14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella attended the Grace Hopper Celebration and spoke on the topic of the gender pay gap in the North American society and how they and other big companies were working towards closing it. His answer was poorly worded and landed him under serious fire with various rights groups and feminists from all over the world.
That’s because he said that women should have the “superpower” to know that they should never ask for a raise even if they believe they deserve it, because “karma” would come back to them one day. To paraphrase, even if they made less than a man for the same job, women should just shut it and trust that the system would one day take care of them, even if it wasn’t doing that at that particular point in time.
No wonder a heated debate and an even more heated outcry was heard in the days following the event; even pop diva Cher weighed in on the problem, calling Nadella a “misogynist in chief” who only wanted to “pat” women on the head without offering them a shred of respect.
Nadella heard you and he wants you to know he’s doing something to improve things
Once his comments went viral, Nadella issued an apology for what he called nothing short of an ill-advised choice of words. He really didn’t mean that, he was just trying to say that those who deserve a higher pay will get it, at least at his company.
Because the apology sounded like he was just trying to save face, he’s now taking concrete measures to solve the problem of the gender pay gap, at least over at Microsoft, as a memo sent out to employees and published by GeekWire reveals.
After apologizing a couple of times more, Nadella says that there is no significant gender pay gap at Microsoft, but even so, he concedes that more measures need to be implemented to attain complete equality between the genders and races.
Said gender pay gap is “consistently within 0.5% at the company,” which means that a woman makes 0.5% less than a man hired on the same position, doing the exact same job. The issue with Microsoft isn’t the difference in pay, but the need to provide equal job opportunities for men and women, Nadella explains.
The new policy of Inclusion and Diversity will serve to attain this goal, and everyone on the staff will be involved in one capacity or another. Everything from the recruiting process to the training will be changed to include these two new priorities.
He’s sorry, again
“One of the answers I gave at the conference was generic advice that was just plain wrong. I apologize. For context, I had received this advice from my mentors and followed it in my own career. I do believe that at Microsoft in general good work is rewarded, and I have seen it many times here,” Nadella says.
“But my advice underestimated exclusion and bias — conscious and unconscious — that can hold people back. Any advice that advocates passivity in the face of bias is wrong. Leaders need to act and shape the culture to root out biases and create an environment where everyone can effectively advocate for themselves,” the CEO continues.
Clearly, this is a man at the head of a giant company who didn’t just commit a huge faux-pas, but who’s actually willing to go the distance to make amends – and not just by tossing fancy worded statements to the media, because we all know that words can carry very little value when it comes to a change of this kind.
Today is the day that all the feminists who took offense (justly so) with Nadella’s comments get a special present from Nadella himself. It remains to be seen if he will live up to his promises.