There is a growing focus on pay equity across the corporate world. Businesses and job seekers increasingly seek to understand the magnitude and drivers of pay gaps between men and women – and across white, Black, Hispanic and Asian employees. (Glassdoor research has substantively contributed to this understanding.)
But for many workers, pay equity is just the tip of the iceberg. In the day-to-day hours between paychecks, equitable experiences are perhaps more front of mind. The Glassdoor Equity Xray™ sheds light on companies where employees from distinct demographic groups report meaningful differences in workplace experience and satisfaction. To our knowledge, it is the first attempt to identify these experience gaps in the workplace.
Below, we highlight several topline findings from Glassdoor’s first-ever Equity Xray™, share the company-level data for users to explore, and describe the technical methodology we used to develop the results.
Key Results
Based on Glassdoor employee reviews submitted between December 1, 2021 and November 30, 2022 and eligibility criteria outlined in greater detail below, we were able to evaluate employee experiences for 371 unique companies across both indices.
- Of the eligible companies, approximately one-fifth (18%) of employers had significantly different workplace experiences between men and women.
- At two-thirds of the companies, men rated the company higher on average than women. For the remaining third, women reported higher average ratings.
- The number of companies with opportunities for improvement is small when broken out by industry, but data suggest that the difference between men and women is meaningfully higher than average in retail, tech, and restaurants & food services.
- Across race/ethnicity groups – which include employees who self-identify as White, Black or African American, Hispanic/Latinx or Asian– there were significantly different workplace experiences at more than one-third (39 percent) of all eligible companies.
Explore the Equity Xray™
The interactive table below allows you to explore companies identified as equitable and those with opportunities for improvement for each of the two dimensions – gender, and race/ethnicity – and shows the average company rating (on a five-point scale) for each group.
Methodology
To identify whether different demographic groups have distinct workplace experiences, we compare the distributions of company ratings submitted by current employees at those companies on Glassdoor.
Data sources. The Equity Xray™ is constructed using millions of reviews from anonymous users on Glassdoor. Users are able to submit their overall rating of their current or former employer on a scale of 1 to 5 stars as well as provide their demographic information, including their gender identity and race/ethnicity.
Eligibility window. Companies featured in the Equity Xray™ must have a minimum of 30 ratings from employees in each employee group within a demographic category, all of whom worked at the company during at least some part of the eligibility period (December 1, 2021 through November 30, 2022). For example, to appear on the Equity Xray™ for gender, companies must have at least 30 ratings from women and 30 from men. Only ratings from current and former, full-time and part-time, U.S.-based employees who worked at the company at some point during the eligibility period are considered for the Equity Xray™.
Statistical test. We use the rank-based nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis (KW) test to determine whether there are statistically significant differences in the ratings distributions among employees by gender and race/ethnicity. The KW test does not reveal which specific independent groups are statistically significantly different from one another, but that at least two groups are different. This method is more appropriate for discrete multinomial and ranked distributions – such as five-point star scales – than more commonly used statistical tests for continuous distributions, such as a t-test, and allows more thorough comparisons of the range of employee experiences than a simple distribution mean and standard deviation would allow. For example, the KW test is capable of distinguishing between two distributions with similar averages where one is normally distributed but another is bimodal.
Reporting criteria. To construct the Equity Xray™, we use the results of the KW test, dividing employers into two categories: “Equitable” and “Opportunities for Improvement.” An employer is categorized as “Equitable” if we do not detect a statistically significant difference at the 90 percent confidence level in the distribution of ratings between groups of employees within a demographic category. Additionally, we also exclude any employers where the largest observed gap in the average company ratings between all groups within the category exceeds 0.2 stars.
Conversely, a company showing “Opportunities for Improvement” is one where we detect a statistically significant difference (at the 90 percent confidence level) in employee-reported workplace experience between different groups of employees within a demographic category. For example, if we find a statistically significant gap between the experience of Asian and Hispanic/Latinx employees, we flag the company as having “Opportunities for Improvement” for race/ethnicity.
We do not attempt to control for additional sources of heterogeneity – such as role or team, level, or years of experience – across subgroup populations that may influence workplace experiences.
