We observed a gender pay gap within the Open Food Network. If you count every dollar spent and if it was paid to a male or a female person, you see significantly more money going to men.
In my understanding, our situation is different to the simpler pay gap where two people doing the same work are paid differently. We have standardised rates for developers but we haven’t applied the same to the rest of the team. We also have a lot of flexibility around payments and volunteer work. That is partly because people are awesome and like to volunteer. But there is also a limited budget and not everybody gets their ideal payment.
The underlying causes are complex and I’m not sure if we understand them completely. In this thread, I would like to start brainstorming ideas how to close the pay gap. I would like us to avoid any judgment or adding any reasoning for our ideas. Brainstorming works best when you put all the stupid ideas out there and later we will review and find the best ones. I will start with a separate reply to this new topic.
After we collected ideas for a while, we can then analyse them in a different topic here or in a meeting. Then could be a good time to look at the underlying assumptions of the ideas and which values they might support. There may be a discussion about values before we can pick the best solution.
But for now, let’s brain dump everything we can think of or we have heard somewhere.
