Intel Chooses Equality, Signs White House Equal Pay Pledge With Other Tech Giants

Intel made a lot of news last week as it rolled through its annual Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco. At IDF ’16 San Fran (Intel also holds IDF in Shenzhen annually), the company made major announcements in the areas of Merged Reality, Deep Learning, and Silicon Photonics, and also demonstrated the multi-media capabilities if its next-generation Kaby Lake CPU microarchitecture, which is scheduled to debut in mobile devices in the not too distant future. While those stories appeal to the hardcore technology crowd, an announcement Intel made yesterday will have much broader appeal.

Yesterday, Intel announced that it had signed the White House Equal Pay Pledge, which urges U.S. companies to address the issue of equal pay and affirms the role companies play in reducing the pay gap.

The White House Equal Pay Pledge launched in 2015 at the United States of Women Summit on Women’s Equality Day. It had been signed by a number of large companies already. Yesterday, however, Intel and 28 other companies got on board, including tech giants like Microsoft , Apple , Facebook , LinkedIn, DropBox, Akamai Technologies, and more.

Intel has acknowledged its efforts to address income equality before. Intel actually conducts audits in the U.S. that analyzes its employees’ pay by gender and in its 2015 Annual Report, the company disclosed that it had already achieved 100% gender pay parity. But Intel isn’t stopping there.  In 2016, the company extended the analysis to also include pay data relative to race and ethnicity. According to Intel, it achieved 99% pay equity for under-represented minorities, committed to closing the remaining gap by the end of the year.

Equal pay is an important issue in the tech sector. Of course, equal pay is important across all industries, but as someone that has been entrenched in technology for the better part of two decades, I’ve seen the “boy’s club” mentality and massive male egos that dominate first hand, so it is paramount that leaders address the issue head-on and make clear improvements.  Intel’s recent moves do just that and the company should be applauded.