Question: My company wants to set a goal of reducing the pay gap between men and women. Do we have to achieve “full parity” for us to be considered successful? Or is “solid progress” enough? These are the days of pay transparency, and most companies and States have just begun to address it. By law in a number of States, companies MUST strive to reduce the “gender equity” gap, as it is known. Pay practices produced a gender pay gap of 30% for many years, and 20% since the Grea

Question: “My company is looking for a better way to evaluate the performance of our CEO. It seems like “stock value” has been the primary way to do so, at least historically. Is it still the best performance measure of a CEO’s efforts to increase the value of a company?” Answer: It is the “common measure” historically, but far from the “best!” A company’s stock market value is affected by many “psychological factors” that influence stock prices in general. For example, in th

Question: In my role as a Compensation Manager, I compare my company’s internal pay rates against the marketplace. But I’m always curious as to whether I should be using the Weighted Average or the Median as the “central measure of tendency”? Is one better than the other? Answer: Perhaps not “better” but there are good reasons to use one or the other. It depends upon how you value each of these measures, and to some extent upon what you are hoping to accomplish. Let’s look at