Tell us about your organization.

The Center for Women & Enterprise (CWE) is a nationally known nonprofit organization, supporting women who see entrepreneurship as a means to economic empowerment. We serve all women while keeping equity at the core of our outreach efforts to ensure that we represent women from various racial, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds. Our goal is not about whether our clients launch their businesses but to provide resources that allow them to assess all of their options to make the best economic choices.

Why did you join the talent compact?

The BWWC’s and CWE’s missions are inextricably linked. Wage inequities are the primary reason women choose entrepreneurship when they would not have otherwise. They often feel undervalued and under-compensated at their current workplaces and believe running their own business will, at the very least, help them reach their full potential. If we can close the gender and racial wage gaps, the CWE believes there will be a more healthy engagement with entrepreneurship from women. Women would enter entrepreneurship based on their passion rather than necessity.

What are the biggest challenges you face in your organization as it relates to gender and racial wage equality?

We have the same hierarchical issues as other companies, even though we have no men working here. CWE staff found it hard to advance or even identify opportunities to grow within the organization. We needed more transparency in salaries and promotions. Offering raises in pay, however, also means increasing administrative overhead, which can be difficult to explain to donors. We needed to find a way to convey to donors why investing in our staff is vital to the organization’s mission and impact. Paying people fairly is especially important in an organization focused on women’s economic empowerment.

What programs have you developed to promote that directly or indirectly address closing wage gaps in your organization?

We hired an external HR firm to conduct an assessment of our organization’s job roles, descriptions, and salary levels. They proposed salary bands for specific job levels based on interviews with our staff, internal roles and responsibility descriptions, and industry best practice for level of pay. We then evaluated every staff member’s job levels to ensure they were being compensated accordingly to our newly developed salary bands. The entire process took us over two years, but we can now proudly say that our salary bands are equitable and competitive to industry standards and, most importantly, that they are transparent to our staff. Employees are now equipped with the tools and agency to discuss promotions and raises with their managers.

Moving forward, we will continue to measure and monitor staff satisfaction by introducing new tools to monitor pay equity and advancement, as well as a dashboard that looks at various internal and external equity metrics. The equity metrics will examine staff turnover, board and staff representation to reflect the communities we serve, the quality of our programs for women seeking to start and grow their businesses, and our overall impact on the entrepreneurship sector.