Fighting the Gender Pay Gap at Berkeley Haas
The gender pay gap is still alive and well in business, particularly in tech. At least that’s what Christina Chavez, a ’19 Berkeley Haas MBA student, discovered when she logged into an online compensation board named Blind while working at Microsoft a few years ago. There was a shocking difference between what male and female colleagues were getting paid. So, when Chavez was accepted into the Haas MBA program, she put pay equity and transparency as one of her top goals.
Last fall, Chavez’s goal came to fruition with the help of her classmate Jack Anderson, a fellow member of the Haas Gender Equity Initiative. Together, they set up a spreadsheet where classmates could share details about their compensation packages. Then, using salary data and research provided by Professor Laura Kay, they created a Haas Wage Gap Infographic.
“We earned 96 cents to the dollar in the last MBA class, and people were like ‘yeah we’re approaching equity,’ but this gap grows over time,” Chavez says.
Transparency and the Gender Salary Gap
Christina Chavez, Haas MBA ’19
Unfortunately, for alumni with more than ten years of experience, the salary wage gap between men and women is much more extensive. So, the goal of the project is to expand what’s already offered through CMG Bears (a Haas Career Management Group tool) and to understand the long-term salary gap concern better. Transparency is a critical weapon to close the gap.
And transparency is particularly important when it comes to compensation outside of salary. While recent research conducted by Professor Kray and Margaret Lee at the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership (EGAL), revealed that alumni base salaries between 1994 and 2014 were only 8 percent higher for men, it was in the bonuses, share values, and options where men far outpaced women. Overall compensation for Haas women MBAs averages about $290,000—66 percent of men’s $439,000 average.
More than Negotiation Skills
While you might think, at first, that it’s all a matter of negotiation skills, that’s not what Kray and Lee’s research finds. Yes, it’s essential to know what compensation is available and what other people are earning in comparison; the problem for women is that there is an inherent bias toward men. Men tend to be put in charge of larger teams than equally-qualified women, and they get paid more because of it.
“You can change processes, but the long-term problem is people’s individual biases,” Kellie McElhaney, the founding director of EGAL, says. “If they believe things like men do a better job at leading big teams, or that women bosses are unlikable, this is unconscious and conscious bias at work.”
Read the full article in the Haas Newsroom here.
This article has been edited and republished with permissions from its original source, Clear Admit.
Friday News – Booth Expands London Campus, Berkeley Haas MBAs Explore Pay Gap, and More
Let’s take a look at some of the biggest stories from this week, including Chicago Booth London expanding.
Chicago Booth Expands Presence in Europe with new Facility in London – Chicago Booth Newsroom
University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business will be expanding its London campus, the center of which will be a newly constructed building adjacent to the Museum of London and St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The move from the current campus in the Financial District will be complete by spring 2020. The new location will serve as the home of the Booth Executive MBA Europe program, as well as various events, seminars, and conferences. Madhav Rajan, Dean and Professor of Accounting at Chicago Booth, says, “Our campus will be located in the heart of the City, in a newly developed neighborhood that showcases the best of London. I expect this will serve as a vibrant home for our faculty, staff, and students, and as a welcoming venue to host our external community of alumni, prospective students, and corporate and government partners.”
The 44,000 square-foot building will be comprised of two executive style multi-tiered classrooms, open meeting areas, and flexible event space. Booth’s European campus has been active since 2005, and was previously located in Barcelona, Spain.
For more on the new Chicago Booth London campus, click here.
Georgetown McDonough MBA Students Consult for WMATA to Improve Metro’s Image as Transit Provider, Employer – McDonough School of Business News
Georgetown University McDonough School of Business second year MBAs recently met some tough challenges—encouraging ridership on DC’s Metro, along with presenting the agency as an appealing employer.
As part of a recently redesigned core course, Managing the Enterprise, students embarked upon a seven week consulting study called The Metro Challenge. Finalists pitched their ideas to WMATA executives, who selected the most workable solution to the problems that they presented.
Practice in Management Professor Nick Lovegrove says, “In management courses, which tend to be a bit abstract, it really helps students to collaborate with an organization to provide a sense of reality … The fact that the WMATA is on the cusp of the public and private sectors means the issues they face are classic Washington issues.”
Practice in Management Professor Nick Lovegrove says, “In management courses, which tend to be a bit abstract, it really helps students to collaborate with an organization to provide a sense of reality … The fact that the WMATA is on the cusp of the public and private sectors means the issues they face are classic Washington issues.” The organization manages a $3.2 million budget, along with roughly 13,000 employees.
One winning team suggested a greater presence of technology such as smart apps to improve both employee and customer experience, while the other suggested mentorship programs and employee exchange programs to enhance operations. For more on the case study, click here.
Amir Yaron, Professor of Finance, Awarded Prestigious Stephen A. Ross Prize for Landmark Paper – Wharton News
Amir Yaron, Professor of Finance at the Wharton School, and Ravi Bansal, J.B. Fuqua Professor of Finance and Economics at Duke University have been recognized with the Stephen A. Ross Prize for their research paper, “Risks for the Long Run: A Potential Resolution of Asset Pricing Puzzles.”
The $100,000 Ross Prize is a bi-annual award given to those who have made significant contributions to research in financial economics. Yaron and Ransal’s paper, which examines the drivers behind movements in asset pricing movements along with factors that determine expected returns on financial assets, is the sixth winner of the prestigious award. It is given by The Foundation for Advancement of Research in Financial Economics (FARFE), which serves as a bridge between theory and practice in the field.
Lars Hansen, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and Winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics, says of the paper, “This truly innovative paper … added an intriguing new perspective to asset pricing theory.”
You can read here for more on the paper and on the FARFE.
MBA Students Fight the Gender Pay Gap—One Offer at a Time – Berkeley Haas Student News
Two Berkeley Haas MBAs, Christina Chavez (’19) and Jack Anderson (’19), have decided to do their part for gender equity in pay through their work with the Haas Gender Equity Initiative.
Chavez, who will work at Google after graduating, discovered just how large the pay gap was when she joined an online compensation board called Blind. “People were posting their data, and we started saying ‘whoa’ there’s some major differences in how our colleagues are getting paid,” she says.
This realization prompted her and Anderson to set up a spreadsheet in which they and their classmates could share their earnings data. The students transformed this data into the Haas Wage Gap Infographic, which showed that the wage gap was closing, with women earning 96 cents of every male dollar. Alumni with over 10 years of experience, however, showed a much wider pay difference.
Assistant dean of MBA Career Management and Corporate Partnerships, Abby Scott, says, “I don’t think that we know the real cause of the long-term pay gap, but we are advising students to make sure they’re negotiating salary and thinking beyond compensation—and we speak frequently to women about both the importance of negotiation and taking on leadership roles.”
You can read here for more on the Gender Equity Initiative at Haas.
Shared Space Under Pressure: Business Support for Civic Freedoms and Human Rights Defenders – NYU Stern News & Events
On Monday, April 8, the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights hosted the Shared Space Under Pressure event, with the aim of discovering how companies can best support civic freedom and human rights in their practices.
Speakers addressed the standards by which organizations can improve their approaches to these issues, and also the outcomes when business leaders do not take them into account.
The panel included Stern Professor of Ethics and Finance Michael Posner, Bennett Freeman, Principal author of “Shared Space Under Pressure”; Principal, Bennett Freeman Associates LLC; Deputy Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from 1999-01; and Bobbie Sta. Maria, Director for Labour Rights and Asia, Business & Human Rights Resource Center.
For more, visit Stern’s event page.
Lehigh Symposium Unpacks How to Get Rich or Die Trying
Lehigh’s College of Business and Economics recently hosted its third annual symposium dedicated to examining the complex issue of how people get paid, according to a recent article on the business school’s website. Entitled “Getting Paid: Earnings Issues in Today’s Economy,” the event drew together a collection of educators, community leaders and economists to address a number of topics related to how we all make money.
