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Well Being

Fox News predicted his 70K minimum salary idea would fail. He proved them wrong—by a lot.

Dan Price/Twitter

In 2015, Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price had a life-changing epiphany.

Price, who founded Gravity with his brother in 2004, was out hiking in the Cascade Mountains with his friend, Valerie. She told him her landlord had raised her rent by $200 and she was struggling to get by on her $40,000 a year income. Price, who was making $1.1 million a year as CEO of Gravity, was struck by her story. Not only did he feel for Valerie—a military veteran working two jobs and barely making ends meet—realized that some of his own employees might be facing similar struggles.

And they were. One employee frankly told him his entry-level salary was a rip-off. Another employee had secretly been working at McDonald's outside of work hours to make ends meet. So Price decided to make a drastic change by investing in his employees.

He researched how much money the average person would need in order to live comfortably and settled on $70,000 a year. In one fell swoop, he dropped his own salary to that amount, while also making it the minimum salary for anyone who worked at Gravity.

The move drew media coverage—and dire predictions from pundits. On Fox News and other conservative outlets he was called "foolish," a "socialist" and a "lunatic of lunatics." Rush Limbaugh called the company policy "pure unadulterated socialism" that was "going to fail" and should be a case study in MBA programs on how socialism doesn't work. Talking heads predicted that his employees would end up in the welfare line.

Six years later, Price has proved the haters wrong—by a lot.

Sharing a video with clips from those outspoken detractors on Twitter, Price wrote:

"6 years ago today I raised my company's min wage to $70k. Fox News called me a socialist whose employees would be on bread lines. Since then our revenue tripled, we're a Harvard Business School case study & our employees had a 10x boom in homes bought.

Always invest in people."

He then added:

"Since our $70k min wage was announced 6 years ago today: Our revenue tripled, headcount grew 70 percent, customer base doubled, babies had by staff grew 10x, 70 percent of employees paid down debt, homes bought by employees grew 10x, 401(k) contributions grew 155 percent, [and] turnover dropped in half."

The business is thriving, his employee numbers have grown from 130 to 200, and they've expanded to a second office in Boise, Idaho. And perhaps most notably, the highest-paid employee makes four times the salary of the lowest-paid employee, not 33 times.

The benefits of taking care of his employees extended into the pandemic, which led to the company taking a 55% revenue hit overnight. Rather than lay people off—with Gravity has never done in its 17-year history—Price held a call with his employees and explained the company's situation. He didn't want anyone to lose their job, and he also didn't want to jack up prices on the small businesses that relied on their services.

In response, nearly every employee offered to take a temporary, voluntary pay cut, ranging from 5% to 100%. That's the kind of loyalty money and support can buy. And it worked—those employees have been repaid and the company is now giving out raises.

Price is outspoken about his company's success because he believes it's a model other companies should follow if they are able. CEO salaries have risen 940% since 1978, while average worker salaries have only risen 12%. The longer that discrepancy goes on, the more normal it becomes in people's minds, but Price is on a mission to disrupt that norm and convince people that paying employees well pays off in a multitude of ways.

Price says he doesn't miss anything about the millionaire lifestyle he lived prior to his pay cut. "Money buys happiness when you climb out of poverty," he wrote on Twitter. "But going from well-off to very well-off won't make you happier. Doing what you believe is right will."

Investing in people is what Price believes is right, and he's lived that belief—successfully—for six years and counting.

The pandemic has revealed how much money there truly is at the top, as billionaires got 54% richer over the past year and while millions of people took devastating financial hits, and large company CEOs received huge bonuses while laying off lower-level employees. Let's encourage more corporate leaders to take a page out of Dan Price's book and invest in the people who made them successful in the first place. Those investments can pay off big time, as Price—and now others—have repeatedly proven.

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Black women are now America's most educated group.

They're the most educated group in America, but they're still grossly underpaid.

This month, there was some pretty great news for black women.

Celebrate with Michelle Obama!

Black women are now the most educated group in America, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

A higher percentage of black women — 9.7% to be exact — are enrolled in college than any other racial or gender group, including white men, white women, and Asian women.

It's the first time in American history that black women are leading the way in education.

And it's kind of incredible for a multitude of reasons, including the fact that education reduces poverty, promotes gender equality, and helps to lessen the spread of various health issues.

So just what are these educated black women doing?

The number of degrees conferred to black students has steadily been on the rise for two decades. And in the U.S. between 2009 and 2010, black women specifically earned 68% of associate’s degrees awarded to African-American students.

Of black students, also earned 66% of bachelor’s degrees, 71% of master’s degrees, and 65% of all doctorate degrees, too.

So yeah, black women are killing it.

#BlackGirlMagic is totally real. GIF from Apple.

But here's a kicker: While black women are the most educated group in America, they're still making substantially less than their white male counterparts.

About $20,000 less per year, to be exact — a ridiculously large gap.


Oprah says, "Not on my watch." GIF via "Oprah."

Unfortunately, this isn't super surprising. Every other demographic in America makes less than white men, too, but black women are on the significantly lower end of the wage bar.

What does this wage gap look like?

On average, an American woman earns about $39,000 per year compared with the $50,000 an average man earns.

If a woman were to work for 40 years, this would add up to a lifetime of around $430,000 of wages lost. For black women, that number jumps to almost $878,000 in wages lost overtime a lifetime.


Absolutely not.

When any demographic is underpaid or understaffed, the effects are pervasive, and we can see that firsthand with black women.

While the numbers of black women in higher-paying jobs are steadily increasing, black women are still largely underrepresented at the top of top-paying industries like engineering and computing. Of the estimated 24% of women in the STEM workforce, a mere 2% of black women are represented in that group.

Black women not having a seat at the high-wage table can be particularly damaging for their families, too.

More than 50% of black women with children are either the sole or primary breadwinners of families, compared with 40% of all of women.

But currently, 38% of black children live below the poverty line, a rate that has remained steady over the past few years while other groups have decreased.

Equalizing wages could make a huge difference in the lives of African-American children by giving them access to better schools, healthier lives, and increased opportunities.

As Viola Davis stated in her historic Emmy’s speech:

"The only thing that separates women of color from everyone else is opportunity."

Viola Davis teaching us all how to live at the 67th annual Primetime Emmy Awards. Image by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images.

The good news is, black women don’t back down from a challenge.

Right now, black women are voting at higher rates than the rest of the population, starting more businesses than any other groups of women, and creating opportunities for other black women to achieve even more.

They have been doing to work to improve minority lives for years.


Yes, girl. GIF from "Sister Act 2."

And when minorities are given a seat at the table of opportunity, we create a society that is strong, more understanding, and increasingly innovative.

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Comedy Central's The Glass Ceiling game gets way too real.

Here's a funny video with an extremely valid point.

Remember how companies used to market board games in the '90s?

They were commercials filled with cheesy music, bad acting, and unrealistic expectations of how much fun you'd actually have playing the game. Last week, Comedy Central released its own board game commercial, promoting The Glass Ceiling game for girls. The hilarious parody video tackles those commercial hallmarks while hitting the girls in it with a harsh dose of grown-up reality about wage gaps and women in the workplace.

GIFs from Comedy Central/YouTube.

In the video, the girls start off with big aspirations, only to learn of some of the workplace's less-awesome aspects.

One girl is shown reading a card that says, "Your Ivy League education hasn't gone unnoticed; it makes your boss Doug feel emasculated. The promotion goes to Blake, who didn't even get a degree. Move back 1 space." Another one of the girls is made to wrestle with what she'd do if her boss sexually harassed her.


Womp-womp.

"It's funny because it's true" is a bit of a cliché, but — well — it's funny because it's true.

There's no shortage of evidence that the "glass ceiling" in the workplace still exists. Whether this is marked by the fact that while women earn nearly 60% of all undergraduate and master's degrees (clearly, they're ambitious), they make up less than 15% of executives and less than 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs, or whether it's the fact that 1 in 3 women aged 18-34 has been sexually harassed in the workplace — there's still a ways to go before we reach true gender equality.

Smash the glass ceiling!

Check out the smart, must-watch video below.

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