A new report shows that women who work at Zillow make a tiny bit more money than their male counterparts, indicating the company has achieved something of a small-but-significant victory in a professional world still plagued by gender pay gaps.
The online portal’s first ever “Sustainability Report” was released Thursday and shows that in 2018 women working at Zillow made $1.01 for every dollar men with comparable skills earned. The report also reveals that women made up 42 percent of Zillow’s workforce last year, which is an increase of 1 percentage point over 2017 and 3 percentage points over 2016.
Broken down by specialty, the report shows that Zillow has the greatest degree of gender equality at the executive level, where 40 precent of named officers are women, and the least in technical fields.
Credit: Zillow
Zillow had a total of 4,880 employees across all offices as of the the second quarter of 2019.
Regarding gender equality, the new report states that the company recognizes “that our work is far from complete.”
Still, the fact that women make slightly more than men at Zillow bucks a national trend in which women actually tend to make less. The Pew Research Center, for example, found that in 2018 women only made on average 85 percent as much as men. And in 2017, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that women made just 80 percent as much as men.
The good news is that, according to Pew, the gap is closing. However, Pew also found that one in four women reported earning less than a man doing the same job — which is the opposite of what Zillow’s report says is happening among its workers.
Among other things, Zillow’s report additionally found that its workforce is 65 percent white. That’s down from 71 percent in 2016, though the company’s leadership has actually become less diverse over the last three years and today is 84 percent white.
Credit: Zillow
The Sustainability Report also briefly delves into Zillow’s environmental efforts, noting that the company leased 759,000 square feet of office space in 2018. About 22 percent of that space is LEED certified.
“We are currently building out new offices in New York City and Seattle that are being designed to achieve LEED certifications when opened in 2020,” the report states, “adding an additional 206,000 square feet of LEED certified space to our operations.”
Other findings in the report include that employees did 2,000 hours of volunteer work and that Zillow donated $2.2 million in cash and in-kind contributions to fight housing insecurity and homelessness.
Dawn Lyon
In a statement Thursday, Zillow Chief Corporate Relations Officer Dawn Lyon said that “we care deeply about how we support our employees, impact our communities, develop our products and operate in the world.”
“Fostering sustainable and responsible business practices is a critical tenet in building a long-term, forward-thinking company,” Lyon concluded.
