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Everything Equal Pay All At Once, The Best Consulting Firm You’ve Never Heard Of, Lessons From SVB’s Blowup

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Here is the published version of this week’s Forbes Careers newsletter, which brings the latest news, commentary and ideas about the workplace, leadership and the future of work straight to your inbox every Wednesday. Click here to get on the newsletter list!

My inbox was full in recent weeks of ways to cover Tuesday’s Equal Pay Day, the day that marks how far into the following year women need to work to earn what men did in the prior year. But it’s been a hard topic to miss over the past year, as Hollywood stars make it a pet issue, female athletes score agreements helping to level the playing field and more states and local governments pass pay transparency laws.

The impact of the latter—laws that try to take some of the guesswork out of pay negotiations by providing pay scales in job ads and, hopefully, spur more equal pay—could end up coming faster than we realize. As I reported Tuesday, a new analysis from jobs site Indeed found that these mandates, which have passed in just four states and five local jurisdictions, are having an outsized impact. Over the past three years, the number of job ads that share salary ranges across industries has more than doubled and is nearing half of all job listings—close to 44%, up from just 18% three years earlier.

The increasing share of job postings that include salary ranges is likely due to several reasons. Employers that have at least some workers in jurisdictions with laws mandating salary ranges are sometimes required to also post them for jobs that allow remote hires, spreading the practice. In addition, there are bills pending this year that would require pay scales in job postings in at least 11 more states or jurisdictions, including Connecticut, Hawaii and Massachusetts.

No surprise, then, that the metro areas that have seen the fastest growth of the practice include cities like Honolulu and Boston. “It looks like employers start adapting before the law even goes into place,” Cory Stahle, an economist with Indeed’s Hiring Lab, told me.

My piece also explores how high-wage jobs tend to have less transparency than low-wage job categories like child care or home health aides. (A long history of sharing wages for low-wage jobs likely has something to do with it, but I’ll speculate it may also have to do with what vagueness may have ultimately saved employers of higher-cost workers.) Check it out, along with our other recent pay equity and diversity coverage, from research showing women of color often set lower pay ranges than white men to Target earning a perfect score on Arjuna Capital’s racial and gender scorecard to how much the wage gap can add up to over a lifetime of earnings. (Hint: It’s a lot.)


FEATURED STORY

Meet One Of The Best Consulting Firms You’ve Never Heard Of

Founder and chairman of ghSMART, Geoff Smart, recently sat down with Forbes assistant managing editor Diane Brady to discuss creating a leadership consultancy that has outscored rivals like McKinsey, Bain and BCG on metrics like pay, prestige and employee satisfaction. Check out their discussion here.


ON OUR AGENDA

News from the world of work

Silicon Valley Bank’s bust: The demise of Silicon Valley bank is a financial story, but it has impact on workers’ careers and lessons for leaders. Contributor Edward Segal outlines how communication efforts to avert a crisis and shore up its balance sheet ended up causing a crisis instead. Before the FDIC said it would protect SVB’s depositors, fintech company Brex said it was helping startups borrow more than $1 billion to meet the bank’s payroll crunch. And what’s it like to actually work at the failed bank right now? Contributor Jack Kelly describes how workers are offered 45 days of work at 1.5 times their pay.

A murky job market: Meta took another swing of the ax Tuesday, announcing it is cutting another 10,000 jobs, as Google said it was pressuring workers to improve performance, venture capitalists claimed tech employees are doing “fake work” and layoffs continued to mount, especially in technology. Meanwhile, General Motors took another approach, offering the ‘majority’ of its salaried staff voluntary buyouts. The news followed a robust labor market report, which beat estimates significantly by adding 311,000 jobs in February, especially in sectors like hospitality and healthcare, but the unemployment rate unexpectedly rose.

A ruling for gig workers: A state appeals court ruled March 13 that firms such as Uber and Lyft can continue treating their California-based drivers as independent contractors, largely upholding a ballot measure that carved out exceptions for ride hailing and delivery services from a 2019 California labor law. ForbesSiladitya Ray reports on the ruling here.

Texas tenure no more? Amid growing politicization of education issues and the increasingly popular cause among Republican legislators over faculty tenure and the teaching of “critical race theory,” a new bill filed in the Texas Senate would prohibit the state’s public higher education institutions from offering tenure or other types of “permanent employment status” beginning Sept. 1.

A new version of ChatGPT arrives: One leap made by GPT-4, the new version of the chatbot OpenAI announced Tuesday, is its ability to parse images, writes ForbesSiladitya Ray. In one example the language model is shown a picture of cooking ingredients and responds with multiple options of what can be made from them. It also advances the ability to contextualize and summarize large bodies of text.


WORK SMARTER

Practical insights and advice from Forbes contributors for building your career, leading smarter and finding balance.

Not all personality types do well working remotely. Here’s how to tell if it works for you.

“Imposter syndrome” is under scrutiny. It’s a paradox when it comes to high performers, even while 75% of women executives say they experience it in the workplace.

Have survival guilt about layoffs? Channel it into something positive.

Become a better public speaker by following these tricks used by Oscar winners Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Ever heard of the Peter Principle? It may explain why your boss is incompetent.



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