In This Article:
Business leaders often avoid talking about inequity and inequality of any kind; after all, it is their job to keep the company out of trouble, so why address an issue you're not prepared to solve? Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff didn't follow that playbook when he spoke with Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi at Dreamforce last week, as he spoke very directly on Salesforce's efforts toward pay parity. "We're committed to equality in our company; it's a core value. Men and women will get paid equally for the same work," he stated. Without hesitation, he even added a frank takeaway: "It wasn't very hard to do."
For full episodes of Opening Bid, watch on our website or listen on your favorite podcast platform.
Quite a few years ago, I had a couple of executives come to me, female executives and sat down with me at lunch. And I'm like, oh, I'm going to have a very nice, easy lunch. And they go, listen, you need to listen to me right now. Okay. You're paying men and women differently for different work. You know, in this company. What do you mean, men and different, men and women differently for different work. No, no, that's not what we're saying. Men and women who are doing exactly the same job? They're getting paid differently. I'm like, it's not possible. Men and women are getting paid differently for the same work. Is that what you mean? Yeah, that's what you're doing. I said, prove it. They bring out this huge spreadsheet. They said, here's our data. Look at that. And I was like, wow. Uh, well, we're going to make that change. We made the change. And then a year later, it was wrong again. All of the data had changed. I'm like, how can this be? I put all the policy in place. It turned out I bought companies where they have the same issue in their company. So then I'm like, no, we're committed to equality in our company. It's a core value. Men and women will get paid equally for the same work. So then I'm like, we're about equal opportunity and equal advancement. That equality is important in our company. Then I did a review of our human resources at Salesforce. And I'm like, is this true? Our HR team is more than 50% women. Our marketing team is more than 50% women. Our finance team is more than 50% women. Our communications team is more than 50% women. And I'm like, wow, this is really powerful and, but we're still, you know, between 35 and 40% women. So we're not a 50/50 company. So, at some level, I'm like, it's great. You know, we're not the tech bro company as much as we were when we started. We were all tech bros. We're more balanced. We have more gender equality and general diversity. It wasn't very hard to do. It's just opening our eyes and being aware that this is an important part of our future. And look, it's aligned with our value of equality. We believe in the equality of every human being, and we believe in having men and women in our company and treating them the same. That is another exciting part of Salesforce. That's very meaningful work to me.