Nokia announces special budget to address gender pay gap

In 2018, Ireland took the lead in closing the gender pay gap by mandating that firms with over 25 employees have to obtain an equal pay certificate. A week ago, US Senator Kamala Harris unveiled a similar plan. Recently, Finnish telecommunications and electronics company Nokia has stepped up to rectify its own gender pay gap issue.

Also read: Closing the gender gap: Iceland shows the way

A recent pay audit by Mercer, a leading human resource consulting firm, found a pay gap at Nokia which could only be explained by gender discrimination. Nokia has said it will eliminate the differences in salary among women and men doing the same work by allocating a special budget for it. Although most of the underpaid employees are women, a few men will get raises too.

In the UK, companies with more than 250 employees are required to disclose their gender pay gaps to the government, and Nokia, with over 100,000 employees worldwide, reported an average pay gap of 21.1 percent among its UK workforce. While most of this gap has been attributed to men holding most of the higher-paying jobs at the company, Mercer found that a number of women doing the same jobs as their male peers weren't getting paid equally.

Nokia CMO Barry French said that the pay gaps they found were small but widespread, with a higher likelihood of appearing among engineering and R&D staff.

"It showed a small but statistically significant unexplained pay gap between men and women. We're doing this because it doesn't fit with our values to have a pay gap like this," added Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri.  

The exact amount that Nokia will be spending on eliminating the differences in salary between its male and female employees is still unspecified, but the company has said that it will be above the $3 million that Salesforce.com Inc. spent to rectify its own gender pay gap in 2015 and 2017. CMO French called the amount "meaningful" but "not material."

Nokia's annual revenue for the year 2018 was $26.64 billion.

Also read: US Senator Kamala Harris announces 'most aggressive equal pay proposal in history'