Good afternoon to the committee.
As you may know, my former role was as CEO of Lululemon, so I'd like to open my remarks in the context of the work I did there.
Given there was a broad range of topics we could discuss, what I felt I could add the most value to was creating a company that was family friendly and where some of the best practices that we put in place to ensure that women's prosperity, leadership, and the family came first as a company. I'd like to share some of those practices with you, and then take any questions you might have on anything else.
For Lululemon, one of the things we did was to recognize that the Gini index, which is the difference in pay between the highest-paid and the lowest-paid workers in a company, has grown to over 500 times that of a CEO for the average worker. We decided to do some unusual pay practices to change this.
Any employee working for us who made less than $85,000 a year was entitled to up to a 16% pay increase, and we held our senior officers to a less than 3% pay increase, with the goal of putting more money in our mid-tier and entry-tier level workers so they could afford day care, houses, cars, pay off their tuition and loans, and to consume more in their daily lives, which then drove industry and the economy. This was our belief.
We also had a minimum of $15 an hour that we paid every employee, whether it was starting at $12 plus commission, or starting at $15. The goal there, as I stated, was to increase the income levels for employees at the early stages of their career and reduce the wealth that was created at the top of the company.
Another family-friendly practice that we put in place which I felt was very important to ensure the prosperity of women and families was to only allow meetings to occur between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. This allowed people to accommodate day care and to be on time to pick up their children. The number one reason parents lose day care privileges is from being late to pick up their children. We created family-friendly policies that allowed our workers to address the real needs of working parents. This was really important for single mothers, in particular.
The other thing we did when parents had to work from home, or during sick time, we used the GoToMeeting or FaceTime technology to bring them into the workplace environment to accommodate absenteeism.
We also created access to transportation, which was the other reason people were late or couldn't get to work, particularly in our store environment. Addressing as a workplace the real needs of families and keeping our women employed, we felt were critical practices.
On an executive level, the other thing we felt was very important was having a board and a management team that reflected the women, so we set a commitment and met it. My executive team was 80% women and our goal was 50%. Our board was 50% women. We felt this was really important, not only for women to have role models, but for men to have role models of women leaders as well. Those are very important statistics, I think.
As you know, women are paid 77% of what men are paid, so we created a guarantee where we paid 100% regardless. We felt that with our strategy of women forming 50% of our board, 50% of our senior team, and reducing the gap in pay, that women basically are paid 80% of what men are paid, we also became a role model company. The results of that was that we became one of the most profitable retail apparel companies in the world. I believe that our practices around equality for women and increasing the income of our mid-tier employees were critical to energizing the company.
The other thing we did was accelerate development, which is about education. We created talent pool positions that we rotated women into that were about leadership and accelerated development, particularly for women who had taken maternity leave. We would rotate women into these accelerated development programs so that they could catch up on anything that they maybe missed in that year in their professional development.
This accelerated our talent pool and allowed us to promote women at the same rate that we would promote men.
Those are just some of the starting things that I wanted to talk about. I'd be happy to answer any questions from the committee.