Nadella Comments Push Tech Gender Gap Disparities To Forefront Once Again

Reena Gupta is one busy person. She's a parent and the CEO of two technology companies, totaling 75 employees.

Gupta, along with several others, was stunned to hear Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s controversial statements made this week that discouraged women from asking for raises. Gupta said it painted a bleak picture of the state of affairs across the channel.

’This literally caught me off-guard,’ she said. ’It doesn’t matter who the person is. Whether it’s [a] man or a woman, if they’re performing and they deserve it, they should get the raise. For me, gender has never ever been an issue. … I think if anyone says salaries should be gender-based, that’s a big mistake.’

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Gupta, head of the Tennessee solution providers Avankia and TargetRecruit, said women have made strides in coming together to insist on asking for raises, when appropriate.

Nadella’s initial comments at a conference devoted to women in technology in Phoenix, may perhaps indicate the attitude behind closed doors at Microsoft, said several solution providers CRN reached out to this week.

Nadella later retracted his statements, calling them ’inarticulate’ in a tweet, and he also corrected himself in a company-wide email.

Microsoft's workforce is dominated by men, which according to some female leaders, speaks louder than anything else.

Microsoft’s global workforce is made up of 29 percent women, up from 24 percent a year ago, according to figures released by Fortune earlier this month. Microsoft reported the percentage of senior executive women and minorities was 27 percent, up from 24 percent in 2013.

Fortune recently ranked tech companies based on the makeup of their workforce and found Pandora to be the most equal employer, with 51 percent of its staff male and 49 percent female. Microsoft was listed No. 12 in the Fortune ranking of 14 companies, beating out Cisco and Intel, both of which employ staffs that are 77 percent male.

Nita Chaudhary, co-founder of the nonprofit gender equality advocacy group UltraViolet, said a company whose workforce is less than 30 percent female is unacceptable, especially considering the size of an industry giant like Microsoft. Chaudhary also criticized benefits Microsoft offers, including 12 weeks maternity leave, compared to Google's 22 weeks.

"It is shameful that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella would tell women -- especially in an industry that already has a serious problem recruiting and retaining female talent -- not to ask for raises,’ Chaudhary said. ’Wage discrimination costs women and their families close to half a million dollars over their lifetime.’

NEXT: Solution Provider Leaders Question Inequality In The Channel

Chaudhary noted women on average in the U.S. still make $0.77 to every $1 a man earns.

Microsoft representatives on Friday declined comment to CRN.

Sonia St. Charles, CEO of solution provider Davenport Group, told CRN she has experienced gender gap issues specifically related to her earnings. She said in the 1990s, while working for a large, publicly-traded company as a senior executive, she was told a male subordinate would receive a raise to support his family, which had seen the recent addition of a baby.

St. Charles said though Nadella’s comments were offensive, she is glad the topic of wage disparities is being raised again because it is still a prevailing issue in the IT industry, from her perspective.

’My guess is that Satya Nadella’s comments reflect his personal view that is incongruent with Microsoft’s publicly-stated philosophy, which is why there has been a flurry of retractions regarding his comment,’ she wrote in an email to CRN. ’It is not a surprise that a highly-compensated male underestimates the gender pay gap, and yet his comments have had a positive effect overall because we are now discussing the topic, again. The more light we can bring to this topic, the more that will be done to ensure it gets corrected.’

PUBLISHED OCT. 10, 2014