Walking up hills

I’m bringing an edgy topic up and it may make some of you uncomfortable…but change is uncomfortable and change is necessary to evolve. And if you know me, you know I am not good at ignoring the "elephant in the room." You can always count on me to acknowledge that darn elephant.

According to the Washington Post, “on average, a woman working full-time, year-round earns 84 cents to every dollar paid to a man in the United States.”

And according to BizJournals.com, "Of the four highest industries by median annual earnings — electrical engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering and economics — the contrast in pay between men and women still is quite stark, the data shows. For example, computer science is a high-earning field for women ($91,990), their earnings are just 79.6% of men’s ($115,500), the data shows."

There is a real elephant here. Don't ignore the elephant!

If you follow me on social media, you know I walk a lot. I like to move. I like to walk outdoors for fresh air. And if you really stalk me, you know that I am a lover of hills and mountains. I walk hills for more efficient and more effective exercise time. I am not afraid to work harder to get better results. I know there is more return on my investment when I work hard. Me walking hills instead of the flatter parts of our Earth is evidence of my own behavior that pushes me to expect better results for how I choose to spend my energy.

So bringing these two topics together, my point is I work harder in my job than some of my male peers and I get paid less. This is a fact. This is not about greed and me needing more money, but more about why my output is valued less than my male peers for what we can argue is equal output.

Last year, my team hit every expected product ship date that I committed for the fiscal year. I’ll spare you my perf story but the output exceeded expectations. So trust me that I’m not a performance issue. 😘

And like any corporate American company, my employer ends up rewarding me for this by giving me more responsibility. I have been at Oracle for 2 years and 10 months, and as an outcome of the last two annual performance cycles , my team size ends up growing. So I must be doing something right, yes? They want me to be responsible for more, so I am doing good things. As more scope moves to me, new leaders and teams move under my span of control. When this happens, I get a little bump.

I missed seeing this pattern in year 1... but after year 2, I got hip to the game...or dare I say the coup. I began to notice that the adjustment that ties to my leaders’ talk track of celebrating my performance, also correlates with my pay staying just a wee bit higher than the development managers who begin reporting to me. My pay is adjusted because of my performance (or so they tell me) and then I soon inherit more engineers, and begin to realize that these guys were making more than me, at lower levels, prior to my pay bump. Interesting.🤔

Should I celebrate this behavior when I get a little bump?! Yay Lisa!! You are doing great! Here’s more pay! 🤡

No. This is not something to celebrate. I’m grateful but I’m not celebrating.

Some will assume I’m greedy when I share that I curiously wonder what my VP peers are bringing home. Dare I say that these VPs are all male in my org of 1200+ engineers. I am the only female in my level in this organizational structure. My guess is these VP males aren’t in need of “bumps” when they inherit new scope with the seasoned development managers who are two levels below them. Which means they are getting different "bumps" on their annual reviews. This is not rocket science folks. Hello Elephant! I see you! #justsaying

So what am I going to do about this? I am going to start writing about it. Maybe I'll even talk about it a bit more in more public settings. But I will also keep "walking my hills." And I’ll trust that as more women start walking more hills, this will course correct for all of us?!

This post isn’t going to change my pay or the pay for the next female engineer that is getting undervalued. But maybe this post will create more awareness to the support networks and communities of women out there.

If there are women in your circles who are walking up hills…PLEASE don’t let them give up. I hope more women walk more hills. The more in quantity we are, the more of a chance things like equal pay will change. If some women decide that flat Earth is more their style, that's fair, do you. But for my daughters' sake, I hope there are more women who choose to walk hills with me.

💪🏻❤️✌🏻