Categories: Jobs

Citi takes steps to right the gender and race pay gap

Theo Thimou | January 16th, 2018

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Is one of your 2018 resolutions to get a better paying job? Then you might want to consider working for one company in particular!

Memo addresses wage inequality

Citi is out with a new memo that details its effort to achieve pay parity between men vs. women and minority employees vs. non-minority employees.

After an internal review, the banking behemoth found that women earn 99% on average of what men earn and minorities earn 99% on average of what non-minorities are paid at the company.

The review — which examined Citi’s compensation practices in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany — took into account job function, level and geography.

“As part of this year’s compensation cycle, we are making appropriate increases to help close the gaps for both women and US minorities. We will also adjust compensation for other individuals where the analysis determined increases were warranted.”

– Citi memo

Equal pay for equal work is a longstanding issue

The issue of gender-based pay gaps has been one that’s gained traction in recent days after the revelation that actress Michelle Williams was paid less than 1% of what her male co-star, Mark Wahlberg, was paid to re-shoot scenes for “All the Money in the World.”

A couple of years ago, the issue was brought into social media discourse in the world of money expert Clark Howard when Facebook readers responded to our post about a bar charging women 77% of their tabs to highlight wage inequality.

(Editor’s note: According to the latest numbers available, the Labor Department reports the national average is 82 cents — not 77 cents.)

Meanwhile, Citi is likely among only a handful of companies who pay women and minorities the same for jobs as everyone else.

Yet if you really want to get paid what you’re worth — regardless of gender or race — corporate America isn’t generally where you want to be. That’s because the conventional wisdom about pay is changing.

It used to be that you’d be paid about 50% more as a skilled worker in the early 1980s when you jumped ship from a company with less than 100 employees to a giant employer with 10,000 or more people on the payroll (i.e. the large corporate firms.)

But that’s simply no longer the case. The Wall Street Journal reports that historical premium is down to about 20% now for workers with desirable skill sets.

And it’s gone altogether if you’re an unskilled worker.

“The bottom 50% of workers by pay received almost no premium for working at large companies in 2013,” the Journal notes.