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Adobe Found and Closed a Gender Wage Gap Among Its Employees

Claire Zillman
By
Claire Zillman
Claire Zillman
Editor, Leadership
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Claire Zillman
By
Claire Zillman
Claire Zillman
Editor, Leadership
Down Arrow Button Icon
December 7, 2017, 9:00 AM ET

Adobe Systems Inc. on Thursday announced that it has reached its goal of achieving equal pay between male and female employees in the United States.

“Women are now making $1.00 for every dollar earned by male employees in the U.S., up from 99 cents a year ago,” the software giant said in a statement.

In July 2016, Adobe said a review of its pay practices revealed that female employees in the U.S. were earning one cent less than their male counterparts and that there was no wage gap between white and non-white workers in the U.S. Adobe’s gender pay gap at the time was tiny compared to the national average of 21%, but it vowed to close the divide nonetheless. In September, the company said it would hit equal pay by the end of the fiscal year.

“We were already close to pay parity in the U.S. through our strong people practices, and now we are proud to have achieved and documented this last step of full parity,” Donna Morris, Adobe’s executive vice president of customer and employee experience, said in a statement. She said the company plans to “extend that same commitment” to its global employee base in the coming year.

Key Speakers At The Bloomberg Breakaway Summit
“[W]e are proud to have achieved and documented this last step of full parity,” says Adobe’s Donna Morris. Bloomberg via Getty Images
Bloomberg via Getty Images
In its announcement Thursday, Adobe said it’s poised to achieve pay parity in India, its largest employee base outside the U.S., in early 2018. Combined, U.S. and Indian employees comprise 80% of Adobe’s workforce worldwide, according to its September blog post.

Adobe was one of more than 100 companies to sign the Obama administration’s Equal Pay Pledge in 2016. By doing so, it agreed to conduct company-wide gender pay analyses on a yearly basis and work to crack down on unconscious bias in hiring and promotion processes.

Read More: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: We’re Erasing Our Gender Pay Gap—Again

Companies have pursued pay parity in efforts to retain women and propel more of them into senior leadership roles, and—at a more basic level—as a matter of fundamental fairness.

Salesforce was one of the first companies to make waves on this front, with CEO Marc Benioff announcing in 2015 that the company had spent about $3 million to bring the salaries of female employees into alignment with the pay of their male peers. But as Benioff told Fortune earlier this year, reaching equal pay is not a one-off endeavor; it must be repeated over and over again as companies hire new employees and make acquisitions.

Read More: Ivanka Trump Backs White House Decision to Stop Obama’s Equal Pay Rule

For its part, Adobe says it will work to maintain pay parity by “regularly” reviewing its compensation practices “as part of our commitment to fair pay.”

About the Author
Claire Zillman
By Claire ZillmanEditor, Leadership
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Claire Zillman is a senior editor at Fortune, overseeing leadership stories. 

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