Global Pay Parity: How We Got There

After many hours of in-depth analysis, along with a small number of employee pay adjustments, we’re there: Adobe has achieved global gender pay parity! This was a huge commitment toward our diversity and inclusion goals this year and it’s exciting to finally have it done.

As I noted after we achieved pay parity in the U.S. and India, we have received a lot of questions about how we approached the pay parity challenge. This last, global phase of our journey was the most complex. Even though we addressed 80 percent of our employees with our U.S. and India efforts combined, the remaining 20 percent spanned nearly 40 countries, often with very small employee populations.

Given that we define pay parity as ensuring that employees in the same job and location are paid fairly relative to one another, regardless of their gender or ethnicity, our smaller and more dispersed global population made a country-by-country analysis challenging since the smaller population sizes did not allow for an appropriate review. Our solution was to look at our workforce by market segments: Fast-moving and Mature, as defined by the volatility of market compensation rates.

• Fast-moving markets included: Bermuda, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Mexico, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, United Arab Emirates
• Mature markets included: Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, , South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, US

As a core element of our gender pay parity initiative, we analyzed our employees within job families across these two market segments. This provided us with the scale of comparison we needed. While many of these countries are quite different relative to their overall business climates — for example, Brazil is very different from South Korea — our groupings reflect very similar employment markets relative to how pay tends to behave.

As part of the review of our global pay practices, we identified areas where modest adjustments (both women and men) could be made. All of our global pay adjustments, including those previously made in the U.S. and India, impacted less than 5 percent of Adobe employees and accounted for less than 0.2 percent of our global payroll costs. For me as a compensation leader, that’s a big win. It means our wages already reflect our commitment to equality in our pay practices, which is what we want to see.

We will continue to monitor our fair pay practices moving forward, including not asking candidates for prior pay history to prevent carrying over prior inequities; reviewing annual salary increases to ensure fairness; and incorporating new acquisitions into our pay review cycles.

I’m proud of this milestone and am excited to find more ways to ensure our compensation and benefits are as inclusive and rewarding as possible for every employee. #AdobeForAll