BEFORE
Two companies and two pay equity adjustments. Through the same mechanism, I received different outcomes.
At Company A, the audit moved my base salary up by about 6%. At Company B, the audit increased it by less than half a percent.
The difference wasn’t the company. It was what I did at the offer stage, years before either audit ran.
Here’s the story, and the four-question script I’d hand any woman walking into a pay conversation this quarter.
AFTER
Most of us were trained to think about pay in one window a year. Annual review, merit increase, or promotion conversation if you’re lucky.
That window is too narrow.
There is a second money conversation happening at most mid-size and large companies, and most employees either don’t know it exists or how to ask for it. It’s called a pay equity review.
What is a pay equity audit?
It’s a structured analysis of pay structures, comparing employees who do work of equal value versus solely their job titles. A well-designed audit compares across departments, not just within them. It looks at the cumulative impact of every individual pay decision your managers have made: offers, raises, and bonuses. Even when pay systems are designed to keep things fair, the audit is a quality control mechanism to catch when it goes off track.
Korn Ferry has a solid walkthrough of how companies run these audits if you want the technical version. It also explains why so many companies hesitate to run them, which is useful context if yours hasn’t done one in a while.
I am talking about something the technical articles don’t cover.
My two-company story
Company A. I started in October 2016, and in March 2018, the company ran a pay equity study that resulted in a 6% adjustment.
I negotiated at the offer stage with little success, and the audit came two years too late. While the increase was great, it didn’t make up for 17 months of being under-compensated. Merit increases were calculated on a lower base salary.
The audit fixed the present, but it didn’t reimburse me for the past.
Company B. It was the highest salary offer that I’d received, and I had a contact inside the company who confirmed it aligned with the company’s pay bands. I negotiated for $10,000 more, which was a 6.25% bump before I even started.
Two years later, a pay equity audit moved increased by salary by less than half a percent. Nominal.
At first glance, that looks like the audit barely did anything.
But the audit was nominal because the salary negotiation put me in the correct band. The audit isn’t a separate raise event. It’s a band-correction mechanism. If you negotiate yourself into the right band, there is little for the audit to correct. If you don’t, an audit will increase your salary, but it might be too little, too late.
The audit was a backstop. The negotiation was the leverage.
The three questions to ask, in order
Question 1 (to yourself): What’s my counter-evidence?
Before raising the topic, collect information that supports your case (e.g., job board metrics, industry resources, real-time benchmarking platforms). Pay gaps of more than five percent between groups doing equal work typically require further investigation. If your number is more than 5% off the market band, you’ve found something worth pursuing.
Question 2 (to yourself): When was the last time my company ran a pay equity review?
If you don’t know, that’s your starting point. Many companies run them every one to three years. If yours hasn’t run one recently, that’s a reasonable advocacy point.
Question 3 (to an internal influencer): This approach depends on the company culture. If you don’t want to publicly raise the question at a Town Hall, consider speaking with trusted influencers (e.g., employee resource group leads). If you feel comfortable and safe, ask your supervisor or HR business partner, “I’ve been reading about pay equity audits. How does the company conduct them?” This is a neutral information question.
The part most people skip
A pay equity audit is a company-level tool. Your individual negotiation is a person-level tool. They are not substitutes. They are layers.
This is the move I see mid-career women miss most often. They wait for the system to be fair, instead of operating both inside the system (annual merit conversations, performance documentation) and on top of it (pay equity advocacy, market benchmarking, direct negotiation at every offer).
You are allowed to do all of it.
What part of this conversation do you want to rehearse before having it for real? Hit reply and tell me.