The startup letting AI loose on staff pay
Mumbrella deep dives with the founders of Evenbetter, a startup building an analysis platform for in-house employee pay. On the eve of International Women's Day, they say it's time to replace the vibe about pay gaps with the facts.
Sorrel Kesby and Ayal Steiner are remarkable people. Remarkable people do interesting things.
In this case, Kesby and Steiner are building a tech platform designed to dissect and analyse what almost every company agrees is their most important asset: the humans who work there.
“I have always been at a loss as to why we spend huge amounts of time in business looking at the P and L and all of the [financial] stats … and then our most important and crucial resource, being humans, are left to quasi science,” says Kesby, a media and tech executive with long-time experience in data-driven businesses.
With Steiner, Kesby founded Evenbetter, a software-as-service platform that launched this week to coincide with the annual release of gender pay gap data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA).
That data showed that men, on average, are paid 22% more than women in the Australian workplace. In the world of advertising agencies, that percentage is lower (15.8% according to Mumbrella’s analysis), and in media lower still (13.5%).
What Steiner and Kesby don’t say explicitly, but is implied in their work, is that the WGEA pay gap analysis is almost misleadingly simplified. The pair don’t deny the basic unfairness of men and women’s pay, but say that just focusing on the headline numbers won’t help most businesses.
“The average is a statistical lie,” says Steiner. “When you look at the average male and the average female pay in a company, you’ve got multiple drivers pushing the average male pay up and drivers pulling the average female pay down.”
Kesby brings an example to illustrate this from Evenbetter’s client base: realtors Knight Frank had assumed high-earning male sales agents were driving their pay gap. Evenbetter’s AI analysis showed the biggest gap driver was actually down to the property managers, the majority of whom were women, and who tend to be lower paid as a cohort. This was something the WGEA headline figure wouldn’t reveal.
“We were able to give them that after 10 minutes with the data and AI model.”
The pair say that labour market realities must be factored into gender pay gaps. Companies in many cases cannot force an artificial 50/50 balance, because the available talent pool skews heavily male or female.
The Evenbetter software — which is licensed annually and designed for HR departments and executives — provides an analysis that can remove the impact of these kinds of market conditions and give companies an idea of their true performance.
The platform uses AI to crunch the big amounts of data involved, and to provide contextual market analysis. It is being product-designed by Steiner and developed by offshore coders. Evenbetter has signed Fuji Australia, Knight Frank and Applejack among its first clients.
Currently, there are no employees beyond the founders, and Kesby is still holding down a big job at ad tech firm GumGum.
Steiner was a senior executive in Israel-based ad recommendations engine Outbrain for more than a decade, building Outbrain’s business in the APAC region.
He says that after leaving Outbrain in 2024, he had a life-defining moment.
”I put on my Lululemon stretchy pants and looked into the ocean. And had to figure out what I want to do when I grow up.”
“I’ve always been a startup person through and through and enjoyed the creativity – the nexus of creativity and technology. I really wanted to sink my teeth into a business that I felt had a great mission and a great purpose behind it.”
For her part, Kesby says she is a big supporter of International Women’s Day and the WGEA pay gap data as “top of the funnel” awareness events.
”I’m here to demonstrate how data-led decisioning makes your businesses better and bonus points — women are great in business, so you should get more of them.”
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The real question isn’t why women are not being paid the same as men, but why women are predominantly in entry or base-level positions while at the same time being in the majority of university graduates. The likely answer is that taking on unpaid care work (raising children) forces us to reduce work hours or temporarily put the career on hold. So if this AI isn’t promoting men taking time off work and working part-time to participate in care duties equally to women, it will not improve gender pay gap issues within companies.
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