Last year Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff spent $3 million adjusting salaries to ensure that men and women are paid equally within the company. Now he makes a habit of asking other tech CEOs when they’re going to do the same.
“Industries have spent billions of dollars to put in human resource management systems,” he said. “But the funny thing is with one button any CEO can know, do they pay women the same as men. But are they willing to press that button?”
“The fear comes from something simple: they don’t know,” he explained. “They don’t know if they’re paying women the same as men, and if they find out there’s some major discrepancy, how much will it cost to make that change, and will it impact them in some dramatic way in their company?”
Business is a platform for change
“All of us together need to take away that fear,” Benioff said. “We need to make that change.”
Benioff spoke at the closing keynote of the Grace Hopper Conference, the largest gathering of women in technology. The conference expected 15,000 attendees, up from 11,700 last year. Benioff addressed tech companies’ responsibility to use their influence to improve equality for women and people of color in the workplace.
“Business is a platform for change, and CEOs are the leaders of business that can make this change happen,” he said. “We have a room full of future CEOs here.”
Benioff aims to make that happen through setting an example with Salesforce. The company has a policy called 1:1:1 in which they leverage one percent of the company’s technology, resources and people to make change. When Salesforce acquires a company (they made nearly $4 billion in acquisitions this year), he encourages leadership to adhere to same pay equality philosophy. Earlier this month, Benioff hired the company’s first Chief Equality Officer.
But it also goes bigger than business decisions: He recalled threatening to pull out of Indiana when Gov. Mike Pence approved a “religious freedom” bill that would have allowed discrimination against LGBTQ people. He said he had a responsibility to make a strong statement through his company.
“I’m lesbian, I’m gay, I’m bisexual, I’m transgender, I’m queer. I’m all of our employees.”
“I’m from San Francisco, I’m married, I’m straight, I’m heterosexual,” Benioff said. “And I’m lesbian, I’m gay, I’m bisexual, I’m transgender, I’m queer. I’m all of our employees.”
“I’m the whole rainbow,” he said. “I have to be. I have to represent everybody.”
He encouraged every attendee to do just one thing, anything, to push for equality.
"Each and everyone of us has to decide what personal action we're going to take to make the world more equal,” he said. “I’m not saying you have to do everything, but you need to do something.”
“I’m just going to tell you what I’m going to tell her, our next president,” he said. “We want more equality.”
This story was written as part of a Women in Tech fellowship sponsored by the GroundTruth Project and SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Other stories reported from the Anita Borg Institute’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference in Houston can be found at the TechTruth Women in Tech site.
