Breaking down the salaries of college graduates.

Salaries of college graduates, age 25 to 59, for the most common undergraduate majors

Data: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, Research by Shahien Nasiripour

Danielle Brown, Intel’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, who votes in Arizona
“When I took over last October, I wanted to get my arms around the data. We’d done a great job diversifying our hiring, but the total representation of underrepresented minorities was flat. Our underrepresented employees of color continually left Intel in greater numbers than their white and Asian counterparts. I wanted to understand why. Intel really values tenure and the tribal knowledge that comes with working at a place for many years. A lot of our diverse employees happen to be newer, and they told me, ‘Look, you hired me for my experience, but now I’ve come in and you don’t value my external perspective.’ We also learned that a manager could make or break a person’s experience. We’d been doing a lot to make sure our diverse employees were being developed, and we learned that we’ve got to look at how to engage managers, the majority of whom happen to be white and Asian males. We’d been focusing too much attention on the wrong groups.

In the first half of this year we did an audit and found that pay for underrepresented minorities was at 99 percent of pay compared to the white and Asian population. We committed to closing the pay gap over the next quarter. We’re getting down to a granular level to see if there are any differences that can’t be explained by a legitimate reason, like a performance issue. If we find a difference that can’t be explained, we make person-by-person adjustments.

In February we launched the Retention WarmLine, a service where any employee having challenges can log their case. I work cases myself. The challenges range from ‘I think I’m being underpaid’ to ‘My manager and I aren’t getting along.’ We work with the employee and often, with their permission, with their managers. We’ve logged 953 cases, and now we can ask, ‘Where are these cases coming from? Is it a particular business group? Is it clustered around a particular manager?’ So not only does WarmLine help address individual needs, it’s going to help us identify and design systemic solutions. Hiring is a lot of process engineering: doing things to make sure managers see talent that’s different. But retention is just so nuanced. I wish there was a quick fix. I’ve been looking for a quick fix for a long time.” —As told to Vauhini Vara