Glassdoor has an equation to help figure out your own company's wage gap

This Equal Pay Day, Glassdoor is offering a way to take action.

The jobs site is "celebrating" Equal Pay Day — the date in 2017 that women must work to to earn what men did in 2016, this year falling on April 4 — with a guide that tells employers how to determine what their own pay gap is. Glassdoor found in its own research that women in the United States earn 76 cents to a man's dollar, but got a lot more specific than that.

The guide by Glassdoor's chief economist gets pretty detailed and technical with actionable steps employers can take to audit their own salary practices, involving equations like this:

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Basically, employers need to evaluate their human resources teams to make sure those departments are collecting the right data. Then, they should get some software for doing complex statistics involving all these data points:

• Gender

• Job title

• Age

• Department

• Location

• Full-time/part-time status

• Annual base pay

• Annual bonuses, commissions and stock awards

• Seniority level

• Highest education

• Score on most recent performance evaluation

• Hire date

• Race or ethnicity

Once employers run statistical regressions on all these data points and determine the source of any pay gap — whether differences in pay among people in the same roles or overrepresentation of men in higher-paying jobs, for example — there are next steps. Employers have to decide whether to share results with their employees, or with the wider world. Plus, they should commit to making equitable salary offers, controlling for conscious and unconscious bias in performance reviews, and pledging their commitment to equal pay on pledges like Glassdoor's.

Along with its pay evaluation guide, Glassdoor has now gotten more than 3,000 employers to sign a commitment to equal pay. Those employers include companies like Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter.

While lots of companies sign pledges like these and commit to supporting equal pay, Glassdoor's guide is among the most specific ways out there companies can actually try to close the gender and racial wage gap.

“The reality is if employers haven’t done the work to truly analyze their pay data, they will have a hard time knowing if a wage gap exists. Our experience shows pay gaps don’t result from overt discrimination, they result from years of unintentional bias that can creep into an organization over time," Glassdoor Vice President of Corporate Affairs Dawn Lyon said in a statement. "Analysis is far more involved than printing out a spreadsheet and eyeballing it - you need to go deep and control for a variety of factors to get the real story.”