Glassdoor has a guide to figure out if there’s a wage gap at your company

Glassdoor wants to help companies put their money where their mouths are. Today, Glassdoor released a five-step guide to address the gender wage gap at any company.

Before it gets into how to solve the gender pay gap, Glassdoor first defines the gender wage gap as “the difference between average pay for men and women, both before and after we’ve accounted for differences among workers in education, experience, job roles, employee performance and other factors aside from gender that affect pay.”

The first step, conducting an analysis of salary and bonus data by gender, department, time spent at company, age, education and location, is the most tedious part. For those who have never embarked on such a task, Glassdoor put together a 17-page guide that covers topics like what software to use, calculating adjusted pay gaps and how to gather the data.

“Our goal is to arm HR practitioners with the basic tools they’ll need to perform their own internal gender pay audit, without the need to rely on expensive outside consultants and with limited support from technical data science staff,” Glassdoor Chief Economist Dr. Andrew Chamberlain writes in the guide. “By making it easy for companies to study their gender pay gaps — and share the results with employees — we believe we can make significant progress toward better gender pay fairness in today’s labor market.”

Next, Glassdoor suggests employers take its equal pay pledge to signal to employees the company’s commitment, making equitable offers, ensuring performance reviews are as unbiased as possible and encouraging employees to honestly review and post their salaries on Glassdoor.

“The reality is if employers haven’t done the work to truly analyze their pay data, they will have a hard time knowing if a wage gap exists,” Glassdoor VP of Corporate Affairs Dawn Lyon said in a release. “Our experience shows pay gaps don’t result from overt discrimination, they result from years of unintentional bias that can creep into an organization over time. Analysis is far more involved than printing out a spreadsheet and eyeballing it — you need to go deep and control for a variety of factors to get the real story.”