Facebook and Microsoft say they've eliminated the gender pay gap

You know what's really cool? Eliminating the wage gap between men and women in your workplace. 

Facebook announced on Monday that it has achieved full gender pay equality among its employees, meaning there is no significant difference in the pay earned by men and women at the company with similar experience and similar roles.

"We regularly review our compensation practices to ensure pay equity, and have done so for many years," Lori Matloff Goler, VP of people at Facebook, wrote in a post. "I'm proud to share that at Facebook, men and women earn the same."

The announcement comes on the eve of Equal Pay Day, an annual event to raise awareness of the disparity in pay between men and women that work similar jobs. The key statistic cited by advocates is that women still earn just 78 cents on average for every dollar a man makes.

Not so in the tech industry, however -- at least according to several of the biggest technology companies. While diversity more broadly may be lacking, pay equity is not.

In addition to Facebook, Microsoft also revealed Monday that it has almost completely eliminated the pay gap between its employees. Women at Microsoft now earn 99.8 cents on average for every dollar their male counterparts make. 

"These numbers reflect our commitment to equal pay for equal work, and I’m encouraged by these results," Kathleen Hogan, executive VP of human resources at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. "Our announcement today is another step forward along the path of greater diversity and inclusion progress at Microsoft, and in society as a whole."

Earlier this year, Intel revealed that it too had achieved 100% pay parity among men and women in its workplace for 2015, the first time it ever analyzed that metric. 

"That was a happy, thrilling surprise," Danielle Brown, Intel's chief diversity and inclusion officer, told Mashable in an interview at the time. 

Around the same, Apple CEO Tim Cook informed shareholders that its female employees in the U.S. earned 99.6 cents for every dollar earned by their male peers. 

This is a shining statistic for technology companies that have been very publicly struggling to improve their internal diversity numbers and prove they are more than communities of white men.

More than two-thirds (68%) of Facebook's staff, for example, are men, according to the company's most recent diversity report. That remains a shortcoming, even if the company can rightly be proud that the 32% of staff who are women have pay parity.

The hope, as Intel's Brown pointed out in our previous conversation, is that publicizing the gender pay numbers does more than lead executives to pay themselves on the back.

"It gives you that accountability to keep watching this, to keep committed to the work," she said, "to make sure we don’t fall out of that 100% goal."

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