Mayor Walsh features his collaboration with business on equal pay day

This morning, Mayor Martin J. Walsh joined nearly 200 business leaders at the Omni Parker House for an event discussing the disparities in wage equity that remain in Boston and around the country.

The first annual Best Practices Conference for the signatories of Mayor Walsh's 100% Talent Compact, a commitment to wage equity in the workplace, was sponsored by the Boston Women's Workforce Council, Simmons College, and the Mayor's Office of Women's Advancement. It included a panel discussion of upcoming gender wage gap reporting by area businesses and presentations from business leaders on action steps being taken at their companies to close the wage gap.

“Closing the wage gap requires a multifaceted approach,” Mayor Walsh said. “We have to create more pipelines for female employees, we have to create more family-friendly policies that help us attract and retain female employees, and we have to ensure the culture of our work environments is welcoming and inclusive of all employees.”

“The Boston Women’s Workforce Council is proud of the work Mayor Walsh’s office is doing to promote wage equity awareness," said Cathy Minehan, Chair of the Boston Women’s Workforce Council. “Conversations like these need to be happening from the board room down in every company in America, and we are starting that trend in Boston.”

State Treasurer Deborah B. Goldberg moderated a panel discussion with Jeff Leiden, CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and Bob Reynolds, CEO of Putnam Investments. It was followed by a panel moderated by Megan Costello, Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office of Women’s Advancement, joined by Lynn Albright, Vice President of Stores, East Territory, Gap Inc.; Regis Mulot, Executive Vice President, Human Resources, Staples; Betsy Larson, Vice President, Compensation, MassMutual; and Kathy Horgan, Executive Vice President, Global HR/Chief Operating Officer, State Street.
 

“State Street is proud to be leading the way on closing the wage gap in Boston,” Horgan said. “At State Street, we have been very intentional about creating opportunities and pipelines for women and tracking metrics that will measure our success throughout this process.”

Leading up to today’s conference, signatories were asked to participate in a survey to share best practices with the work they are doing toward reaching pay equity. In addition, three data partners - State Street, Putnam Investments, and MassMutual Financial Group - tested the wage data collection process to smooth out reporting details and to report to other signatories about their experiences with the initial process.

The event included a data training led by Azer Bestavros from the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering of Boston University, who is leading the aggregation component, in anticipation that all signatories will provide an anonymous snapshot of their employee wages to understand any gaps that currently exist.

The Boston Women’s Workforce Council expects those snapshots in the spring and will release key findings from all signatories this summer.