New in Humaans: Gender Pay Gap Reporting

Today we announce the release of our updated Insights view to help you dive into any potential gender pay disparities. Based on learnings collected so far, this is something that we believe is important for any company to be able to create a positive working environment.

Why are we introducing this?

When I was first learning about Humaans, I asked Karolis and Giovanni, our Co-founders, a simple question: "What makes Humaans different from all the other HRIS platforms out there?" They told me that whilst there were many different solutions available, they all fell short in one aspect or another: whether it be automating common processes, providing a great user experience, or helping the company provide the best working experience. They wanted to change that by building a modern HRIS where we do not stop at just allowing companies to manage their people, but also go further and help these companies provide them with the best experience and positively impact the workplace. This is where our name comes from, we wanted to reinforce the fact that everyone onboarded is a human being, not just an employee.

The Insights view was our first step in providing a simple mechanism to understand analytics around this last point: from company growth history and average tenures, to how Time Off and Working Away is being utilised throughout the year.

With this new release, we wanted to take it one step further and zone in on one particularly important topic: gender pay gap.

What is the gender pay gap?

The gender pay gap is the difference between the average earnings of men and women within a company. For example, a 5% median gender pay gap in favour of men will mean that the typical salary of a woman in the company would be 95c compared to a typical salary of $1 for men.

Gender pay gap is an important topic for any company. Ensuring people are paid fairly is a crucial part in providing an inclusive environment and a positive working experience. Happier employees could lead to longer tenures, reduced personnel turnover, and ultimately a more closely knit team.

What does the report tell you?

The report can be accessed by Admins through the new tabs at the top of the Insights page. You might notice some extra settings at your disposal.

The first is the ability to switch between median and mean salaries as the basis of the report. We provide the option to choose between the two as they each have their own pros and cons.

A couple of definitions:

• The median as a measure of average earnings means that half of your employees earn more than the median salary and half earn less.
• The mean is calculated by adding up the earnings of each person, then dividing by the number of people in the group.

Within some companies, the distribution of pay can be very skewed: the highest paid employees could earn significantly more than the lowest paid. When this is the case, the mean earnings will be much higher than the median earnings if there are a few significantly higher paid individuals in a group. This is why the median gives us a more accurate representation of the typical salaries of men and women. However, this specific characteristic of the mean salary will often highlight the lack of women in high-paying roles so we decided to include the option to view the report in either form.

Humaans was designed to be a product for global teams, so if your company operates across multiple currencies, you will also see a handy currency selector that allows you to view the report in the currency most familiar to you.

See how your pay gap is changing

When you first land on the page, you will see the current pay gap in your company. This gives a quick summary of the most important numbers and how they've changed in the past 12 months. You have the option of choosing another date range at the top which will reveal more comparisons between the previous period so you can check if you're heading in the right direction. If you want to dig further into the data, you can take a look at the two breakdown tables below which I’ll talk about more in a bit.

Identifying where the problem is

As an Engineer, when I am given a problem to solve my first instinct is not to devise a solution for it, but to always dig deeper to try and find the root of the problem. That's what the accompanying two breakdowns will help you with: identifying the specific problems contributing to the gender pay gap. (If you don't have one, great! But you can still look at how pretty these visualisations are, I spent a lot of time on them!)

The first breakdown is pay quartiles. This is created by first ordering every person in descending order of pay, grouping them into 4 equal quartiles, and analysing the gender makeup of each quartile. The analysis is helpful in letting you know if there are a lack of men or women in the higher paying roles.

The second is a breakdown by department. This table shows the gender pay gap on a department level, ordered by the departments with the highest gap to lowest. If the pay gap is concentrated in specific areas of the business, you'll be able to see that here.

What we've shown here should give you a good overview of potential gender pay gaps within your company. This is a very complex topic, so we don't begin to believe we can solve the problem here with just a few simple charts and numbers. Hopefully, what these do give you is a good starting point for conversations around this issue with your peers.

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That's it for today, we hope what we’ve built here is helpful and gives you an insight into any gender pay disparities your company may have. If you have any comments or suggestions on how we could make this even more useful for you, fire them our way (via team@humaans.io) or ping us on Twitter.

If you're not a customer yet but want to see this in action, head on over to humaans.io and start your free 14 day trial today!

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