Sage Ke’alohilani Quiamno on Closing the Gender Pay Gap
This International Equal Pay Day, we caught up with the brilliant Sage Ke’alohilani Quiamno. An award-winning Indigenous entrepreneur, Sage started her career in pay equity and has provided 10,000+ women the tools and resources they need to negotiate salary increases and advocate for themselves at work. Sage went on to co-found Future for Us, a platform focused on advancing women of color through career development, community and culture. A passionate advocate for equal pay and a former Vital Voices Leadership Incubator Fellow, Sage shares her thoughts on the pay gap and what’s needed to close it —
On the pay gap
The gender pay gap has been an ongoing issue for women for generations, but I think it’s become one of the most important issues for women over the past decade. Especially because what we've learned is that the pay gap hasn't changed after all these years—and it only has widened since the pandemic. And so it's important conversation right now, because there's also disparity within the pay gap, not just between women and men, but also between races as well.
And even though there's a big push about awareness, about finally recognizing that this is an intersectional issue that women face, there's nothing happening. There's a lot of campaigns about equal pay, there’s a lot of online and social awareness, but there's not really any practical change within companies to solve for that.
On what it will take to close the pay gap
What it will take is having multiple resources—everybody from government to companies—enacting pay equity policy change. This means policy by government to enact pay transparency for companies, and also policy around releasing data, which we’re seeing a push for in other countries. Another part of it is the responsibility of companies to create pay equity for their employees. But I think most of the responsibility is on policymaking in our government, to ensure that companies, private companies especially, are transparent about their pay and are enacting an internal company policy to make sure that their employees are paid equally.
On building community & women’s collective advocacy
Collective power is transformative. Information is transformative. Transparency is transformative. And so, the power of community and being transparent about your pay—actually talking about who's getting paid, how much they're getting paid, and where—that creates a dialogue about money. I think especially for women of color, POC, BIPOC, there’s so much trauma around money. So I think it’s really important to learn about our relationship to wealth. I think Edgar Villanueva’s book Decolonizing Wealth is a great place to start.
It is important for women to start using money as a part of their daily dialogue. Once we identify our relationship with money, we become more comfortable with being transparent with it. When I’ve taught salary negotiation classes, I’ve encouraged participants to say aloud, in front of the class, the top range salary they would like to make. These brave participants would, and most felt relieved and empowered by just verbally saying it. Then I would encourage the rest of the class to write down 3 different numbers of salary ranges they would like to stay within and turn to a partner and share. This practice emboldened more women to feel comfortable to talk about money and turned into more than 4,000+ participants receiving more than $1M+ in salary increases in one year. That’s the power of building a collective of women and women’s advocacy.
On what an equal pay world would look like
If women were compensated equally to their counterparts, we would have a more just, balanced world. We would have more innovative products and more innovative leadership. We would have better family balance—the average American family would be making more money, the middle class would be growing.
We would see big investments in marginalized communities. So many of our societal issues would be solved through equal pay of women because when we know that women invest their money back into their community. Time and time again, the data shows that we reinvest our money back into our communities. So imagine if we were paid equally, how much more that would happen.
