Tutanota introduces transparent salaries to close gender pay gap.

Equal Pay Day

March 15 is Equal Pay Day in the USA: Until that day in 2022, women in the US have worked for nothing.

This is unacceptable in 2022. But to change anything, we need to change the compensation mentality in general. For this reason, Tutanota has introduced a transparent salary model that automatically guarantees equal pay regardless of gender - or any other factor.

New figures from Europe and the USA show that the gender pay gap is still wide open – and what is worse, it seems to have stopped closing in many developed countries, likely due to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic.

Nevertheless, these facts are no reason to stop fighting, quite to the contrary our society and businesses must try harder to make a difference. So we at Tutanota have decided to embrace change and to do things differently at our company. We introduced a transparent salary that aims to:

• Offer a transparent and fair salary to all employees
• Prevent gender pay gaps
• Stop any form of income discrimination

"Introducing a transparent salary has been a consequent step for us in following our ethical business strategy", says CEO Arne Möhle. "Ten years ago we have founded Tutanota to develop a secure, but also an ethical email service: We do not track our customers and we do not post targeted ads. Following this strategy, we are only using renewable energy to power Tutanota, we donate Tutanota to NPOs, schools and open source projects. We want to make a change, to create a better, a more private web that respects everyone and anyone. Consequently, we also need to treat our own employees in the fairest way possible, and the transparent salary achieves this."

The company Tutanota now makes sure that there is no discrimination in pay raises caused by taking parental leave, or by switching to part-time work.

But there is another important reason why the transparent salary makes a difference: It is not the loudest, or the best negotiator who gets the highest pay raise. With the transparent salary model there are no payment negotiations taking place at Tutanota.

The payment system is based on a rather simple calculation method. The payment of every employee is calculated with the help of the following figures:

• a base salary that takes the average market salary of the job position into account
• an experience salary that takes into account any degree as well as work experience (where work experience years count as full years even if the person worked part-time or has been on parental leave)
• a bonus that depends on employee loyalty (= number of years in the company)

As a result, all salaries at Tutanota are calculated using the same formula, which leads to a fair payment of all employees.

We hope that in this way we can contribute to making the world a fairer place. At Tutanota there are no salary differences based on external factors such as gender.

For us, Equal Pay Day is on January 1.