Equality in Equity: A Conversation with Jordan Sale and Lora Rosenblum, co-founders of 81grants

We’ve long had a conversation on the benefits of equal pay, and yet it is often too difficult to attain this status because there is a fear of advocating for yourself. Advocating yourself in the corporate involves copious research, difficult conversations, and the confidence to know your worth. Two incredible women are here to make that conversation easier. Jordan Sale and Lora Rosenblum are dedicating their time to add more color to the conversation with 81grants. In this interview, we talk to Sale and Rosenblum on the statistics behind salaries, tips on negotiating, and the future of combatting pay inequity.

Why did you decide to start 81grants? What’s in the name?

Jordan: 81grants is the pro bono arm of 81cents, the pay equity startup I founded in 2018 as a way to help womxn and historically excluded minorities become better negotiators.

81cents works like this: When someone has a new offer or a promotion coming up, they submit their compensation and a description of their background and role to our platform. We share this information with a network of advisors, hiring managers, and recruiters in tech, who weigh in on which components of the candidate’s pay could be enhanced through negotiation, arming the candidate with lots of niche data, ultimately leading to increased confidence and better results.

To date, we’ve helped 600+ candidates earn over $3M, equivalent to a 17% increase in pay per candidate.

A few months ago, we launched 81grants, an initiative to provide pro-bono 81cents support for candidates of color for whom 81cents might be cost-prohibitive.

One of our community members actually came up with the name for 81grants, a riff on 81cents, which represents the amount that womxn earn on the dollar (an average across all races).

Lora: Jordan and I have been best friends since living in the same hall our freshman year of college. Something I cherish about our long friendship is that we have so many dimensions to our relationship. We have a daily text where we manage to have multiple conversations at once. I think yesterday we were back and forth navigating a work issue I was having while also discussing our obsession with Sumo oranges.

I’ve been a vocal advocate of 81cents and the company’s work ever since Jordan started the company. I’m a proud repeat customer, and I’ve served as a pay equity advisor since the beginning. Having worked in the startup ecosystem my entire career, I also love supporting young companies, and I thought Jordan had a perfect platform for change.

Last summer, Jordan and I spent countless hours discussing our own commitments to being anti-racists. I suggested there was an opportunity to leverage the 81cents platform to double down on pay equity initiatives for people who experience even worse pay gaps, such as individuals of color.

Jordan: The idea of providing support for people who couldn’t afford 81cents market research reports was already on my mind. At the end of 2019 (81cents’ first full year of operations), we looked at the breakdown of the 200 or so customers we’d served that year. We realized that we hadn’t cultivated a user base that was representative of the US population, especially when it came to race. We’d over-indexed on gender equity.

At that time, we made a goal to be more intersectional and, in 2020 focused on building partnerships with amazing orgs like ColorVision, Elevate Your Pay, HireBlack, Sista Circle Black Women in Tech, Panther Mamas, and Techqueria that helped us expand our reach with womxn of color. By the end of 2020, we had made real progress and 60% of the womxn we served identified as Black or Brown.

81grants was a natural extension of this work and a way to formalize our commitment to womxn of color. To build the program, Lora and I spent the fall pulling the pieces together, thinking through how we could best support candidates, which included how we would fund the program.

What are both your backgrounds and how do you bring them into building 81grants?

Lora: I’ve spent my entire career working in health tech, motivated by the opportunity to make our healthcare system better and more equitable. My blood boils when I think that in the US, a person’s healthcare experience is determined by things like where they live, what job they hold, and how much money they make. Something I’ve realized about myself over the past few years is that I’m really driven by fairness. I was excited to channel my energy into an initiative like 81grants because it drives tangible impact for womxn of color, a group of people disproportionately marginalized compared to other groups.

Jordan: I’ve also spent my whole career in and around tech — first in civic tech and then fintech before starting 81cents. Functionally, I started in marketing but have always been more motivated by moving quickly, talking to users, and working on what I feel are interesting and important problems with people smarter than me!

How does a company like 81cents help with the conversation in pay equality across genders?

Jordan: Negotiations don’t have to be adversarial, but information asymmetry and power dynamics between employers and candidates make them really challenging for most candidates, especially womxn and candidates of color.

81cents addresses this by crowdsourcing compensation data and negotiation strategies from an impressive group of leaders in tech. We work hard to make sure our advisors are diverse, people of various genders and races, for example, so we don’t accidentally reinforce the inequalities we aim to solve.

Lora: Putting my customer hat on for a moment, 81cents has provided me with more confidence. I usually don’t have a problem initiating a conversation around asking for more, but being armed with objective data around how much I’m worth always makes me feel more prepared. It’s a really helpful part of the process.

How do you think about intersectionality and how 81 grants can address that knowing the disparities that lie between white women and people of color?

Lora: 81grants was founded on the premise of intersectionality: we’re doubling down on some of the work that Jordan and 81cents had already started when it came to prioritizing engagement with womxn of color.

Even though 81cents advocates for pay parity across gender identities, there exist additional societal constructs within gender identities that create new inequities, particularly across color lines. The premise of providing complimentary 81cents reports is an effort to offset the gaps experienced by groups of people more than others.

The year is 2040. Tell us about the future that you expect for women and pay inequity.

Jordan: To be totally honest, I’m feeling a bit cynical after this past year which shows that womxn, especially womxn of color, have been disproportionately impacted by COVID — leaving the workforce at extremely high rates. So, I’m worried that we’ll just be getting back to the levels of employment we saw in 2019 and early 2020.

That being said, I do expect to see a lot more womxn in leadership positions by 2040 and more diverse C-Suites and boards.

Regarding pay equity, it’s expected to take 100+ years from today to fully close the gender and race pay gaps, but I do think we’ll have made a dent. I also expect to see many companies taking negotiations off the table to increase parity and regulation around disclosing pay — particularly as it relates to gender and race.

What are three tactics that every woman or non-binary person should have when going into negotiations?

Jordan:

1. Numbers. Not only will this be persuasive, but having solid #s will also make you feel more confident!
2. Mirror what you hear back as a question. This is an amazing tactic that works wonders personally and professionally. Essentially you repeat back the last thing the other person said as a question. So, if the person says, “Sorry, this is the best we can do.” You would say, “Got it. So it sounds like this is the best you can do?” Miraculously they’ll start talking and share more information you can use to inform your next steps.
3. Write a script. It sounds silly, but honestly, it makes all the difference. Scripting out your thoughts ahead of time will help you calm your nerves and prep answers to potentially challenging questions or pushback.

Lora: If you follow Jordan’s advice, you’ll be in great shape. But make sure you actually ask for more! If you’re a womxn thinking about negotiating your salary for the first time, call me. I’ll give you a pep talk.