Celebrating five years of global gender pay parity at Adobe

Image credit: Adobe Stock/Rawpixel.com.

According to the International Labor Organization, women globally are paid about 20 percent less than men on average. At Adobe, we recognize Equal Pay Day as an important opportunity to raise awareness of the continuing pay gap, and are proud to reaffirm our global commitment to gender pay parity for the fifth year in a row. Additionally, since 2020, we’ve achieved pay parity between employees from underrepresented minorities (URM*) and non-URM employees in the U.S.

Adobe was built on the foundation that our employees are our greatest asset, and how we treat one another is core to what makes us a great company. With our commitment to Adobe for All, we believe that when people feel respected and included they can be more creative, innovative, and successful, and one way we achieve this is by ensuring our employees are paid fairly. 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 journey to fair pay has taught us a lot — and we’d like to share some reflections that we hope will be useful in helping other organizations achieve fair pay practices.

• Start with a definition. In 2018, Adobe was one of the first technology companies to affirm gender pay parity. Our journey began by clearly defining what we mean by pay parity. We defined the phrase as ensuring employees in the same job and location are paid fairly, compared to one another, regardless of their gender or ethnicity.

• Take time to define jobs. Before Adobe could analyze fair pay, we had to be sure we were making fair comparisons, so we defined jobs by the actual work and tasks that employees were doing, as opposed to arbitrary job codes. We introduced a job architecture initiative to review and create new job families as needed, realigned employees to the job families and levels that best reflected their work.

• Review and adjust. Once we accurately mapped the jobs that employees were performing, we began reviewing annually and making pay adjustments as needed. We provide managers with resources and trainings to avoid unconscious bias in their decision-making during the annual review cycle.

• Continue to innovate. Adobe has grown significantly and now includes more than 28,000 employees and 64 offices globally. We're constantly reevaluating our approach to ensure we are maintaining global pay parity. For example, we have moved to a bi-annual promotion cycle to increase fairness and transparency. Adobe also remains committed to fostering a culture of pay transparency by providing enablement sessions and self-serve resources around our compensation philosophy and pay practices. We continue reviewing annual salary increases to ensure fairness and incorporating pay review cycles when we acquire a new company.

Our pay parity and talent development initiatives — like Adobe’s Leadership Circles — are key to supporting an inclusive culture and diverse talent pipeline, while developing a culture where every employee has an opportunity to grow and make an impact. We’re proud of the progress we’ve made in the last five years, but we know there is more work to be done. With our Adobe for All strategy, we remain committed to ensuring fairness for our employees as we build our talent pipeline, attract diverse candidates, enhance the employee experience, and drive diversity across our industry. Visit our webpage to learn more about Adobe’s leadership in pay parity and progress to date.

* Underrepresented minorities (URM) are U.S. employees who identify as Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, and/or two or more races.