How We’ve Lowered Our Gender Pay Hole From 15% to five.5%

Buffer is based on the belief that transparency creates trust, makes us responsible and can advance our industry. Our wages have been transparent since 2013, and for the fifth time in a row we are sharing our transparent salary analysis. In this report, we share the difference between what men and women make at Buffer.

We have come a long way in the past five years. Far from the ratio of 70 percent men and 30 percent women in the team when I first wrote this report, this year we’re almost 50/50. And at the time of this writing, our leadership team consists of eight people, five of whom are women.

Here are all of our numbers from our 2021 salary analysis, as well as more information on the positive impact transparency has had on us on the gender pay gap.

Salary analysis 2021

Here’s what the unadjusted gender pay gap will look like at Buffer from March 2021:

Buffer team: 83 people
Women: 39
Men: 44

Median salary for women: $ 123,707
Median salary for men: $ 131,923
Unadjusted percentage gap: 5.46%

note: We report an unadjusted wage gap because we compare the earnings of all men and all women at Buffer, regardless of their role or level of experience. An adjusted pay gap would be the pay gap between people who have similar roles. We don’t have an adjusted pay gap at Buffer because we a. use Salary formula for all of our salaries.

About the numbers

For the second year in a row, our gap has narrowed, and this year it has decreased significantly compared to last year.

We have been tracking the unadjusted gender pay gap at Buffer on a monthly basis since 2019. Here you can see our progress over the past year as the gap gradually decreased from 12.5 percent to 5.5 percent.

Compared to previous years
Here’s a comparison of all the years we’ve done this salary analysis. You can also read each full report at the links below: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017.

Our gender pay gap has fallen from 15% to 5% in the last two years – how did that come about?

We have been closely following the gender pay gap at Buffer since we started our transparent payroll research, and we are committed to narrowing this gap.

Transparency has been a key factor in narrowing our gender pay gap.

We made a lot of small changes, but the most important factor for us was transparency. We believe that transparency creates accountability, and our example shows that transparency can have a powerful impact on closing the gender pay gap.

Transparency led to more learning.

Thanks to our transparency, we have learned more about the gender pay gap and have been able to make changes and adjustments every year. In 2017, when we first ran the report, we didn’t know much about equal pay. We also had a smaller team size with fewer teammates identifying as women and later found that our 2017 gap was narrowing with a high earning woman on the team, so our report didn’t accurately reflect the year for us.

In 2019, we had our highest gender pay gap to date, at 15 percent, and that came in the year we also increased the number of women on our team.

The correlation we saw is that as we hired more women this year, our gender pay gap widened as many of those women were hired at a lower level of experience. However, we’ve seen that gap slowly narrow over the years as more women joined the team and more women got promoted and earn more overall.

More attention has been paid to this change through transparency.

The annual gender pay gap reporting has also brought more teams together to focus on how we can improve pay equity at Buffer. It’s no fun to publish a report that shows our gender pay gap is getting worse every year, and several teams have been highly motivated to improve that number.

Our finance team began collecting gender pay data monthly instead of yearly.

Our People team also played a huge role in diversifying our recruitment pipeline over the years to attract more women in higher-paying positions. The work our people team does is especially impressive when you consider that long-term oriented company, we don’t grow our team much from year to year. Our team size was 72 teammates in 2017 and is now 83 teammates.

The ratio of teammates who identify as men and women at Buffer has improved significantly.

When we started reporting equal pay, we at Buffer were 70 percent men and 30 percent women. That meant any change in the number of women at Buffer had a significant impact on our gender pay gap, and it was much more likely to fluctuate as women joined and left Buffer.

Since then, our gender distribution has become almost 50/50 with 44 men and 39 women on the team. At the time of this writing, our leadership team at Buffer consists of eight employees, five of whom are women.

We are confident of this positive downtrend.

Now, it’s safe to say that our five percent gap isn’t due to a high-income person on the Buffer team. This steady narrowing of our gap over the past two years is the result of many areas of work and will not change drastically in a month.

What’s next for equal pay at Buffer?

We are proud that our gender pay gap is 5.5 percent, well below the industry average. We will continue to do everything we do and monitor our gender pay gap closely throughout the year. We will continue to work to ensure that there is no unadjusted gender pay gap and that our attitudes focus on diversity as a whole. We also hope our trip can help others bridge the gender pay gap.

If you know of other companies that share their gender pay gap publicly, or if you’d like to share yours publicly, Send us a tweet. We like to talk!

Would you like to work in a company with salary transparency? We are hiring, take a look at our vacancies!