Every year, March 14 marks national Equal Pay Day, a date dedicated to raising awareness and urging social change surrounding the salary disparity that women as a whole experience in our national workforce. But this year, advocates of gender equity say that Equal Pay Day is just the beginning. “March 14 is the launch of an entire year of Equal Pay Days that will highlight pay gaps experienced by women of different races, ethnicities, sexual orientation and gender identity, and by those who are also mothers,” Noreen Farrell, chair of the advocacy group Equal Pay Today, announced to the press on Tuesday. And it’s a movement that legislators hope will gain momentum moving forward. According to President Joe Biden, “despite historic growth, rising wages, and unemployment at a near record low, women working full-time, year-round are paid an average 84 cents for every dollar paid to men,” He notes that in our country these pay disparities are even more pronounced for Black women, Native American women, Latinas, many Asian American women, and women with disabilities.
While these statistics ring true throughout all industries within our economy, the impact they make on the world of customer contact is particularly grave: according to CMP Ressearch nearly 70% of individuals working in the customer service space are women, most of whom are call center agents. Overwhelmingly, agents tend to be women of color and from marginalized communities, without access to the higher wages afforded those in the C-Suite. Even when it comes to women in the boardroom, female executives are still paid 25% less than their male counterparts. Despite studies that show women work at higher, more productive rates, are more engaged at work, are better leaders and even offer more culturally to businesses by their involvement, the attributes of success women exhibit are somehow still not enough to warrant full pay equity in the U.S. And if work ethic isn’t enough to sway the economics, education isn’t either: women account for more than half of the college-educated labor force in the United States, but higher education doesn’t even set them apart from women who don’t have a college degree when it comes to closing the pay gap.
If women can’t make it out of the call center seats, and even when they go to school or try to they don’t reach equal pay with men at work, what does that mean for EX in the CX industry?
It means that they fall into traps of gendered work roles, remote working parenthood, low wages and little mobility in companies that don’t recognize the disparity or dedicate DE&I initiatives to eliminating them. “The choices that women make, particularly when they are mothers, are just going to naturally lead to lower earnings in part because they're working fewer hours,” Rachel Greszler, a senior research fellow at the Washington D.C.-based think tank the Heritage Foundation, shared with USA Today. “They might be giving up wages in turn for remote work or more flexible type of work or maybe certain types of benefits.”
Women working in customer contact continually face roadblocks and obstacles that make it hard for them to advocate for themselves, speak up, prompt change and raise awareness about the gender pay gap. Even though more business thought leaders, newspapers and social media posts urge ideas like pay transparency, open door policies in the workplace and community building that supports women, the reality is that if women themselves have to be the ones to get the ball rolling on "taboo" subjects, they are putting more on their own plates and proliferating the idea that women will get things done without even being asked to. It’s a form of emotional and social labor that further drops the equity scale, and keeps women right where they’re at while their male counterparts wonder why they haven’t thought of that idea. Ironically enough, my own act of writing this piece to raise awareness on pay disparity in customer service as a woman of color working in the customer contact industry goes to show that these issues are first and foremost on the minds of women before the realizations occur to everybody else.
The way that we can change this is by getting everyone else on board. Of course, the women of customer contact have already begun doing so by creating spaces with and for them to discuss these issues, teach each other advocacy skills and rally the workforce around them. I’m proud to say that at CMP my colleagues do exactly that. But when things are always for women, by women, the burnout rates of women working to climb the corporate ladder in customer service rise exponentially. We’ve already experienced that reality throughout the pandemic, where women’s participation in labor fell to the lowest level seen in 35 years. Women alone cannot carry the brunt of this movement towards social change. Colleagues who are Black, LGBTQIA+, or disabled, who may also have workplace inequity at the forefront of their minds due to their own experiences with being marginalized, should also not be expected to solely champion women’s causes on the behalf of women under the umbrella term we loosely use as “diversity.” When “doing the work” lies in the hands of the people who need the work to be done in order to succeed, we are doing a disservice to our colleagues, bosses, friends and even ourselves.
“A job is about more than a paycheck—it is about dignity and respect,” said President Biden. “Equal pay is about justice and fairness and living up to our values and who we are as a Nation. Together, we have to make sure that our daughters have the same rights and opportunities as our sons.” Making sure that all generations have the opportunity to experience gender parity in the workplace means that today’s employees must function with an acute awareness that the way things are now is not the way things will be in the future. The reality of one person who loves their job might not be the same experience for someone else in the department–trying to understand why that is, and if your organization’s operations are contributing to the dissatisfaction of your colleagues is a good place to start when it comes to developing personal awareness of the wage gap. Being the person who shares their salary, suggests a support initiative or brings up something that doesn’t quite sit well with you is a means of normalizing candid conversations on these issues. Not talking over your teammates, crediting their ideas and validating their experiences makes them feel seen and heard in the workplace. Praising your female coworkers or suggesting to your boss that they might be a great fit for your next presentation, to go to a conference, or to speak as a subject matter expert on a given topic creates an opportunity for the playing field to level out–and for your coworkers move out of the contact center and advocate for higher pay.
We’ve already seen the beginnings of this in the CX world as more women rise through the ranks and dismantle the gendered status quo of customer contact. In their upper management roles, these women are prioritizing the efforts listed above as integral to the future of the industry. When women move out of the call center and into the C-Suite their presence creates a new level of visibility that creates a consciousness of what the working world is like for everyone. It’s everyone’s responsibility to let them know that the space for them is already there–all we have to do is open the boardroom door.