In 2017, Intel announced it had closed the gender and racial pay gap for all U.S. employees. But almost two years later, the Fortune 500 company took a second look.
This time around, Intel says it closed the gender pay gap for all employees globally—and incorporated stock compensation into those calculations, which it didn’t do in 2017.
“We weren’t sure what to expect when we looked at that number,” says Julie Ann Overcash, Intel’s vice president of human resources and director of compensation and benefits. “We didn’t find too many gaps, and the ones we did find, we closed.”
Globally, Intel found an overall 2.6% pay gap because of gender in nine of 54 countries where it has employees (the other 43 countries had no gap) and adjusted employee pay by an average of 6.5%. Employees in the United States who were found to have been underpaid through stock compensation received, on average, an adjustment equal to 1.5% of their total compensation.
Bringing a pay gap from 2.6% to zero sounds great, but those numbers can be hard to parse. Intel analyzes pay equity as differences in pay for employees of different genders and races in the same or similar roles, and does allow for differences due to performance and tenure.
That’s a different calculation than what Citigroup released last week, revealing a 29% unadjusted gender pay gap that doesn’t discount differences in position. That number shows the dearth of women in high-level jobs. And an analysis as part of a lawsuit revealed last week that Oracle paid female employees, on average, $13,000 less than men in the same jobs.
Intel didn’t reveal dollar figures behind its pay gap or how much money the company spent fixing those discrepancies. But 5,872 employees, or about 5.1% of the company’s workforce, got a compensation adjustment as a result of the initiative to close the pay gap. Intel informed those employees they were receiving a change to their compensation after a gender or racial pay gap was found.
The gap was usually introduced at the time of hire, Intel found, and gaps in stock compensation were most often created through the promotions process.
“Pay equity is central to making Intel a truly inclusive workforce,” Overcash says.
Clarification: An earlier headline to this article referred to stock options measured by Intel; the company evaluated stock compensation more broadly.
