. They discovered that women at companies with high rates of female executives women earn 91 cents for every dollar men earn. At companies with low rates of female leaders, they earn 77 cents, based on the median incomes of male and female employees at each company.
Redfin and PayScale also compared the salaries of men and women at similar job levels with comparable years of experience. By that criteria, companies with high rates of female executives paid two cents more for every dollar than men in similar roles earned. For example, female employees at those companies make $98,000 when their male counterparts make $100,000.
The fact that the pay gap is significantly higher when looking at the median salary of employees, versus adjusting for similar roles, suggests that companies with more women executives also promote their female employees to higher-paying roles more regularly.
Redfin selected 31 of the largest U.S. tech companies to include in the study. It set the criteria by considering companies with executive teams that were 25 percent or more women to have a “high rate” and fewer than 20 percent, a “low rate.” Those with executive teams of 21 to 24 percent women percent not included.
PayScale then studied 6,562 salary profiles of people who reported working for those companies between June 2015 and 2017.
“Increased transparency is one way we can work together to close the pay gap in our industry,” Redfin CTO Bridget Frey said in the report. “But our analysis shows that getting more women into executive positions could help, too.”
Male and female employees at companies with more female leaders also reported higher rates of satisfaction with their employer, according to the study. Those companies also saw less employee turnover.
Redfin, which made its IPO last week, has been a vocal advocate of gender equity in the workplace. Earlier this month, the company launched a campaign to fight sexism in the technology industry, asking investors to encourage startups in their portfolios to recruit an “independent, diverse board member” within two years of funding.
