Salesforce announced on Tuesday that it has spent $3 million to adjust the gender pay gap that impacts 11 percent of the company's 25,000 employees.
On Equal Pay Day, CEO Marc Benioff attributed the pay gap between men and women to an acquisition streak that brought in 7,000 new employees in the past year.
"You buy their pay practices, and this pay practice -- of, basically, gender discrimination -- is quite dramatic through our industry and other industries," Benioff told The Washington Post, describing how acquiring other companies lead to a new pay gap at Salesforce.
The cloud computing giant bought 14 companies in the last fiscal year, which was the largest amount ever for the 18-year-old firm. Salesforce acquired companies like the marketing and data-analytics startup Krux, word-processing app Quip, and the e-commerce platform Demandware.
This isn't the first time Benioff is tackling the wage gap. So far, Salesforce has spent a total of $6 million in fighting the cause. (It also pledged $3 million in 2015.) The CEO says that a gender pay gap analysis will become part of his due diligence in the future.
"When we do future acquisitions, I will ask the question, 'have we looked at the pay gap for the company?' " Benioff told The Washington Post. "I've never had to do that before. Honestly, in some ways it's shocking. In other ways, it's kind of like, 'gee, why didn't we think of that?'"
