Tech giant Adobe has agreed to provide median gender pay gap disclosures requested by a 2021 shareholder resolution, according to a new press release from activist investor Arjuna Capital. This will result in Arjuna withdrawing the proposal, and makes Adobe one of only a handful of companies (including Mastercard, Starbucks and Citigroup) to agree to disclose unadjusted, “raw’ median pay gaps across race, gender or both. Adobe’s median pay gap disclosure, available here, reports an unadjusted pay gap of 1.2 percent for women worldwide. While noting “We do not believe managing to the median pay metric will drive actions that would truly increase fairness in pay and opportunity,” the company has agreed to repeat the disclosure annually “in the spirit of providing an additional element of transparency about the distribution of jobs within our employee population.”
Adobe’s disclosure is also notable for its information on diversity and inclusion at the company, the subject of another wave of proposals from NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer to S&P 100 companies requesting disclosure of their EEO-1 reports. The 24 proposals submitted this week are a follow-up to the Comptroller’s July campaign which sent letters (but not formal proposals) to S&P 100 companies requesting they disclose demographic data via their EEO-1 report. The Comptroller reported after that campaign that 40 additional S&P 100 companies had agreed to disclose the information, bringing the total to 54.
