This year, more companies are disclosing pay gaps based on race and gender.
up to date scorecard A study by Proxy Impact and Arjuna Capital found that 13 of the 68 largest U.S. companies report the most internal data on how employee salaries vary by race and gender. Received an “A” rating. This is up from last year’s ranking, when only seven companies received the highest rating.
Michael Passoff, CEO of Proxy Impact, a shareholder engagement and proxy voting services company in Berkeley, Calif., said the improvement is a measure of whether minorities and women are paid equally. He said it was due to more companies providing transparency about the median price. High-paying jobs as a man. This is a measure used by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The financial sector has the highest wage gap of all industries covered in the report citing data from PayScale. A software compensation company found the industry’s “unadjusted” gender pay gap to be 33%. This metric compares salaries across all roles, not within specific job functions. Taking into account the latter factor, the pay gap would be 2% for her.
Another PayScale survey cited in the Scorecard report found that 58% of financial and insurance companies plan to conduct a racial or gender pay equity analysis by the end of the year.
The scorecard comes at a time when some investors are increasingly looking to invest in stocks and funds that align with their values and morals. It also includes the issue of pay equity at a time of growing opposition from conservative states to investments in environmental, social and governance.
The 6th Annual Scorecard ranked companies asked by shareholders to improve their pay equity disclosures across a range of areas. Categories include the distribution of jobs by race and gender. Which groups have high-paying jobs. Disparities between minorities and non-minorities, and between men and women in similar roles. The ranking also measures the extent to which companies publish data about their global operations and disclose bonuses and equity incentives.
“Racial and gender pay disparities are structural and persistent, but the scorecard can help achieve pay parity,” said Natasha Lam, managing partner at Arjuna Capital, an investment management firm in Durham, North Carolina. We support companies that are truly doing their jobs with integrity,” said the statement.
In Q4 2022, the median income of black workers was only 81% of what white workers earned. according to to the labor office. The agency also reports that a full-time woman’s earnings were only 83% of what her peers earned last year, a $10,452 annual difference.
Passoff said the scorecard could be a useful tool for investors trying to align their investments with their own value, and could have real financial impact on companies. “People invest for financial performance, but they also invest for value,” he said. “It can also impact corporate recruitment and retention of women and minorities.”
A pay equity list can help, says Michael Reynolds, owner of Elevation Financial, a Westfield, Indiana, financial planning firm focused on ESG and socially responsible investing. “I primarily use mutual funds and his ETFs, but when evaluating individual stocks, scorecards, and ESG, ratings are part of the screening process I go through, in addition to financial analysis. is,” he said.
There is increasing pressure on companies to provide clarity on ESG-related issues. According to Proxy Impact, in 2023, shareholders will file 16 resolutions on gender and race median compensation reports. Last year there were only nine. But Passoff said the largest asset managers generally don’t support race- and gender-based pay reporting in shareholder resolutions.
“We may take further action towards equalization of wages, but BlackRock, Vanguard and Fidelity have not sent signals to these companies, so it is okay not to provide this information,” Paoff said. said. “All of these companies say they support equal pay, but they don’t vote as such.”
Of the 68 companies surveyed in the scorecard, 25 received an ‘F’ for failing to disclose data on gender and pay equity despite telling investors they would. . These companies include Google’s parent company Alphabet, Goldman Sachs and Walmart.
Scroll down the slideshow to see the highest and lowest rated companies on the Proxy Impact and Arjuna Capital scorecards.
All pay gap scores are on a scale of 0 to 1, with 1 being the highest score. A 0.5 race and gender pay gap score such as BlackRock shows a commitment to publish data next year. A company’s total score is the average of all data points and is expressed as a percentage. Racial pay gap-adjusted scores and gender pay gap-adjusted scores take into account factors such as job, education, and experience.
financial plan We reached out to all 12 companies listed as the worst for comment. Only one person responded, as shown below.