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Study pulls back curtain on gender pay gap in business
A new study has revealed that, in jobs that include incentives as part of pay, women make less than men despite better performance.
A new study reveals that, in jobs that include incentives as part of compensation, a gender pay gap exists despite women outperforming men in those roles.
The Xactly Corp. study surveyed more than 700 of its customers. Based in San Jose, Calif., Xactly provides sales performance management and automated incentive-tracking software that helps corporations determine how much their salespeople should be paid.
While most of the roles were sales-related, the study encompasses any job in which incentives are part of a worker's pay.
The study indicated that women generally outperformed men in terms of reaching their quotas (70% of women compared with 67% of men). Women, on average, received lower commission rates than men (4.8% for men; 4.1% for women) as well as lower total variable and base pay by more than $25,000. Female-led teams included equal numbers of both genders while male-led teams tended to hire more men. The study said that women stayed in their roles for longer than men by nearly one year.
Freshfone update enables mobile telephony service
Freshdesk Inc., a San Francisco-based provider of cloud-based customer support software, announced updates to its Freshfone platform that aims to make it easier for companies to offer help to customers without building regional contact centers.
With this release, local support phone numbers in 36 countries allow for more agents to work remotely using mobile phones, potentially reducing companies' contact center costs. Freshfone is available as part of Freshdesk's mobile apps for iOS and Android devices, enabling agents to answer customer calls as long as they're online and without incurring call-forwarding charges.
Pricing for Freshfone starts at $1 a month for a phone number, with the option of adding more. Companies pay for the minutes spent on calls, while features such as automatic call recording, IVR (interactive voice response) support and agent transfers are free. The announcement comes a year after Freshdesk launched Freshfone.
Birst boosts marketing analytics offering
Birst, a San Francisco-based cloud business intelligence and analytics software provider, looks to give marketers a single view of the customer with its new Marketing Analytics Accelerator. The tool, which integrates online and offline sources of marketing data, intends to increase opportunities to sell additional products and give a complete picture of a customer's profile as he moves from a prospect to a spending customer.
The Marketing Analytics Accelerator features customer profiling and segmentation capabilities and various dashboards for users to analyze data. It integrates with such platforms as Marketo, Salesforce and Google Analytics applications and provides key performance indicators, reports and data visualization capabilities.
The announcement follows news in early October that Birst partnered with SAP to provide SAP's Hana Cloud Platform with analytics.
Let's be realistic here. Please. There's a pay gap between men and women (and some pretty lousy pay for the men to begin with) because the upper echelon gets away with it. I don't know any dumb women; I don't know any women who aren't qualified for their jobs. So why do they getting less for their work...?
Parity won't kill profits, though it might shave a few cents in the short term. But it buys happier employees and better work conditions and that's for the very long term. A fair deal, I say. I also say we make up the added costs by reducing executive pay.
Salary is a result of negotiation. There are men and women who are good at that, and those who are not.
One approach to compensate for the lack of negotiation skills is to have group negotiations and agreements.
On the other hand, women should have extra support options in order to have family and children without sacrificing their career. For example, paid 3 years long maternity leave or 4 work days week paid in full (as 5 days). I'd totally didn't mind if funds for those go out of the common salary pool.