Microsoft CEO apologizes for “inarticulate” comments on gender pay gap

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Internal Microsoft memo tells female employees to "just ask" for a raise

On Thursday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella issued an apology on his personal Twitter account after making comments about the gender pay gap at a women-in-technology conference, and he followed that up with a lengthy internal Microsoft memo.

Re/code published the memo, which saw Nadella acknowledge his mistakes during a conversation with Harvey Mudd president Maria Klawe (herself a Microsoft board member). "Toward the end of the interview, Maria asked me what advice I would offer women who are not comfortable asking for pay raises," Nadella wrote. "I answered that question completely wrong."
His memo continued by acknowledging industry-wide initiatives meant to "close the pay gap," then added, "when it comes to career advice on getting a raise when you think it’s deserved, Maria’s advice was the right advice. If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask."
Earlier that day, Nadella took part in an hour-plus conversation panel at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. At the 1:35 mark, Klawe asked what advice he had "for women who aren't comfortable with asking for a raise."
"All human resources systems are long-term efficient, short-term inefficient," Nadella said. "It's not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system would give you the right raises as you go along. That, I think, might be one of the additional superpowers that, quite frankly, women who don't ask for a raise have. That's good karma. It'll come back." He then implied that not asking for a raise was a smarter idea in the long-run: "That's the kind of person that I want to trust. That's the kind of person I want to give more responsibility to."
Data suggests that the good karma does not, in fact, come back for most women in the technology sector hoping for wage equality, a point Klawe made in her response to Nadella's advice. She told a story about poorly negotiating for her salary as Dean of Engineering at Princeton years ago, concluding, "I probably got a good $50,000 less than I would have if I had been doing my job."
Nadella's first public apology came in the form of a single tweet, which read, "Was inarticulate re how women should ask for raise. Our industry must close gender pay gap so a raise is not needed because of a bias." Of course, the industry has its work cut out for it, as diversity reports from a variety of big companies has proven.
The rest of the GHC conversation included many other positive statements about women in the tech sector, but hopefully Nadella takes an opportunity to offer advice for young women—at least, those outside of Microsoft who didn't get his memo—who will soon find themselves at a bargaining table for an engineering or programming gig.