Movement Pay Gap: What You Can Do
As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Reform Pay Equity Initiative (RPEI), I am reflecting over the decade of work the Reform Movement has done together to close the gender equity pay gap.
At this point in the process, I wish I had better news to reflect upon and share.
When this group began talking about how much of a differential there was in pay scales between male and female professionals in our Movement, it was obvious to the people around the table that we could and should do better. It was on us as the Movement partners representing cantors, rabbis, executive directors, educators, and lay leaders to affirm that there is no place in our Movement and in our organizations for the disparity in pay reflected in “corporate America” extending to our Movement’s employers. While we recognized there are societal reasons that often contribute to the overarching pay gap issues as outlined in a 2016 Pew Research Center (Pew) study on racial and gender pay gaps, as Jewish organizations, we agreed that we could and would do better.
We built upon decades of work by the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), and Women of Reform Judaism (WRJ) who published resolutions and responsa calling out the inequality of female salaries in the workforce but had not been updated since the early 1990s. The last official statement on pay equity from the URJ was penned in 1992 when the organization was still the UAHC. The statement “urge[s] all UAHC congregations to compensate such professionals justly regardless of gender. Those congregations now served by women are asked to examine any conscious or unconscious gender discrimination in their compensation practices. Where any injustice surfaces, however inadvertent, we call upon the congregation to consider immediately and voluntarily raising compensation, even before the finish of present contractual periods.” The statement stands today, but we have not yet progressed in closing the gap.
Together through RPEI, we created thoughtful training. We created best practices and processes for congregations coming into placement through our organizations to address the wage gap in their hiring practices. We created an opportunity for and required participation in implicit bias training for search committees of congregations so they were aware of their own internal bias as they navigated hiring new professionals. We require salary scales to be present on any placement application posted within our Movement. We held up the work of the CCAR’s “Clergy and Educator Monologues” which is a compilation of stories of how female clergy and staff are spoken to (and about) in our congregations. After two years of participating in the work of the RPEI, in 2017, the ACC under the leadership of then president Cantor Steven Weiss, passed a resolutionpushing harder for pay equity for our membership. Our members have authored essays reprinted in CCAR Journals and articles for the Women’s Rabbinic Network (WRN). We have participated in the creation of documents for family leave alongside our WRN partners. We have provided training sessions and resources geared toward female professionals on how to better negotiate their own contracts and ask for what they are worth from their employers. And both the CCAR and ACC have celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first ordained female rabbi and cantor during the past decade.
The National Association for Temple Administration (NATA) just released their 2025 salary survey. While the overall salaries of executive directors have grown, the gender pay gap is still 16.7% between male and female executive directors in the field. Approximately 62% of NATA members are female.
While the 2025 ACC salary survey is in process, the 2022 survey, for an organization whose membership is 65% female, showed the gender pay gap remained at almost 15%. In fact, in that survey, the gap actually widened from the previous survey in 2019. In simple terms, that means that over half of our membership is potentially earning 15% less than 40% of our membership. How is that still possible in 2025 after a decade of work?
In the CCAR‘s 2022–2023 compensation study with gender data, the gender pay gap remained at almost 15%. “It is clear from this data that even with some movement forward in the last two years, there is still not pay equity in rabbinic compensation. It is very important to read this data as a call to action for the Jewish community to achieve equity.” While in some congregational categories the gap had narrowed, what was noted in their documentation was the rate at which closing the gap had slowed.
According to the Pew report from March 2025 report on gender pay gap in the US, “The gender gap in pay has slightly narrowed in the United States over the past 20 years or so. In 2024, women earned an average of 85% of what men earned, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers. In 2003, women earned 81% as much as men.”
Corporate America has caught up with what the Reform Movement in the United States has been doing all along. But because now there’s simply parity between corporate pay scales and Reform Movement pay scales, this tells me we must do more.
So, what do we do?
I believe the first thing that we need to do is change our audience. While I applaud my colleagues for our collective work within the RPEI structure, we must bring our message more clearly and thoughtfully to the “Jews in the pews” who are the leaders of our individual congregations. Congregational boards and budget committees need this information when they are negotiating contract extensions with sitting members of their staff. If a congregation has not gone through a search process with one of our Movement partners they are not necessarily exposed to this information. Utilizing our professional organizations and our resources should be the first step to holding an equitable search and negotiation for all of our Movement’s employers.
We must change our perceptions of female and non-binary employees in the workforce. We must stop blaming female employees for the pay gap and employers must take responsibility for perpetuating the gap. In her 2017 paper[1] “Negotiating While Female,” Professor Andrea Kupfer Schenider says, “Blaming women for income inequality fails to hold employers responsible for payroll decisions and minimizes the employer’s role[2]. And, therefore, nothing needs to change. No company needs to do anything or think about basic issues of equity[3]. No laws need to be changed. We end up focusing on women’s purported deficiencies, instead of on their abilities, while searching for individual “cures” to this inequality instead of structural solutions.[4]” We can no longer employ the excuse that “women negotiate differently” because regardless of the negotiation style of the employee, it is the responsibility of the employer to close the gender pay gap in their own organization.
What does that mean for our Movement as employers? RPEI has developed the tools and information, and continue to provide hard data in salary, surveys and salary studies, that show the tremendous and equity that allows to continue in our congregations. No one expects any organization to close the gap immediately but there are tachlis strategies that can be used to make serious headway. Just one suggestion is creating a multi-year employment contract that may start out as less equitable but works through thoughtful increases to bring a female or non-binary professional into alignment with their male counterparts and will close the gap for that employee. When repeated across congregational and organizational staffs, real changes can be made.
As a Movement who has focused so much of our attention on external activities on wage discrimination and pay equity for the greater good, it is time that we also commit together to the principal of gender pay equity as employers and making that commitment part of our individual ethics documents, both as congregational employers and professional organizations.
[1] Andrea Kupfer Schneider, Negotiating While Female, 70 SMU L. Rev. 695 (2017)
[2] Michelle A. Travis, Disabling the Gender Pay Gap: Lessons from the Social Model of Disability, 91 DENV. UNIV. L. REV. 903 (2014).
[3] Stereotypes Do Reinforce Status Quo, INSIGHTS BY STAN. BUS. (June 15, 2003), https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/stereotypes-do-reinforce-status-quo [https://perma .cc/G666-AKWJ].
[4] Travis, supra note 4, at 918; see Christine Elzer, Wheeling, Dealing, and the Glass Ceiling: Why the Gender Difference in Salary Negotiation Is Not a “Factor Other Than Sex” Under the Equal Pay Act, 10 GEO. J. OF GENDER & L. 1, 3–4 (2009).