Rekha Gurnani

Unfortunately, I have not been very lucky in having really good leaders and mentors in my life. I wish I had had that opportunity and fortune. The one little advice that I got from a career coach I once spoke with was basically don't ever pick a job or stay at a job for a person. I was at a job where I really liked my manager, and I thought I don't know if I'll ever find a manager like that, so I'm gonna stick around, even though I hated a lot of other things about the job. She said, well, people come and go, so that should not be the reason for staying, because what if she ups and leaves tomorrow, or she gets another opportunity? Women tend to make very relationship-based decisions, right? Men would make job choices based on more practical things. I think women will be like, oh, but I really like this person to work with, or they're so nice to me, and they'll stick around knowing that they could be making less money. I talk to women all the time who do that. So I realized I need to stop thinking like that.

I would say you have to be comfortable with bragging a little bit, and you have to be comfortable with kind of being your own advocate. You have to be comfortable with showcasing your work and almost showing it off, because nobody's going to do it for you. I mean, some people are lucky and they find that right person at the right time, but generally, you have to toot your own horn. Women really, really struggle with that. We always downplay our accomplishments, right? I'm not saying all men, but some men are more comfortable with speaking very confidently about their accomplishments, even embellishing it a bit, but women always downplay that. I do that, and I've seen that pattern, so my advice to young women would be, be comfortable with listing your accomplishments and shouting your successes from the rooftops. Don't downplay it. Brag away.

In my field, there's a lot of challenges and opportunities. The biggest one is AI, of course. In an opportunity sense, there's a lot of manual work that we were doing in this field that now we need to adopt AI and take advantage of that to be more efficient. In terms of challenges, AI is also a challenge because what does that mean for the way we work, the way we pay people, the way the jobs look? For a while, AI was an additional premium skill, so it was like, okay, do we pay people extra if they know how to build AI? And now it's part of your day-to-day job, everyone's expected to do that. The other thing is legislation is constantly changing. We now live in this world where all job ranges have to be posted on jobs. There's greater pay transparency. In Europe, they have a very intensive pay equity directive in most countries now. Employee preferences and expectations are constantly changing, right? With the Gen Zs coming more into the workforce and the next generation starting soon, the way they work or the way they expect the employee-employer dynamic to be is very different from what we had. I've been doing something related to this space for about 20-something years, and the first 13 to 14 years looked kind of the same, and the last 5-6 years since COVID have completely changed. With COVID, so many people started working remotely, so we had to grapple with questions like, do you pay people the same regardless of where they live? Do you pay people for the work that they do, or do you pay people for where they live? All those things that we never had to think about before. It's exciting times, challenging times, all of it.

Because I work in a field like compensation, the values that I really care about is equitability, right? Equitable treatment, equitability in pay and outcomes for employees. I always want to make sure that there's no group that's in some way not being treated the same when it comes to financial outcomes, pay, as well as things like mobility or whatever else. That's a value I really, really live by, because in every single decision that I make professionally, it has to be something where I can move towards a more equitable world, I guess. That's super important to me.