In an effort to continue our commitment to workplace transparency and pay equity, we’ve conducted our third annual audit of Glassdoor’s own employee compensation. The audit is a check up we voluntarily do to ensure gender equality.
We are pleased to report that in 2018, Glassdoor has no significant pay gap between male and female employees. The analysis looks at an apples-to-apples comparison of employees in similar roles with comparable experience and backgrounds. The findings are consistent with our past two analyses, which also found no adjusted gender pay gap for Glassdoor employees. Each year we’ve used a similar approach to the methods described in this previous report, which outlines how any employer can analyze if a gender pay gaps exist within their organization.
Below is a deeper dive into the data that sheds more light on how we came to this conclusion.
A Look at the Data
To begin, we collected basic payroll data from Glassdoor’s HR department as of May 2018 for all 600 full-time U.S. Glassdoor employees, excluding C-suite positions.(1) We can see that Glassdoor’s U.S. employees are 45 percent female and 55 percent male. The summary table shows the average annual base pay, average bonus and average total compensation for male and female Glassdoor employees.
| Compensation (May 2018) | Male | Female |
| Base Pay | $108,523 | $88,655 |
| Bonus Pay | $31,250 | $22,546 |
| Total Pay | $139,773 | $111,201 |
Source: Glassdoor Economic Research (Glassdoor.com/research)
The data shows men as a group earn higher average pay than women at Glassdoor. This is common in many companies and in the labor market overall in most countries. Average total pay was $139,773 for men at Glassdoor, compared to $111,201 for women — a gap of $28,572 per year or approximately 23 percent (as illustrated below)(2). That’s higher than last year’s overall pay gap of $23,514 or approximately 20 percent.
Although the table above shows a large difference between average male and female pay, the pay gap figures are “unadjusted”. It isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison and doesn’t account for important differences in job function, department, job tenure, management level, location or other factors that can explain differences between male and female pay.
The “unadjusted” pay gap between average male and female pay at Glassdoor is due to the different representation of women and men in different roles in the company, which economists call “occupational sorting.” For example, Glassdoor’s marketing and HR teams are about 82 percent female. Meanwhile, Glassdoor’s engineering team is only about 16 percent female, down slightly from 20 percent in 2017. However, this is above the national average which shows women currently hold about 14 percent of all engineering and architecture roles. These teams have different pay scales and very different local supply and demand in the labor market and that affects overall average male and female pay at the company.
The best way to make an apples-to-apples comparison is to analyze the “adjusted” total pay gap. Let’s look at that next.
No Adjusted Gender Pay Gap Among Glassdoor Employees
The figure below shows the results of our analysis of the “adjusted” total pay gap at Glassdoor (for the full methodology, see our guide for employers). The bars show the approximate percentage of the total pay gap between men and women at Glassdoor, before and after including controls such as job title, location, performance and seniority.
Before accounting for any difference between male and female employees, there’s about a 23 percent gender pay gap at Glassdoor; in other words, men as a group earn around 23 percent more in total compensation than women as a group. Adding controls for employee and job characteristics (such as age, seniority, performance, and all other factors we can observe about employees) reduces the pay gap to 12 percent (in the middle bar), which is still statistically significant.
However, when we make our best apples-to-apples comparison of employees in similar roles, departments and locations, the gender pay gap at Glassdoor shrinks to a statistical zero — less than one half of one percent in the far right bar, which is not statistically significant.
Based on this analysis, we’re happy to report that once we’ve accounted for differences in job functions, performance evaluations, employee tenure and other factors we can observe about our employees, there’s no evidence of a gender pay gap among employees at Glassdoor. This finding remains unchanged since we conducted this analysis in 2017 and 2016.
Conclusion
The first step towards gender pay equity is to recognize and identify where it exists and with the Glassdoor Equal Pay Pledge, more than 5,000 companies have expressed their own promise to pay employees fairly for equal work and experience.
At Glassdoor, we remain committed to workplace transparency and raising awareness of gender pay equity and we’re happy to report that there is no adjusted gender pay gap at Glassdoor in 2018. In this analysis, we revealed the results of our own gender pay “check up” in hopes that more companies utilize our free employer’s guide to examine their own compensation programs. The employer guide is available for free to any employer.
To learn more about Glassdoor’s efforts around gender pay analysis, read the Glassdoor Blog.
1. Only full-time U.S. Glassdoor employees who went through a performance review process in 2018 were included in this sample.
2. The overall gap amounts to 20.4 percent of average male pay, or 25.7 percent of average female pay. The average gap of approximately 23 percent reported here is based on our regression analysis, as detailed below.
