Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday aroused a controversy after he suggested that women don’t need to ask for a raise and should just trust the system to pay them well.
When asked by Maria Klawe on how women should get ahead in the tech world at a three-day Grace Hopper Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, intended to celebrate women in computing, Satya Nadella, who became the CEO of Microsoft in February this year, replied saying that “It’s not really about asking for the raise but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along.”
“Because that’s good karma,” Nadella continued. “It’ll come back because somebody’s going to know that’s the kind of person that I want to trust.”
Maria Klawe, who is also the president of Harvey Mudd College and a board member at Microsoft, disagreed with Nadella’s career advice and went on to speak out her personal story as when she was hired as Dean of Engineering at Princeton, and found out she was making $US50,000 a year less than she should have been.
In no time, Twitter was flooded with irate reactions from audience who felt that Nadella’s remarks advocated women to quietly tolerate lower pay than their male colleagues.
Nadella however tried to get his point clear by tweeting that his response had been “inarticulate” and that the tech industry should eliminate gender pay inequality so that raises are no longer an issue.
The Microsoft CEO then sent an email to the company’s employees addressing his gaffe, in which he admitted that his reply to Maria Klawe’s question about raises was “completely wrong.”
