Providing equitable reward opportunities for all employees is a critical tenet of the core of Citrix’s compensation strategy. Pay equity is so important at Citrix that, beginning this year, part of our executive officers’ variable cash compensation plan includes pay equity objectives, among others. It’s one of our Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metrics, and we have increased our focus on ESG initiatives, including our diversity, belonging, and inclusion programs.
International Equal Pay Day is in September and recognizes the longstanding efforts toward achieving equal pay for work of equal value, which is prerequisite for achieving gender equity in the world of work. According to the United Nations, women worldwide earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, creating a lifetime of income inequality between men and women. There are several reasons for this — historical and structural inequitable power relations between women and men, poverty, and disadvantages in access to resources and opportunities. Progress on narrowing that gap at an international scale has proved a slow and difficult road.
Regardless of the underlying causes, Citrix is working to ensure there is no gap in pay for women and under-represented minorities within our company. We take a holistic approach to pay equity analysis that gives us a better understanding of how to drive systemic change in diversity, inclusion, and belonging. Proactively analyzing our talent and pay programs helps us achieve pay fairness and better serve our employees.
Paying equitably and stimulating the desire for action around the globe requires action on multiple fronts. Here are some strategies we employ to achieve pay equity:
- Drive pay fairness through targeted training
- Teach people managers, human resources professionals, and finance team members how to make unbiased reward decisions that are anchored in compensable factors that drive company success
- Train those making pay decisions to understand performance-based pay differentiation, external competitiveness, and internal equity
- Make executives accountable for pay equity
- Set clear goals for pay equity and make achievement of those goals a factor in executive compensation
- Review compensation for BOTH pay equity as well as pay equality
- Pay equity means providing equal compensation for employees performing similar job duties, factoring in characteristics such as experience, tenure, location, and job performance
- Pay equality is the broader concept that refers to the equality of opportunity, which leads to the proportional holding of positions across the pay spectrum
- Conduct frequent, proactive reviews for pay gaps, in addition to formal annual reviews. Focus on:
- Locations and roles that may indicate a need for ongoing review, including:
- Roles that we are often hiring (to prevent upfront issues)
- Roles with frequent promotions (larger pay increases may be needed to maintain pay equity)
- Locations and roles that may indicate a need for ongoing review, including:
- Use business intelligence tools and analytics to:
- Drive awareness of existing pay gaps
- Lend pay equity related decision-making support to compensation decision makers
- Challenge traditional views of pay equity analysis to gain a better understanding of how to proactively drive systemic change in diversity, inclusion, and belonging
International Equal Pay Day recognizes the work done — and that still needs to be done — to achieve pay equity and pay equality. We encourage leaders everywhere to deepen their understanding of compensation management and to do their part in ensuring pay equity and pay equality.
