The Pay Check

Latest Episodes:

Get Yourself Paid Jun 13, 2018

Show notes

So far, the pay gap has proved pretty impossible to solve. But most of us aren’t just going to sit here and accept that we’ll be paid less than men for our entire careers. In the last episode of The Pay Check, host Rebecca Greenfield talks to Gaby Dunn, who hosts her own podcast called Bad With Money, about what she's learned from the many people she's sought advice from on her series. Jordyn Holman also travels to Seattle for the Get Money, Get Paid conference, hosted by a group called Ladies Get Paid, and learns some important lessons about negotiation—and collaboration.

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Treating the Disease Jun 06, 2018

Show notes

The pay gap goes way deeper than just men's and women's salaries—that's why just paying women more doesn't solve the problem. In this episode, Claire Suddath talks to Salesforce.com Inc., the San Francisco software company that began doing pay equity audits in 2015 and has found a pay gap every single year. Host Rebecca Greenfield looks at another software company, Fog Creek Software, Inc., and how radical pay transparency is helping equalize salaries. And Ellen Huet reports on Adobe Systems Inc., which says it's closed its pay gap but is still trying to tackle inequities around parental leave that can hold some women back.

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The Shaming Initiative May 30, 2018

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Can companies be shamed into closing the pay gap? A new law in the U.K. requires companies with more than 250 employees to publicly disclose their gender pay gaps. More than 10,000 companies reported by the April deadline, revealing differences in median pay of as much as 60 percent in some extreme cases. Now it’s up to companies to decide what, if anything, to do about that. This week, Suzi Ring talks to one company that reported a wide gap, and how that’s changing the way it hires and pays women. Then, Claire Suddath tells us about a different pay gap law in Iceland, how that came to be and if it’s working.

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The Gray Areas May 23, 2018

Show notes

Skeptics say the gender pay gap is explained by choices women make about family and career. Rebecca Greenfield unpacks those arguments with the help of professors from Harvard and Georgetown. Then, Jordyn Holman goes inside a contract negotiation between Netflix and the comedian and actress Mo’Nique that went south.

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Let's Talk About a Sex Scandal May 16, 2018

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There was a brief moment 150 years ago when it looked like women might get equal pay for equal work. But they didn’t—and that set the standard for decades to come. On this episode of the Pay Check, Rebecca Greenfield revisits a Civil War-era sex scandal that set the stage for the pay gap debates we're having right now. She talks to Claire Suddath about how a century of rules and laws saying what women can and can’t do have made it easy for companies to pay women less.

One big reason the gender pay gap still exists is because of a phenomenon called "occupational sorting"— the idea that some jobs are dominated by women, and those jobs often pay less. That didn't just happen. Claire and Rebecca sort through how history determined the market value for women. Then Claire talks with Lilly Ledbetter, whose fight for gender equality at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. seemed like an open and shut case—until a loophole in the law denied her justice.

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A Big, Expensive, Global Mystery May 09, 2018

Show notes

In the first episode of The Pay Check, we go deep on pay discrimination. Host Rebecca Greenfield tells us about an equal pay fight in her own family. We take you inside a gender discrimination case against Goldman Sachs that’s been unfolding for over a decade. And we look at how companies magically make their pay gaps disappear—without actually paying women more.

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Coming Soon: The Pay Check Apr 26, 2018

Show notes

It’s a big, expensive, global mystery. Why do women still make less money—a lot less—than men? In the US, the average woman makes 80 cents to every dollar a man makes. Launching May 9, the Pay Check is an in-depth investigation into what that 20 percent difference looks like. In this miniseries we'll show you how the gender pay gap plays out in real life. We'll hear from Lily Ledbetter, Mo’Nique, and a lot of other women who weren’t happy to be paid less. We'll find out what happens when a whole country tries to tackle the pay gap. And we'll talk to some women who are taking things into their own hands.

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