New Relic achieves pay equity

Closing the gender and racial pay gap continues to be one of the most critical imperatives of organizations today, and it has been an important focus area for me as Chief People and Diversity Officer at New Relic. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought on new economic challenges that have disproportionately impacted women and people of color. According to Payscale, in 2021 women earned only $0.82 for every dollar earned by a male counterpart. They also found that women of all races and ethnic groups and men of color earn less than white men. On top of that, women’s labor force participation is at a 33-year low driven by the pandemic, which will have economic ripple effects on women and minorities for years to come.

That is why I’m so proud to share that in keeping with our commitment to driving meaningful progress toward Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, New Relic has achieved racial and gender pay equity. In other words, New Relic compensates similarly-experienced Relics at the same level when they perform the same or similar job duties, regardless of their gender or ethnicity. 

How we got here

New Relic worked with a leading third-party pay equity software and consulting company, Syndio, to analyze our pay rates for gender equity and, in the U.S., for racial equity.¹ Race analysis compared white to non-white employees collectively, as well as white to Asian and Black populations separately. 

Accounting for job level, geography, and performance, the initial results analyzing compensation at New Relic were positive and showed little disparity in our pay rates, but highlighted opportunities in our underlying structure to improve systemic equity. We took action based on the findings from Syndio by:

• Simplifying our job architectures. This allowed us to better analyze not only our compensation packages, but also to better benchmark against the industry. 
• Providing guidance to managers on which employees should receive additional increases and including those raises as part of our compensation process in 2021 to address any discrepancies we uncovered.

Looking ahead

Pay equity is a moving target that requires ongoing work as employees join and leave the company, and as workforce trends change. While the focus on pay equity isn’t new at New Relic, the work we’ve done over the past year has not only helped us achieve current pay equity, but also created a structure and process for helping us to maintain it going forward. Since our initial study, we’ve used Syndio to analyze pay each quarter to ensure we’re paying our Relics equitably across race in the U.S. and across gender globally.

And while pay equity is an important step toward making New Relic an equitable workplace for all Relics, it’s only part of our long-term DE&I strategy. To build true equity, we are also focused on driving true systemic change and continuing to increase the representation of women and Relics of color overall, including in technical and leadership roles. 

To maintain accountability and transparency, our new Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) website is updated regularly with our workforce demographic data. Visitors will find ethnicity (U.S.) and gender (global) data across three categories from 2017 to 2020:

• Overall workforce representation
• Leadership (VP level and above)
• Tech roles (jobs that require advanced technical specialization or knowledge of computing, engineering, and/or data science domains) 

These key data points are used to help inform and measure our progress toward our long-term DE&I strategy.

We are proud of how far we’ve come and our continued commitment to building and fostering a truly diverse, equitable, and inclusive New Relic. To learn about New Relic and view open roles, visit newrelic.com/careers.

 ¹Race data is not currently collected outside the U.S., so other countries were not included in this part of the audit.