Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, has launched a companywide program called Women’s Surge that aims to eliminate any pay disparities between male and female workers, hire and promote more women, and make sure they are better included in meetings.

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But another reason government employees have a smaller gap may also be because salaries are mostly publicly available and transparent, and few report that they are banned or discouraged from talking about pay with coworkers. Transparency has caught on outside the public sector: tech companies SumAll and Buffer make all salaries publicly available. That not only undoes any negotiating bias when people are hired but also gives women and people of color the information they need to know how much they should be paid and ask for more.