Women Set the Bar Too Low on Pay — So We Tell Them to Aim Higher, Says ComAp HR Director

Article originally published on Ekonews.cz. | Author: Martina Patočková 

"Pay for men and women in the same role still differs. One reason is that women tend to ask for lower salaries as early as the job interview stage. At ComAp, we have found a way to address this issue, and our gender pay gap is gradually shrinking," says HR Director Jitka Smith. 

The EU Pay Transparency Directive, which takes effect this year, puts the spotlight on the gender pay gap, the difference in pay between women and men for the same work or work of equal value. Changing the approach of how companies recruit is one of the ways to reduce this gap, Jitka Smith explains in this interview for Ekonews. 

"If a hiring manager is not explicitly instructed by the company to tell a female candidate she could earn more, she will often be hired at a lower salary. And there’s no bad intent behind it. But once we spotted this pattern in the data, we introduced a new measure. If a candidate asks for less than what is standard for the position, we tell her how much she could be earning,” says Jitka Smith, HR Director at Czech technology company ComAp. The company develops control systems for engines and generators, with branches in dozens of countries worldwide.

“After maternity leave, women’s confidence often drops” 

A while back, your colleague mentioned on the Ekonews podcast that the pay gap at ComAp was around nine percent. That was for 2023. Your target is two percent. How are you progressing? 

We’ve been working on that for four years now. In 2024, we managed to bring it down to seven percent, and now we're at four. We’re talking about the adjusted pay gap, where we don’t see a major issue, so reaching two percent within roughly two years shouldn’t be a problem. 

What exactly does “adjusted pay gap” mean? 

It means comparing apples with apples: the same job levels, the same positions, people doing the same kind of work. The unadjusted pay gap is higher, though. We’re a global company and our CEO is a foreign national. What's more, most of our roles are technical, and women make up only about twenty percent of our workforce. If you just divide the numbers based on maths only, they don’t tell you anything meaningful. 

How did you manage to reduce the gap after adjusting for these factors? You say it's not a major issue, but at the same time, you must have taken some measures...

We started about five years ago. As long as a company is smaller, say up to 200 people, the management often feels they have a “clear” overview, and salary trends depend on how well the managers are able to negotiate. At this stage, every company develops some kind of gap. But once you start setting rules, processes, benchmarking and pay grades, that gap begins to show in the data. It’s what we call the "legacy pay gap," and it takes a painfully long time to fix.  

So you started creating the system five years ago? 

We established levels, benchmarks, and we do everything globally. But the most important part is that we introduced an IT system on top of all that, so we have data. Without data, it just cannot work. We also put processes in place, meaning we track performance and compensation, management, potential, and talent, and we segment it by role types. We've tried to build a transparent, fair platform that helps us start closing the legacy pay gap. 

How does a legacy pay gap happen?

In a smaller company, mistakes in compensation sometimes happen. But there is a second factor, and we can still see this happening in every company today: women ask for less money. If a manager isn't instructed by the company to tell a female candidate that she could be paid more, she gets hired at a lower salary. There’s no bad intent behind it. But once we spotted this in the data, we introduced a new measure. If a female candidate asks for less than what is standard for the position, we bring to her attention how much she could actually earn.

And this happens often?

It does, actually. And you can see it happening right after they leave school. The bottom line is, women are still afraid to ask for more, whereas men generally aren’t. The biggest issue comes after maternity leave, because that's when women’s confidence often drops. You can’t read a female candidate’s mind to know what she can actually do, and when she tells you during an interview that she’s forgotten everything and hasn’t kept up, you may place her in a lower role or pay grade with good intentions. But then, three months later, you may find out she's just severely underestimated herself, and you have to close the gap. We do an annual salary review, but, frankly, it’s hard to make up for a poor starting point.

I myself realised this because when I returned to work part-time after parental leave, the pay gap was there. No one thought to adjust my salary and it didn’t even occur to me to actually ask. 

ComAp is quite exceptional in this regard. A large percentage of mothers going on maternity leave keep working. To a certain extent, they maintain their connection to the company and continue to grow career-wise. Over the past five years, we’ve made sure that when someone returns from maternity leave, we bring her pay up to where it should be at that time, meaning her salary is adjusted accordingly for the period away. We offer a lot of part-time positions and strive to keep people with us, involved in the company's activities. When you give mothers the space, they are more than happy to use it. And 90 percent of them return to us. 

“We’re curious to see if men will be the ones pushing for higher wages”

You mentioned women underestimating themselves during job interviews. What is it like in other countries, given you have branches in 18 countries and can make comparisons?

It depends on the location and the type of company. In large companies and in the US, the UK, Germany, and Australia, you don’t really run into this problem. But in smaller companies and across much of the rest of the world, you can still see it happen.

When you talk about ComAp’s adjusted pay gap, is it in line with the Equal Pay Directive, which is supposed to take effect this year? 

It is, but we currently calculate it using base salary only. The moment we throw in other components, such as bonuses and the like, it will worsen. Not dramatically, but since we’re at four percent now, we might end up getting over five percent (five percent being the threshold in the directive that companies are expected to stay within, A/N). But the criteria are set, so it isn’t an issue to explain the differences.

Criteria such as performance, overtime, and the like? 

Yes. And besides, we're talking about roughly four people here, so I don’t see a major problem there. I am confident we’ll have that handled by the next regular salary review. I'm more interested in something else. The purpose of the legislation is to close the gap for women, to bring them up to par. But with the directive applying to all employees, we are very curious to see to what extent it will actually protect women, how they will be making use of it, and whether, eventually, we might not see men being the ones putting more pressure on wages.

What do you mean? 

As a company, we must communicate our pay system internally. If someone asks individually, we must answer what the average salary is for a given job level for women and for men. That means anyone can make a comparison, not just women. 

So, men may start coming to ask…

And they already are. So it will be very interesting to see what real impact the directive actually has. From the perspective of women, I don’t think we have a problem internally anymore. But I’m genuinely curious about what it will do to the company culture. Because this isn’t an exact science. This is HR. 

Employees in specialised companies like ours, where almost everyone has a university degree, will need to show some understanding. They will be able to analyse things. At the same time, I would expect them to also understand that this matter calls for a reasonable approach. There is a difference between well-paid and lower-paid professions.

In what sense?

In lower-paid jobs, you get a job description and that's how you perform it. And it's simpler in the sense that men and women should draw the same salary. But in companies like ours, the directive comes with two sides: a human one and a legal one.

Our people are highly educated, capable and innovative. We need to motivate them, which means that while they have a job description, we also add projects, skills, and learning on top of that. This means that they develop, step out of their roles to learn leadership and other skills. They go the extra mile. So the question is, what is “work of equal value” then? People will need to be sensible about how they view these new rules. 

You're probably working on how to explain to employees what is changing, what they will be entitled to, and what it will all involve? 

That’s non-negotiable. All of this will not work without a communication campaign on our part. But we also have to wait for the final wording of the Czech law that will transpose the directive, so we align the details of legal requirements and terminology. The campaign will need to be strong and tailored to our environment and culture. We have more than 600 employees in total and we deal with differences in jurisdiction, territory and culture.

Beyond communication, what else will you need to put in place?

There are four key areas we need to cover. One is communicating pay at the recruitment stage, which differs everywhere. So far, this applies to us only in the US, where we're already doing it.

Then there’s internal communication, with confidentiality in mind. That means what information we must provide to employees while maintaining confidentiality. That’s pretty much similar everywhere, and we will build on EU standards.

The next area is the role of government involvement, both in terms of reporting and enforcement. How will the state act to ensure companies do this properly? We hope it will act in a way that helps us achieve the desired goal. If a company receives a massive fine and also has to pay additional funds to close the pay gap, it won’t have much money left for those payments.

This relates to pay confidentiality clauses…

Those have been explicitly illegal in the Czech Republic since June 1 last year due to the “Flexi-amendment." In Europe, employers are not allowed to prohibit employees from sharing their salaries, regardless of the company’s size. Other legal obligations depend on the number of employees, and individual EU countries may go further, requiring employers to meet certain standards even with a smaller workforce.

When it comes to the directive we’re discussing, Sweden is probably the most interesting case; there, certain obligations apply to companies with as few as ten employees. Everywhere else, the threshold is over fifty or over a hundred employees. That makes sense, because you need a certain number of people to manage such a system effectively.