Airtable: Tracking Peace Data and Combating the Wage Gap

Introduction

Formulas? Check. 

Views by filters? Check. 

Functional blocks? Check. 

If you’ve worked with Airtable, you’re likely aware of the extreme versatility of this platform. However, what you may not realize is that this ~fancy~ spreadsheet can be used as a tool to combat workplace discrimination that manifests in salary discrepancies. In doing so, Airtable becomes much more than an organizational mechanism as it also serves as a peace data repository!  

Exploring Airtable & Peace Data 

Airtable is a cloud collaboration service that allows you to easily build and manage databases. There are over 200 templates to explore that utilize their spreadsheet-database hybrid. Airtable also includes app-like add-ins called blocks that allow for different functions and visualizations of the spreadsheet data. At the Peace Innovation Institute, we utilize Airtable for publishing calendars, content pitches, resource sharing, and human resource functions. Through our exploration of Airtable we have also discovered that it can be a tool to collect peace data within companies and organizations. 

Peace data, or data about positive, prosocial behaviors that maximize mutually beneficial positive outcomes from interactions with others, has four dimensions. They are group identities, behavior data, longitudinal data, and metadata. For now, we will focus on the first dimension, group identities. For more information on the other dimensions of peace data, please see this miro board.

Group identities are social categories that people fall into. Some examples of group identities are the “Big 8” which are: age, ability, class (socioeconomic status), race/ethnicity, gender, religion, culture (national identity), and sexual orientation. Other examples include occupation, relationship status, your alma mater and whether or not you have children. Some of these group identities are salient and others are invisible. Each group identity has sub-categories, which are difference boundaries. For example, for the group identity race/ethnicity, our intern cohort at PII has difference boundaries including Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Portugese, Spanish, and American. 

In this Airtable HR template, you can see some group identities and difference boundaries recorded for each person. 

Difference boundaries are crucial for collecting peace data as peace data is created when people of different group identities positively engage through a mediating technology. These difference boundaries can also be used to evaluate whether or not your company or organization may be contributing to workplace discrimination such as the wage gap.

What is the Wage Gap?

We need adequate wages to live and thrive no matter where we are in the world. In the United States, the Fair Labor Standards Act allows for children as young as 14 to begin working and earning. After years of gaining various work experience or acquiring higher education, imagine that your livelihood falls short of what is deserved - not because of a difference in work quality or skill level, but rather because of your gender or the color of your skin. This is the reality not only in America, but throughout the world. 

In the U.S., women on average earn approximately $0.81 for every $1.00 that a man earns. This discrepancy is highlighted on the annual Equal Pay Day, which falls on the day of the year that represents how many extra work days women must complete to earn the same pay that men earned in the past year. The wage gap is evident in many occupations including pilots, chefs, and professors. The following graphic from a Glassdoor study in 2019 shows the top 15 jobs that experience the highest gender pay gap. 

An insightful episode from Netflix series Explainer, “Why Women are Paid Less”, goes into depth about this gender-based inequality not only in the U.S., but also in countries such as Korea where women make as low as $0.65 per $1.00 that a man makes. However, the episode also revealed that workplace salary discrimination is not based on gender alone. It is actually heightened for women who are mothers or have a family to care for compared to women without children. This concept is known as the motherhood penalty. A 2018 study from Denmark, Children and Gender Inequality: Evidence from Denmark, by Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, Jakob Egholt Søgaard showed that women who had children saw larger changes to their earnings, wages, working hours, and participation rates than men with children as shown in the following graphs.  

The COVID-19 pandemic only made this wage-gap issue more prevalent as women now have no option but to work from home and take care of their families and children that are not currently in school. A study performed by the University of Southern California found that 64% of college-educated mothers reduced their working hours since March 2020 compared to 52% of college-educated women with no children. 

In addition to gender-based, and motherhood-based workplace discrimiation, there is a race-based pay disparity that disproportionately affects women of color. As shown in the graphic below, women of color inherently face a larger wage gap, making an additional $0.06 less than white women on the dollar. 

Adopting Airtable 

As a very functional spreadsheet-database, Airtable can be used by Human Resources departments to organize and visualize employee information such as salaries, number of years with a company, education level, skills, etc. By laying out all of this information in a highly organized and versatile way, understanding what difference boundaries exist and where workplace inequalities exist becomes much easier. Here are some ways that Airtable can be optimized to prevent discriminatory wage gaps and other workplace inequalities:

• The more group identities, the better. By incorporating as many group identities and difference boundary categories as possible in the spreadsheet, workplace transparency is increased which allows less room for discriminatory wage gaps. Anonymous surveys or voluntary disclosure can be utilized to collect data on group identities that are unrelated to someone’s ability to perform a job, but are helpful for tracking peace data. For example, it is inappropriate for someone to ask anyone during a job interview if they have kids or if they intend to have children. However, if you want to monitor the motherhood penalty in your workplace, you can ask employees to anonymously submit whether or not they have children, their gender, and their salary. This data can be collected and displayed in Airtable for transparency. 

• Utilize Airtable blocks. Block add-ins in airtable allow for visualization of trends, changes, and discrepancies across difference boundaries. Seeing visual representations of this data may highlight discrepancies that have previously gone unnoticed. For example, seeing numbers and data across a row and down a column might not be as efficient as seeing a bar graph comparing the positions and salaries of each employee or group of employees. 

• Ensure that your benefits are equally benefitting group identities. Salaries and wages are not the only monetary asset that influences a job’s level of appeal. Benefits add immense value to an employee’s overall job offer. In fact, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that as of March 2020 benefits accounted for 29.8% of the company cost for private industry workers. 

  Utilize Airtable’s clean design to succinctly and effectively organize and present your company/organization’s benefits to your employees. Share the board with them and keep it updated regularly, so they can go back and reference necessary information. Use blocks to show others how many of their coworkers are enrolled in your benefit programs and display the level of value it adds to your company. Track who has enrolled across difference boundaries. Is one group not enrolling? Ask yourself, why is that the case?

• Record promotions, raises, and negotiations. Utilize Airtable to see what group identities are not being promoted. Are they not applying? Are they not asking for a raise or negotiating their salary? Is one group favored in negotiating scenarios over another? Take a hard look at your data to ensure that people of equal skill level and ability are receiving equal pay for equal work. How can you encourage those who are qualified to ask for what they deserve?  

  According to the Harvard Business Review, women are less likely to apply for a job they are not fully qualified for compared to men who will apply for the job. This disparity can be attributed to the sentiment that women must meet every requirement, always follow the rules, and underutilize advocacy.

• Make your recruiting process transparent. Utilize Airtable to visualize your recruiting process and increase transparency. Include stats such as the percentage of career fairs you attend at all womens’ colleges or historically black colleges and universities. What are the group identities of the candidates you are interviewing? Is there a pattern of select group identities in candidates who receive offer letters? Which candidates turn you down? 

Conclusion 

Some countries have made great strides towards closing the wage gap. Iceland is an exemplary country as they have almost closed their wage gap through passing effective parental leave legislation. This legislation allows for nine total months of parental leave -- three months for one parent, three months for another, and the other three can be decided between them. This system has helped to combat the motherhood penalty by treating parental responsibilities as equivalent between genders. Similarly, Rwanda has significantly closed their wage gap. Their constitution includes a commitment to equal rights between men and women and requires that at least 30% of all posts in decision making organs at all levels of government must be women.  

Until other countries step-up and implement large scale changes to combat the wage gap, it is up to individual companies and organizations to ensure that discrimination is not present in their workplace including in their employees’ paychecks. By intentionally collecting and analyzing peace data, using tools like the spreadsheet-database hybrid, Airtable, your company or organization may be able to identify any present workplace discrimination. Your peace data can also inform your plans to actively combat workplace discrimination and create an environment where equal pay for equal work is a reality.  

Are you convinced that Airtable is a useful, fitting tool for your company,  organization, or your next big idea? You can sign up for Airtable here. For more on peace data and the work that we do to promote peace, sign up for our newsletter here

Written by: Abigal Gard and Elisa Selamaj