NEW YORK   - Companies often try to put their best foot forward by highlighting adjusted figures before the harder GAAP numbers. Yet both help fill in the picture. The same principle could apply to the gender pay gap.

The median income for females working full time in the United States is 85% of their male counterparts, according to the Pew Research Center. Although that was up from 64% in 1980, the continued discrepancy has prompted Corporate America to start addressing the disparity. Yet most companies still have a way to go.

Many firms, including Bank of America and JPMorgan , have embraced pay-gap reporting data but publish numbers according to factors like job categories. When looked at in this light, differences in salaries are often minimal, suggesting a flattering degree of equality.

Revealing a median gender pay gap is pointier. Activist investor Arjuna Capital and advocacy group Proxy Impact are pushing for more companies to reveal that number, and have filed proposals at more than two dozen companies including Cigna , Pfizer and Facebook.

Alphabet, one of the targeted firms, will put the measure to a shareholder vote on Wednesday. The Google parent is urging its investors to reject the motion, contending that its methods for addressing salary inequality – a complicated soup “modeled algorithmically, based on work-related inputs” – is adequate. It claims to have paid an average of $900 last year to more than 10,000 employees to adjust for gender discrepancies, but it doesn’t publish median or adjusted salaries. Compensation should be based on the work that’s done not “who one is,” it says in the proxy.

This is a laudable goal, but it misses a big part of the picture. Citigroup this year disclosed both adjusted and median pay by gender. The former showed that women globally were paid on average 99% of what men got. The median was much lower: just 71%.

The big discrepancy seems to reflect, at least in part, that fewer women are in top positions. Indeed, at Google females represent 26% of the global leadership.

There’s no quick, easy fix for getting more women into senior positions. But sidestepping the issue isn’t a solution. Reporting fuller numbers should help companies get at the real problem.

CONTEXT NEWS

- Shareholders at Alphabet’s annual meeting on June 19 are scheduled to vote on a proposal requesting that the company report on the global median gender pay gap. The parent of Google is opposing the request, which was put forward by sustainable investing firm Arjuna Capital and advocacy group Proxy Impact.

- “We are deeply committed to diversity and equality in all areas of our business, including hiring and compensation,” the company said in its proxy statement. It added that “compensation should be based on what one does, and not who one is.”

(Editing by Tom Buerkle and Amanda Gomez)

© Reuters News 2019