Meet The Woman Investor Pushing Amazon, Google, And More To Close Gender Pay Gap

Within 24 hours last week, Amazon.com AMZN +2.37% and Expedia EXPE +0.60%, Inc. — two of the largest internet companies in the world — both announced their intentions to close the gender pay gap GPS +1.65% among their employees.
Amazon, in fact, said they’d essentially closed it already, paying women 99.9% of what men working for the e-commerce giant make. Expedia, for its part, committed to disclosing its gender pay equity policies and goals by October.
These two companies are the latest to respond to pressure from Arjuna Capital, the activist arm of Boston investment firm Baldwin Brothers Inc. and a shareholder in many of the country’s biggest tech outfits. In February, Intel INTC +1.47% reported it had reached 100% gender pay parity. Apple AAPL +2.35% indicated its women workers were making 99.6 cents to every man’s dollar, excluding bonuses and stock.
The architect of this initiative is Natasha Lamb, director of equity research and shareholder engagement at Arjuna. She filed shareholder resolutions at each of these companies in advance of proxy season, forcing each to weigh up the optics of a vote on equal pay transparency.
“Our clients are interested in investing in such a way that they’re having a positive impact on the world with their money,” Lamb said. “We pick issues that we think are good for society, good for the environment, and will be good for the companies that manage them well.”

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Amazon has so far been the only tech firm to push back, seeking permission from the Securities and Exchange Commission to leave Arjuna’s proposal off is annual ballot, citing “inherently vague or indefinite” language.
“The legal argument they made was ridiculous,” Lamb said. “They said they didn’t think their shareholders would understand what the gender pay gap is.”
The SEC ruled in Arjuna’s favor, deciding that the online retail giant should put the issue to a shareholder vote. Six days later, Amazon released its internal gender pay data. Lamb withdrew Arjuna’s proposal, as she had when the other companies in her crosshairs capitulated.
Incidentally, Amazon placed near the bottom of a recent gender equality ranking of tech companies by job review site Fairygodboss. Of women respondents working at the e-commerce site, 40% said they felt they were being treated as equal to their male peers. By way of comparison, 72% of women respondents working at Apple reported being treated fairly.
“I was only willing to own Amazon [shares] if we were going to engage with them, because of their poor workplace practices,” Lamb said, noting that a 2014 Seattle Times piece posited that Amazon’s growth had actually worsened the city’s gender pay gap.
Arjuna has also filed shareholder proposals at eBay, Google, Adobe, Facebook, and Microsoft this proxy season. Of these, only Facebook — the birthplace of COO Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In movement — and eBay have been completely incommunicado. Neither company immediately responded to Forbes’ request for comment.
If Lamb has anything to do with it, their silence will be short-lived.
“The gender pay gap isn’t going away for 40 years, at this rate,” she said. “We can’t wait that long.”