Match Group publicly shares its equal pay results

Match
Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg

Jerod
Harris/Getty Images

• When Mandy Ginsberg took over as CEO of Match
  Group she vowed to make sure the company was welcoming to
  women.
• She knew she had to audit the company’s payrolls to make sure
  that women were paid equally to men.
• She hired an outside auditor and was so shocked when they
  told her that Match was paying women 100% equally that she made
  the auditor double check the results.
• She now credits one of her long-held leadership practices on
  how to deal with employee pay.

When Mandy Ginsberg took over as CEO of online
dating juggernaut Match Group in mid-2017, she was determined
to alter the perception of the industry as a “bro culture” world.

And one step she made was to audit the salaries of her own
workforce, which is now 1,500 people, to see if she was paying
women and men equally for equal work.

She was shocked to discover that at her company — the
largest operator of dating apps with brands like Tinder, Match,
Plenty of Fish and dozens of others — her female employees were
100% equally paid, according to the findings by a third-party
auditor.

Paying people equally for the work that they do, regardless of
their gender, has been required by law since the Equal Pay Act
was passed in 1963. And yet women still earn 80 cents for every
$1 that men earn, and are often underpaid even for equal work.

See Mandy Ginsberg speak at
Business Insider’s Ignition conference, December 3 & 4 in
New York and streaming online.

Ginsberg didn’t just want to give lip service to her internal
audit. She hired outside auditor, Syndio, to examine the pay
rates of her workforce which is 36% female. The firm didn’t just
look at job title but grouped employees by what their jobs
entailed. If it found a difference in pay between genders, it
looked at other non-gender factors such as tenure, education,
years of experience to determine if that explained the gap.

And often, it doesn’t. Salesforce
famously audited its workforce, not just once but twice over the
past couple of years and issued $6 million in raises to women and
agreed to publicly discuss its process, becoming the poster child
for equal pay. The second audit and adjustment was done after
Salesforce grew its employee base substantially through
acquisitions, CEO Marc Benioff
previously told Business Insider. 

See Salesforce HR chief Cindy Robbins speak about the
impacts of paying equally


at Business
Insider’s Ignition conference, December 3 & 4 in New
York.

Match has also grown dramatically through acquisitions. So, when
the consultants told Ginsberg that their analysis had found no
discrepancy, Ginsberg was so surprised she demanded the
third-party auditor go back and check the data again. They did
and the results stood.

It was a light-bulb moment for Ginsberg. Although she’s only been
in the top CEO role for a year and a half, she spent the last
half dozen years as the executive in charge of a number of
Match’s biggest businesses, including Match.com, Match Affinity,
Plenty of Fish, OKCupid. 

And one of her “guiding principals” has been to offer pay and
raises based on people’s value to their company “whether they ask
for it or not,” she said in the press
release.

In other words, she hasn’t turned compensation into a negotiating
game, granting raises only when someone asks. She has simply paid
people what the company was willing to pay them and rewarded them
without asking for a job well done. And now, she’s not only
published the results but is speaking out and advocating for this
method.

“So often and in so many businesses, women don’t make
compensation demands. And until we raise our daughters to make
those demands, we, as leaders, need to be proactive and
methodical about how we think about
compensation,” she said.