Microsoft is working to repair its public image and change course by addressing the damage that CEO Satya Nadella caused last week by saying that women should, perhaps, not ask for raises. His comments immediately became an international high water mark for tone-deafness — and being flat wrong — and he continues to apologize and promise change.
The executive quickly followed his initial comments with a tweet, and later a formal retraction. Today Nadella went further in an internal memo that included a new apology and a set of notes explaining what he intends to implement at Microsoft regarding diversity.
The full memo, which GeekWire published (TechCrunch confirmed with Microsoft that the text is real), is worth reading. The key excerpts follow:
The data regarding employee pay in the United States is encouraging, but hardly complete. Microsoft is a multinational outfit, with employees spread around the globe. Having near-perfect salary equity in its home market is good, but if those figures are different in other regions, the company has work ahead of it.
It would be good of Microsoft to release more detailed statistics on a per-country basis. That data would help women around the world better understand the labor dynamics in their countries. And it would help the technology industry better understand where pay gaps based on gender are wider — that could help people ask for the raises that they deserve.
Tasking the company’s senior leadership team with increasing diversity is a fine idea in principle, but we’ll have to see. This is also a push that will take time to bear out, meaning that it will be all but impossible to determine its effectiveness in the near-term. Training is similar in that it might only have impacts later on. However, it is still a good idea.
