A Classroom Assignment for Sparking Discussion on the Role of Gender in Employee Compensation Decisions

Abstract

The following teaching brief outlines ways for advertising and public relations educators to discuss gender pay equity in the classroom. We know that educators are asked to teach about matters of diversity; yet many faculty members do not have adequate resources to do so. Faculty can rely on data and reports, but there are few hands-on activities that allow students to directly wrestle with gender pay disparity. The following activity centers on a hypothetical scenario in which we ask students to allocate pay bonuses to employees based on performance, time on the job, and other work-related factors. Over multiple semesters, we found that students consistently award smaller percentages of the bonus pool to employees with names commonly associated with females. Thus, this exercise provides a helpful way to enlighten students about implicit bias and gender pay equity in the professions of advertising and public relations.

Keywords

gender bias gender pay gap advertising agency management advertising education public relations education

Introduction

Chafe (2018) poignantly wondered if “[e]qual opportunity for all” has been the essence of the American creed for 250 years, “Why, then, do we remain so blind to the inequalities that persist in our country” (para. 2). Gender pay disparity is a blind spot issue (Boesveld, 2020). It is also a hot-button issue the nation continues to fight over. Notedly, on March 21, 2021, President Joe Biden staged an event to highlight the gap in pay between men and women in the United States (Widakuswara, 2021). In his remarks, Biden (2021) stated, My administration is going to fight for equal pay—for it to become a reality for all women. It’s about justice. It’s about fairness. It’s about living up to our values and who we are as a nation. Equal pay makes all of us stronger. (para. 28)

As stated above, it has been widely recognized there is a gender gap in compensation—both in the United States and abroad, and experts in economics and human resources have attempted to understand the reasons for it. As a result, there are many papers that provide a general analysis of the gap in a global context, and others that consider how it relates to a variety of occupations (Miller, 2009), such as medicine (Boesveld, 2020) and young professionals in the financial and corporate sectors (Bertrand et al., 2010) specifically.

Much of the literature about the gender pay gap has sought to identify the nondiscriminatory factors that might have driven or continue to drive the pay gap. Because researchers have been studying the closing of the gender gap since the 1890s (Goldin, 2019), several researchers believed the remaining gender pay gap is explained by the human capital theory and other nondiscriminatory factors (Olson, 2013). Without debating the merits of those assertions, and regardless of the source of the issue, gender pay inequities are prevalent and can be a central issue that contributes to a disconnect between an organization and its “employee publics” (Waymer & Ni, 2009).

Gender pay equity is a real-world issue that we, as university faculty, should be discussing with our students. Therefore, this teaching brief offers an interesting example of unequal allocation of employee compensation by gender that can be used for advertising and public relations example of unequal allocation of employee compensation by gender that could shed some light on that discussion in the context of advertising and public relations (see Dozier et al., 2013; Wolin, 2013). This teaching brief also provides a platform for discussing attitudes about compensation with advertising and public relations college students preparing to enter the workforce. Our teaching brief outlines a hypothetical scenario that asks students to allocate bonuses based on various factors such as work performance and time in post. The exercise intends to engage students about the topic of gender bias, and the assignment highlights the problematic nature of the gender pay gap in advertising, public relations, and the communications profession writ large. Because of the ongoing challenges of addressing gender inequality in the industry, this is a helpful exercise to engage students. Although this teaching example is United States-centered, it still has value for faculty outside of the United States because gender equality is a global issue (World Vision, 2021). In this brief, we explore the role gender plays in the decisions of advertising and public relations students in the United States about work compensation. Furthermore, we offer a perspective on how to teach advertising and public relations students about the topic of compensation.

Overview and the Compensation Assignment

The agency management course is a senior-level undergraduate class at a large research university in the United States. It is required for advertising majors and is an elective for public relations majors. The description of the course is as follows:

[The course] [e]xamines the managerial role in both advertising and public relations practice. Key dimensions in communication management, including, but not limited to, professional and business ethics, business, and financial literacy, media management, organizational culture and communication, and leadership are covered. A variety of teaching approaches—case studies, team projects, debates, simulations, student presentations, readings, and lectures—are employed. Writing proficiency is required for a passing grade in this course. A student who does not write with the skill normally required of an upper-division student will not earn a passing grade, no matter how well the student performs in other areas of the course.

Because writing proficiency is a required element of the class, students are assigned a variety of writing assignments, and each is related to topics covered in the course. For example, for several assignments, students needed to imagine a scenario in which they held a position at an agency and had to write a professional email to a coworker about whatever topic the class was focusing on at the time. Topics included requiring students to write an email to the agency staff to introduce themselves as a new employee; write to the new business director to provide a suggestion about brands to add to the agency’s prospect list; or to respond to the agency president’s request for feedback on the agency’s purpose, vision, and values statements.

The assignment that is the focus of this teaching brief focuses on employee compensation and gender bias. In a course module about compensation—which considered how agencies are compensated by clients and how employees are compensated by agencies—students were asked to write an email about an employee compensation scenario that deals with salaries and bonus allocations.

Students were provided the following writing assignment scenario, presented on a series of PowerPoint slides in class. These slides were posted to Blackboard Learn (a learning management software program) after class for reference.

SLIDE #1

You lead an account management team for your agency—you have four account coordinators working for you. It is getting close to the end of the year, and you have been given your performance bonus pool allocation of $18,000 for your team. You need to report back to your management about how you want to allocate the budget among your four account coordinators. Note that all four of them earn different salaries.

SLIDE #2

You are going to create a story about why you are making the recommendations for each employee, but here are your starting points.

• Michelle, the newest member, has been on the team for 6 months. She is bright and a go-getter. Although she does not know much, she works hard. Her salary is $31,750.

• Travis has been on the team the longest (2.5 years). He has a personal connection with the client, and his work is okay. He occasionally misses deadlines. His salary is $39,750.

• Brian has been on the team for about a year. He is a good, solid worker that you can count on. He is about to get married, and although he hasn’t said anything, you know that money is tight for him and his fiancé because they are trying to buy a house. His salary is $33,500.

• Amy came on the team about 18 months ago. She does phenomenal work and is why the team is successful. However, there is always some kind of drama with her because her personal life is a mess. She has been known to come to work a bit hungover, and she became angry last year when her bonus did not meet her expectations. Her salary is $36,500.

SLIDE #3

Assignment

You need to send an email to your boss outlining how you want to allocate the money from the $18,000 bonus pool.

1. Provide a brief introduction to your email describing that these are your bonus recommendations for your team.

2. Write a well-organized email that specifically outlines your bonus recommendation for each employee. The recommendation includes the portion of the $18,000 you want to allocate to each employee and a couple of sentences about why each one deserves the allocation you have given them based on their work history.

3. Close the email as you feel appropriate.

SLIDE #4

Tips

• When making your recommendations, you do not have to tell upper management everything you know, but you need to ensure that what you tell them supports your recommendation.

• In theory, none of your employees should know what their coworkers received as a bonus.

• However, when you give the bonus checks to your employees, you will need to tell them what they did, in your estimation, to deserve it.

• Be conscious of how the bonus compares to their salary as a percentage.

• Create a story about their work performance that is consistent with the profiles I have given you to support your recommendation.

• You do not have to give a bonus to everyone, and you do not have to give out the full $18,000.

• Remember, in this agency, a bonus is intended to incentivize employees, recognize superior performance, and help with the retention of good employees.

Beyond these instructions, which were discussed in class by using the slides as the guide, students were provided with little guidance about how to assign the bonuses. In assessing this assignment, the professor emphasized the quality of the writing, and his teaching plan was intended to allow the students’ work to shape the follow-up discussions about fairness, equity, and other compensation-related topics. The employee descriptions were written in a way that would entice students into making poor decisions about allocating the bonuses, such as over-rewarding a new employee who had been at work for only 6 months, giving a larger bonus to someone to avoid conflict, or providing additional funds to someone for reasons unrelated to their work performance (e.g., getting married or buying a house).

After the assignments were submitted, a summary of all the bonus recommendations was reported to the class in a chart that represented the average of the recommendations for each employee’s bonus. The feedback also included the highest and lowest bonus recommendations for each employee. Some students “took the bait” and were enticed to make poor decisions, which provided the class with an opportunity to have a robust discussion about fairness and equity as they relate to compensation. The students’ allocations also offered a means to discuss how middle managers must manage both up and down. This is a solid exercise to set the stage for discussing gender pay disparities in advertising and public relations contexts.

Exploring the Roles of Gender and Implicit Bias in Compensation Assessments

Like most instructors, we slightly change assignments from semester to semester to minimize cheating or diversify our materials. In so doing, we discovered that when we made regular changes and edits to this assignment, such as changing the names and genders of the four employees in the above scenario for each term, we found that, in aggregate, students awarded employees with names they perceived to be feminine smaller bonuses across the board—regardless of the gender composition of the students granting the bonus. We were compelled to showcase this assignment because we found that students consistently assigned employees with perceived masculine names a larger percentage of the bonus than employees with perceived feminine names. Thus, this assignment is an effective tool to show students how employees’ genders might affect work compensation decisions. Also, this assignment provides instructors a way to discuss the role the students’ genders played in their bonus compensation determinations.

In a debrief with the students following the assignment, we specifically discussed awarding bonuses based on merit and not based on “needs beyond work.” However, after we highlighted the apparent implicit gender biases in their bonus allocations, students were astonished. Most student comments reflected they had not considered, or at least were not conscious of considering, the gender of the employees when calculating the bonuses.

Our allocation of bonuses differed considerably from the students’ allocations, given our focus on making the allocations on merit alone. To confirm our allocation decisions, we solicited 20 industry professions with supervisory experience to determine the following: (1) how they might handle the allocation; (2) and if the same gender bias was apparent in their allocations. As we hoped, our assessments as instructors were consistent with the allocations awarded by the industry professionals. This assignment has been administered, with consistent results, at least 12 different times over several years. More than 375 students have participated in this exercise, and at least six other professors with advertising and public relations backgrounds have administered this assignment. Thus, we are confident this assignment can be used to teach students about gender disparities in compensation.

The Pedagogical Opportunities

An additional teaching opportunity presented itself during the process of collecting the professionals’ responses. The students’ assignment required them to report their allocation decisions through a professional work email to their supervisor that outlined their allocations and rationale. When we solicited the professionals’ opinions, we were initially seeking their input to include it in a data chart for our class discussion of compensation. However, the professionals sent us not only the bonus allocations for each employee but also email examples of what they would send to their bosses to explain their rationale behind their bonus allocations. Thus, we could post a collection of professional emails for the students that used the same prompt they used for their hypothetical emails. This approach was a valuable and exciting way to bring professionals into the classroom rather than simply having them on a Zoom call. They gave students concrete examples of professional work emails, which they could compare to their work. Instructors can reach out to professionals, and they can invite them to class to discuss their allocation decisions. However, although such discussion is meaningful and engaging with professionals can enrich students’ educational experiences, our critical point in this article is about how instructors can facilitate conversations about gender pay disparities and implicit bias.

One Potential Teaching Plan

Based on our experience with this assignment, the following is a detailed outline for using this assignment in the classroom. The classroom discussion outlined below usually takes about an hour.

1. Create the assignment as outlined in the slides above. For the purposes of this assignment, try to avoid gender-neutral names such as Alex, Blair, and Pat. To be able to compare results to our findings, assign employees A and D names with the same perceived gender (feminine) and employees B and C names with the perceived opposite gender (masculine). If you are teaching multiple sections, either in the same semester or over multiple semesters, reverse the genders of the employees each time you offer the assignment. When creating the assignment, provide instruction that emphasizes rewarding superior performance. Encourage students to add details to the prompts for each employee in their explanation.

2. After the assignments have been turned in, create an Excel chart with four columns. If you are interested, you can email us for a blank copy of our Excel chart. Enter the assigned bonuses for each employee and then determine a simple average of the amounts assigned.

3. In class, I start discussion by asking the students if, in general, they found the allocation decision difficult. If so, I ask them why. You can probe by asking the students to detail the approach they took to making the overall allocations. Good students usually attack the issue by establishing some baseline (percent of salary, percent of the overall pool, or a set dollar amount) and then vary the individual employee amounts by increasing or decreasing them based on the employee. Their logic is usually that a bonus below the baseline represents a penalty, and a bonus above the baseline is intended to signal encouragement and provide a reward. Other questions to ask include the following:

• Did the fact that employees might share their bonus information with each other affect your decision-making?

• How concerned were you about disappointing an employee or making them mad?

• Did you allocate the entire bonus pool or less than the full amount?

4. After the general assignment discussion, I usually share the aggregate results from the class, noting the average bonus given by the class as well as the highest and lowest bonus for each employee. At this point, we discuss the key factors that affected their allocation decisions for each employee. Students who made very low or high bonus allocations are encouraged to offer their rationale.

5. Following that discussion, I provide my allocation recommendation to the students. I make this allocation based on my experience and the professionals’ feedback. You can use the amounts below or adjust them as you think best. I usually display my allocation solution in a chart that compares it with the students’ average allocations.

• Employee A $2,500 (7.8% of salary, prorated because of half of year).

• Employee B $4,500 (11.3% of salary, lower because of poor performance (deadlines).

• Employee C $5,500 (16.4% of salary, highest in dollars and % of salary, based on performance).

• Employee D $4,750 (13.0% of salary, could have been higher but pulled down because of drama and personal conduct).

My allocation is not based on a strict mathematical calculation. I used a baseline of 12.7% of salary, calculated based on a $18,000 bonus pool for the $141,500 of combined salaries. I added or subtracted amounts from the baseline in increments of roughly $250 and rounded to the nearest $250 increment. One thing I point out about this method is that you do not want to infer there is a precise formula, and I round to whole numbers. I also emphasize my preference for trying to share as much of the bonus pool as possible with the team. However, in the follow-up discussion, I discuss how this approach can box in a manager for the subsequent year. As an aside, it is useful to tell students that they, as managers, do not accrue the money that is not shared with the team, and unallocated dollars are usually returned to the company. A few students will intentionally hold back a portion of the bonus allocation because they think it will increase their personal bonus allocation.

6. I use my explanation of my allocation decisions for each employee as an opportunity to discuss the elements that should be considered and included in their decision-making. These elements include considering the short tenure of employee A, balancing the client relationship of employee B while considering their seniority in relation to their poor performance, keeping in mind employee C’s upcoming home purchase, and considering employee D’s significant contributions in relation to their disruptive personal behavior at work as well as their potential to get angry at you because they do not think their bonus is sufficient.

7. After all that discussion, I let students know that there is one more dimension to the assignment that is not so obvious. I tell them our department has been doing versions of this assignment in this class for several years, alternating only names and the perceived genders of the employees. Over time, we have discovered that usually every class gives a lower amount of bonus to the perceived female version of a given employee than the perceived male version of that same employee. I also point out that most of the students in those classes are female. The typical reaction of the class is usually disbelief. Most students say the genders of the employees did not enter at all into their calculations.

8. I ask them to brainstorm possible reasons for our long-term findings. Generally, students are reluctant to explain the result as being due to bias, given the dissonance they feel in saying that they may have been biased against their own gender. I mention that bias or negative stereotypes are not just something others own—sometimes, we are trapped by our own stereotypes. As an example, I bring up the results of the Barron research about salary negotiations and how female MBA students in a study asked for lower salaries than male MBA students when negotiating salaries.

9. I remind them that I did not give them much information about each employee and had asked them to imagine/fill in the situation details. Their response to the assignment is partly due to how they brought these situations to life in their own imaginations. I then show them a version of the assignment slide with the employees' perceived genders reversed and ask them to think through their response to the assignment. Does their explanation and allocation still work for this different set of employees? What comes to mind in their imaginations?

10. I conclude the discussion by noting that even with the best intentions, our evaluations of employees—and people in general—are shaped by unseen thoughts and feelings. I also note the need to be mindful of how we might be evaluating our own worth and performance based on those same stereotypes or biases.

The Debrief

If the instructor is teaching more than one section of this course in a semester, they can dive deeper into this assignment by giving the students in each class a different version of the assignment with names altered so each of the four employees has a different gender. If the student allocations are consistent with our students’ allocations (as we suspect they should be), the instructor should debrief by highlighting that employees with perceived masculine names received more bonus money than the same employees with perceived feminine names. The instructor can then investigate further by highlighting students’ allocations to “good employees” and “problem employees” and asking them to consider the role gender might play in their evaluations. One possible explanation for the differences in the amounts students allocated by gender could be that they tended to reward perceived male employees more for good behavior and were less forgiving of perceived female employees who exhibited poor behavior. These findings are consistent with scholarly research. As instructors facilitate this discussion, they should direct students to academic articles by Kennedy et al. (2016) and Morgan et al. (2018). Instructors should assign SHRM (2021) on implicit bias. As a point of reference, below we present the aggregate differences among our student ratings over the past 7 years when we grouped their responses into groups of good employees (#1 and #3) and problem employees (#2 and #4).

Good Employees

Employee #1 is the new employee who has been on the job for 6 months. The perceived male version of this employee received 0.5% more of the bonus pool money than the perceived female version. This equates to an about 2.48% higher bonus for the male employee.

Employee #3 is the solid employee who is reliable. This employee is about to get married and buy a house, and money is tight for them. In this scenario, for employee #3, the perceived male employee tended to receive 1.8% more of the bonus pool than the perceived female version. This equates to an about 6.2% higher bonus for the perceived male employee.

Problem Employees

Employee #2 is the long-term employee who has a relationship with the client but tends to miss deadlines. The portion of the bonus pool money allocated for this employee was almost the same for the perceived male and female versions. However, the perceived female version of this employee received 0.1% less bonus pool money or an about 0.46% lower bonus than the perceived male counterpart.

Employee #4 is the phenomenal employee who is the primary reason for the team’s success. However, they are also the source of significant office drama. In this scenario, the perceived male version of this employee received 1.5% more of the bonus pool money than the perceived female version of. This equates to a 5.3% higher bonus for the male employee.

Discussion

This classroom exercise provides a few interesting perspectives on the gender gap discussion. First, students usually have limited or no supervisory experience, and it would be rare for any student to have had to make the kind of compensation decision presented in the scenario. Therefore, they must rely on the guidance provided by the assignment, which is purposely vague, but specifies that the bonuses are intended to reward performance. The students usually interpret this guidance as “being fair” to each employee. Consequently, some go so far as to give the same amount to each employee; others offer the same percentage of salary; and some choose a hybrid of these strategies. Most students, however, do not focus solely on performance when assigning bonuses, but instead factor in the non-work performance-related elements listed in the scenarios. This exercise provides a good opportunity to discuss compensation with students, and it provides instructors with a tool to teach students how to make compensation decisions based on performance.

Second, considering that the advertising and public relations student population in the United States who does the assignment is primarily composed of women, there is a possibility the students gave perceived female employees slightly lower bonuses because they subconsciously believe they are not entitled to higher salaries. This explanation is not far-fetched and is supported by the literature—as demonstrated by Barron’s (2003) exploration of how male and female MBA graduates approached their salary negotiations. This perspective opens an avenue of discussion for the class to discuss women’s reticence to actively bargain for their initial starting salaries. Some faculty have suggested that the discussion of gender pay disparity should occur before giving this assignment so students can be better prepared to provide the “correct” allocations. We disagree. It is an eye-opening experience for students in an age of wokeness (“Woke Stay,” 2021), in which they are asked to make decisions based on performance and equity; yet their responses nonetheless highlight implicit bias. We argue that this could be an experience they take into workplaces; furthermore, it could shape how they view gender disparities while providing the students with guidance to fight to end those disparities.

We hope that this teaching brief will inspire teachers and equip them with a tool to address gender pay equity head-on in their classrooms—ultimately empowering their students to become aware of pay inequities based on gender and helping them to address implicit bias in compensation matters.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Damion Waymer

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