It was at the company Christmas party when Sharon Procopio first began to think about the gender pay gap at the engineering firm where she worked. All the workers who had been promoted took the stage, and they all had something in common: Each and every one was a man.
The women of JVA, Inc., banded together and approached the top brass to request an analysis of inequity in hiring, promoting and pay. To Procopio’s surprise and delight, management took them seriously. A consultant was hired and the numbers run. Sure enough, there was a pattern of hiring more experienced women for junior roles and of those women staying in those roles for longer, and earning less than their male counterparts.
“It was tough,” Procopio said. It took a lot of “uncomfortable” conversations, but “our management team dove right into it. We did the right thing.”
JVA went to work immediately to correct the imbalance and, today, women at the company are slightly out-earning men for the first time.
The rest of Boulder County has yet to catch up. The county has the largest gender-based wage gap of any of its closest neighbors and lags Colorado and the U.S. as a whole in gender pay equity. Women working full-time earn, on average, 74 cents for every $1 a full-time working man does in Boulder County.
The gap increases with education: The average Boulder County male with a graduate or professional degree earned $96,199 in 2017. A woman with the same education was paid $55,585.
“Women straight out of college are offered lower salaries, so immediately you’re starting with a lower pay scale,” said Darcy Juday with the local chapter of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), a nonprofit advocating for gender equality. “You’re starting with lower wages, so bonuses are lower. “If you get a smaller raise every year than the guy you started out against, wages diverge quite a lot over the course of a career.”
Where Procopio and Juday agree on a solution is more training and mentorship for female workers. The AAUW conducts two training courses, Start Smart and Work Smart, to teach women how to negotiate salary and promotions.
Boulder County’s extremely low unemployment presents the perfect opportunity to introduce some equity to the economy. Companies are desperate to hang onto workers, Procopio said.
“This is the perfect time for us to narrow the gap.”
