60 Minutes - 04/15/2018: Allegiant: Flying Under the Radar, Pay Up

Episode Date: April 16, 2018

Steve Kroft investigates Allegiant Air. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You're a former member of the NTSB. Would you fly on an Allegiant plane? I have encouraged my family, my friends, and myself not to fly on Allegiant. What sets Allegiant Air apart from its competition can be found in public documents. An alarming number of aborted takeoffs, loss of cabin pressure, smoke and fumes in the cabin, unscheduled landings, and engine failures. He came on and he said, the mechanics have been working on this right engine. We apologize for that. We'll get you up in the air as soon as possible. As we started taxiing, everything was going okay. And then it's like as soon as the wheels came up, the engine blew. Oh, s***. the wheels came up. The engine blew. We saw in our company a lot of meetings where there were

just men. Like we would have a meeting and I would look around the room and I'm like, this meeting is just men. Something is not right. That's not all that wasn't right at Mark Benioff's company, Salesforce. To his great surprise, it turned out that despite a reputation for championing women, the company was paying men more than women for the same work. Why do you think, given your culture, why do you think it happened here?

I think it's happening everywhere. But why particularly here, and why is it happening everywhere? There's a cultural phenomenon where women are paid less. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper.

I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way.

Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa? As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. Allegiant Air is a small, ultra-low-cost carrier based in Las Vegas that happens to be one of the

country's most profitable airlines. But according to federal aviation records and interviews with pilots, mechanics, and industry experts, it may also be the most dangerous. The airline flew 12 million passengers last year on its 99 planes to 120 destinations from California to Florida, but it's had persistent problems since at least the summer of 2015 when it experienced a rash of mid-air breakdowns, including five on a single day. It was not a fluke. Public documents show an alarming number of aborted takeoffs, cabin pressure loss, emergency descents, and unscheduled landings. Yet, for the most part, Allegiant's difficulties have managed to stay under the radar of the flying public. It's entirely possible that you've never heard of Allegiant or flown on one of its planes. But if you shop for the cheapest ticket, live near cities like Pittsburgh

or Cincinnati that are underserved by major airlines, or you rely on regional airports, then you probably recognize the company's colors and logo. Allegiant has some of the lowest fares, the least frills, and the oldest fleet in the business. Right now, nearly 30% of its planes are antiquated, gas-guzzling McDonnell Douglas MD-80s. Almost all of them purchased secondhand from foreign airlines. It also has more than its share of angry, traumatized passengers willing to share their experiences.

People are screaming. The stewardess are running up and down the aisles. The smoke started pouring in out of all the vents and started filling the cabin up with smoke. All I kept thinking was, thank God we're on the ground. For the past seven months, we've been scrutinizing service difficulty reports filed by Allegiant with the FAA. They are official, self-reported records of problems experienced by their aircraft. What we found raised some disturbing questions about the performance of their fleet.

Between January 1, 2016 and the end of last October, we found more than 100 serious mechanical incidents, including mid-air engine failures, smoke and fumes in the cabin, rapid descents, flight control malfunctions, hydraulic leaks, and aborted takeoffs. Something significant is going on and it should be addressed. We shared the reports with John Golia, who has more than 40 years of experience in the aviation industry, including nine years as a presidential appointee to the National Transportation Safety Board. Now retired, Golia remains a respected figure in the aviation industry and occasionally testifies

as an expert witness on safety issues. There's another one, engine fire. We wanted to know what he thought of Allegiant's 60 unscheduled landings and 46 in-flight emergencies. I mean, is that common for an airline of this size? Very, very high for an airline of this size. I hate to make comparisons, but we've seen that before in airlines that are no longer with us that had experienced a number of accidents and killed a bunch of people. I don't want to repeat that, so I try to push on Allegiant to clean up their operation. What do those reports say about Allegiant? Well, just to serve as difficult, the reports say that somebody's not paying attention. You're a former member of the NTSB. Would you fly on an Allegiant plane? I have encouraged my family, my friends, and myself not to fly on Allegiant. We wanted to ask Allegiant and its CEO, Maurice Gallagher, about all of this.

What they gave us instead was a brief statement from their vice president of operations, which says, in part, All of us at Allegiant are proud of our strong safety record, as noted in the most current comprehensive FAA audit. Safety is at the forefront of our minds and the core of our operations. But John Golia and other aviation experts we talk to aren't so sure. They believe Allegiant's problems come from the confluence of its aggressive business model and the safety culture they find to be lagging. The business strategy, which has produced 60 straight quarters of profits, occasionally with margins approaching 30%,

requires the airline to keep costs down and push the metal, keep the planes flying as often as possible. But Allegiant's aged fleet of MD-80s, which it is phasing out and is responsible for most of its problems, require a lot of maintenance and reliable parts are hard to come by. Is there anything that separates

the maintenance systems at Allegiant from the ones of the larger carriers? Well, the first and most obvious piece is the lack of infrastructure. They don't have the number of mechanics, and we've seen some problems with the contractors that they've used. We're seeing problems that require feet on the ground, people looking at the airplanes when they're being worked on

so that these problems are caught during maintenance and not caught by the crew as a surprise in an emergency. We found numerous planes with the same recurring issues, and others returned to service before they were ready. Like a Legion flight 533 last July, which was delayed in Cincinnati on its flight to Las Vegas. Mercedes Weller and Dan Mannheim, who says he paid $80 for his round-trip ticket to Vegas,

remember the pilot's announcement as they pushed away from the gate, three hours behind schedule. He came on and he said, the mechanics have been working on this right engine. We apologize for that. We'll get you up in the air as soon as possible. As we started taxiing, everything was going okay, and then it's like as soon as the wheels came up, the engine blew.

Here we go. We're taking off. Say black. Oh. The force of it was so hard that it popped open the cockpit doors, and there was smoke in the cabin and fire coming out of that engine. And I just remember thinking... that I would never see my daughter again. Weller and Mannheim said the plane had to circle at a low altitude on one engine for about 25 minutes

while the airport ground crews cleared debris from the runway for an emergency landing. Everyone turned their phones back on, and I called my family. I'm pretty much telling them goodbyes. You thought this was it? I texted my husband, and I said, if something happens, just know that I've been very happy and I love you. The plane eventually landed safely back in Cincinnati. For their trouble, Allegiant offered to rebook Mercedes and Dan the next day and gave everyone a $150 voucher. But that was not the only problem Allegiant's small fleet encountered last

July. There were nine other Allegiant planes that also had to make unscheduled landings during that month. Four of those planes had engine problems, two reported fumes in the cabin, four had instrument or flight control problems, and that's not all. Over the course of one weekend in July, Allegiant canceled or rescheduled 11 separate flights leaving Las Vegas, all for mechanical issues. You think that's a big red flag? Something's wrong. Something's wrong. Among the most concerned are the people that have to fly the planes. Daniel Wells, a captain for Atlas Air with 30 years experience, is president of Teamsters Union 1224, which represents pilots from Allegiant and nine other airlines. We wanted to know how unusual it was for a small airline with 99 planes to have 25

engine failures or malfunctions in less than two years. Well, I don't have all the data in front of me to compare with other airlines, but I can say that those are extraordinarily high numbers. Outside the norm. Outside the norm, for sure. If I come into a career as an airline pilot now, I will go my entire career, maybe 30 years, and never have an engine failure, ever. What are Allegiant pilots telling you about their airline? What I hear from hundreds of conversations with Allegiant pilots

is the management of Allegiant seems to denigrate the pursuit of safety. Why are we unable to talk to any Allegiant pilots? I think that says volumes about the company. I would love to put up some of the Allegiant pilots, but they can't. And they can't because they know that they would be terminated, at the very least disciplined. And that's just for speaking up about concerns. So I have to speak on their behalf. Captain Wells says they have every reason to fear retaliation, considering what happened to one of Allegiant's pilots three summers ago. On June 8, 2015, this Allegiant MD-80 jet with 141 passengers aboard, it just left St. Petersburg, Florida for Hagerstown, Maryland,

when a flight attendant informed the pilot that there was smoke in the cabin. Allegiant 864 declaring an emergency at this time. Concerned about the possibility of a fire, Captain Jason Kinzer and his co-pilot made a quick decision. I need to return to St. Pete. Please deploy the tenets of reporting that smoke in the cabin. Legion 864, Roger. Cleared back to St. Pete Airport. Captain Kinzer landed the plane and was met at the end of the runway by fire and rescue trucks that confirmed his concerns. I'm showing some smoke on your number one engine.

Verify you're showing smoke on the number one engine? That's affirmative. That's our ground legion 864. We're going to be evacuating. 864, roger. 864, hold off on your evacuation, please. Who said to hold off? It would take another 22 seconds in prompting from ground control before that voice identified himself as Rescue Fire 2.

But with the clock ticking and confusing radio chatter, Kinzer did what he had been trained to do. He deployed the emergency chutes and evacuated the aircraft, with eight people sustaining mostly minor injuries. The incident drew unwanted attention to Allegiant, but nothing compared to what followed six weeks later when the airline abruptly fired Kinzer for his actions. I haven't spoken to a single captain, both Allegiant and otherwise, that knows the details, that didn't say he absolutely did the right thing, and if I was there,

I would have done exactly the same thing. I've never, ever heard of an airline firing a pilot for an emergency evacuation. Lorena Alkali has a lot of experience in things like this. She spent 30 years at the FAA prosecuting enforcement cases in the Northeast region. She was particularly annoyed by Allegiant's letter of termination that blamed Kinzer for what it called an evacuation that was entirely unwarranted and for not striving to preserve the company's assets. Yeah, it's really outrageous. And that's where the FAA should have stepped in to look at the safety culture, because the message to all

the other Allegiant pilots is don't ever have an emergency evacuation if you don't see flames in the cockpit. I mean, that's what other message could you get? Did the FAA investigate? I have been told that they'd never questioned the pilot. We decided to question the FAA. As far as the FAA is concerned, what's more important, the safety of the passengers or the assets of the airline? Certainly the safety of the passengers is what's always important. John Duncan is the executive director of flight standards at the Federal Aviation Administration. He oversees the operations, maintenance, and airworthiness of all U.S. carriers. That doesn't seem to be the values of Allegiant as expressed in this letter

of termination. You've seen it, right? I've seen the letter, yes, but just that letter and nothing else. So I don't know the rest of the story in that regard. So nobody asked you to conduct an investigation, so you haven't? To my knowledge, we haven't been asked to investigate through a whistleblower complaint the termination of the captain. What do you think the FAA should have done? Well, they should have been all over that. I mean, it's outrageous. What kind of safety culture would allow that to happen?

I mean, it's just so inimical to safety. Captain Jason Kinzer filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against Allegiant, which is scheduled to be tried next month. As for the FAA, which is charged with enforcing airline safety in the U.S., it has not brought a single enforcement action against Allegiant in nearly three years. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade.

Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Allegiant Air is an ultra low-cost carrier primarily known for its rock-bottom fares and its high profit margins. But what really sets it apart from the competition is that its planes have been nearly three and a half times more likely to have serious in-flight mechanical failures than other U.S. airlines. That figure comes from a seven-month review we conducted of safety records on file with

the Federal Aviation Administration. What's equally surprising to us is what some have called the FAA's passive approach to correcting allegiance difficulties. It has to do with a change of policy. Over the last three years, the FAA has switched its priorities from actively enforcing safety rules with fines, warning letters, and sanctions, which become part of the public record, to working quietly with the airlines behind the scenes to fix the problems. It may well be what's allowed Allegiant to fly under the radar. But Loretta Alkali, who spent 30 years as an FAA lawyer, says it does not absolve the agency of its responsibility to ensure airline safety. The FAA's job is to enforce airline safety, isn't it? Isn't that part of its job? Yes. When the FAA knows that an airline has a problem or there are

sufficient red flags, it is supposed to step in and protect the public because airlines have to operate by statute to the highest level of safety. And there are red flags here in the case of Elysian. Yes, there's definitely red flags. But you wouldn't know it talking with the FAA. We asked John Duncan, the executive director of flight standards, to comment on the more than 100 serious mechanical incidents we found at Allegiant in a 22-month period ending last October. Multiple engine failures, aborted takeoffs, cabin pressure loss.

That's 100 serious incidents. And we take those very seriously, and we look at each one of them. We look for the root cause, and then we address that root cause and assure that a fix is put in place to make sure that that problem is resolved and doesn't reoccur. And you're satisfied that all of the problems with Allegiant have been fixed? We're satisfied that we are taking the appropriate actions with regard to Allegiant and every other carrier that we work with to make sure that those problems

have been appropriately dealt with. Looking at the FAA's records, you would have to conclude that that is a very optimistic assessment. Go back to August 17, 2015, around the time the FAA switched priorities from enforcement to compliance, and you can see the differences in their approach. Allegiant Flight 436 was leaving Las Vegas full of passengers when it nearly crashed on takeoff. Barreling down the runway, the pilot had trouble controlling the plane. Running out of asphalt, he made a last-second decision to abort, traveling at 120 knots per hour, barely avoiding disaster. Something inside him said, I'm not putting this in the air, and thank God he didn't, because that was going to result in a bad outcome. The problem turned out to be a missing cotter pin that holds together essential components

necessary for the pilot to fly the plane. John Golia is a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board. I mean, this is a critical flight control, so this isn't fixing a coffee maker. This is fixing a critical of flight component, and obviously that wasn't done adequately. According to the detailed report from the FAA investigator, Allegiant and its maintenance contractor, AAR, failed to perform procedures that would have caught the air no less than five times. The report called it a deliberate and systemic act of non-compliance that had endangered thousands of passengers on more than 200 subsequent Allegiant flights. The inspector recommended strong enforcement action and maximum fines,

but superiors, citing the new compliance philosophy, ignored the recommendations and closed the case. Actually, the file called for a much larger investigation, but the FAA just said basically letter of correction, which means nothing. So it wasn't even a slap on the wrist, or barely a slap on the wrist. Well, letters of correction are nothing. They're not enforcement action. There's no record. I mean, the FAA knows that there's a letter of correction, but you can't use it to augment a sanction. They're just, they're basically nothing. Are you aware that your own investigator recommended a heavy fine?

Yes. And yet, to our knowledge, there was no enforcement action, no fine, nothing other than what's been described to us as not even a slap on the wrist. That was a major screw-up, wasn't it? This was certainly a major event. And so our charge in these kinds of events is to assure that they don't happen again. This was three years ago. I mean, this was 2015. We've had all these other incidents, these 100 incidents that have occurred since then. It seemed like they're on top of it.

All those incidents have been addressed, as I've described multiple times. Back in 2015, the only people that seemed to be paying attention to Allegiant were reporters at the Tampa Bay Times. The airline has a major hub in St. Petersburg, and the paper began keeping track of Allegiant's missteps, digging into records, and documenting the potential dangers. The coverage prodded the FAA to undertake a thorough review of Allegiant's operations in April of 2016. Three months later, the FAA concluded there were no serious deficiencies, recertified the airline for five more years, and says it has been monitoring ever since without noticing any systemic problems.

But last July, while Allegiant was having a very bad month, we decided to follow up where the Tampa Bay Times had left off to see if the airline had improved its operations. We filed a Freedom of Information request with the FAA, asking for more than a year's worth of mechanical interruption summary reports from Allegiant and seven other airlines so we could make a comparison. We received the documents for every airline except Allegiant, which objected to their release. What do you make of that? Well, obviously they have something to hide, and you have a number of them from other airlines, a whole stack from United Airlines. It calls into question why Allegiant is stopping it. You know, is there something there that they don't want to see? Is there something there

that the FAA doesn't want you to see either? So that actually points at both of them. Seven other airlines had no problem with us looking at their records. I appreciate that. Only Allegiant. I have no idea what their rationale is in that regard. Six days after this interview, the FAA overruled Allegiant's objections and produced the documents. They showed, on average, that the airline was nearly three and a half times more likely

to have mid-air breakdowns than American, United, Delta, JetBlue, and Spirit. But even more disturbing are new allegations from the ranks of Allegiant's own pilots. Their union president, Captain Daniel Wells, says he's concerned that Allegiant is trying to gain a competitive cost advantage by softening safety standards adhered to by the major airlines. That pilots are being told to think twice before declaring costly emergencies. And that Allegiant's maintenance department tries to talk pilots out of reporting problems with their aircraft to avoid delays and keep the planes moving. What I hear from the Allegiant pilots are they get a call from maintenance control,

who is an agent of the company, and says, you know, you didn't write anything up, did you? Meaning you didn't notice any maintenance problems on the airplane. And that's a very clear message to send to pilots, that the company is discouraging you from recording maintenance deficiencies. Is that legal? No, because our captains are required to report any mechanical deficiencies of an aircraft. In response, Allegiant's statement to us says, in part, any employee who fails to report safety-related concerns through available channels is in violation of company policies and may also be in violation of federal regulations. The head of the pilots union told us that Allegiant's maintenance operation is discouraging pilots from reporting mechanical difficulties on the flights.

Would that alarm you? Certainly, discouraging pilots from reporting legitimate maintenance problems would concern me a great deal. That's against the law, isn't it? Are pilots required to report this? They are. It certainly doesn't meet the safety standards that we would anticipate. Have you ever heard this before?

I have not. Is that something you might look into? It's something that we do look into on a routine basis, yes. Is it something you will look into? It's something we will continue to look into. It must be noted that there has been a sharp drop-off in the number of Allegiant service difficulty reports since we notified the airline and the FAA that we were working on this story and began requesting information. It may have to do with the fact that Allegiant replaced 10 of its old MD-80s

with new aircraft from Airbus. But we do know that this serious incident that occurred in September is not reported in the public record. The Legion Flight 514 had just landed in Fresno, California, and was rolling up to the gate when it suddenly stopped short as the cabin began to fill with fumes and smoke. Scott Shoemake, his brother Chris, and sister-in-law Chanel were on the plane. I'll never forget this, the most absurd thing I've ever heard in my life. Captain comes on and says, ladies and gentlemen, we've been informed there's smoke in the cabin. Please start breathing through your shirts. Through your shirt? Yeah.

Was it hard to breathe? Yeah. You couldn't. The crying flight attendants walking around kind of blindly. Not making eye contact. Not making eye contact, blindly handing out wet cocktail napkins. She's just crying. And saying, breathe through this. The oxygen masks in the cabin didn't deploy, and the passengers say minutes went by before the crew moved to get them off the plane. We're like, open the damn door. We just need some fresh air.

Like, it's okay that, you know, there's a problem. You guys can take your time to figure out what the problem is, but open the door. So how long were you on the plane? 12, 15 minutes. 12, 15 minutes, yeah. Literally just breathing this white substance. The captain eventually dropped the stairs at the back of the plane and passengers evacuated one by one and walked across the taxiway to the terminal,

but not before receiving one last instruction from the cabin crew. And so then they come on, say, take your carry-ons and exit the plane out the rear. A legion has yet to tell passengers what they were breathing, but the airline confirmed to us that the fumes were from Skydraw 4, a hazardous hydraulic fluid. In a brief statement the day of the incident, a legion said only that a mechanical issue arose that caused a visible haze to appear. Quote, passengers deplaned with any carry-on items and proceeded to the terminal per normal procedures. They can't have the image on

the six o'clock news of a bunch of passengers jumping with their arms crossed on a yellow slide. The fact that they made such a big deal about reminding us to take our carry-on bags as we're getting off the plane. So it looked normal. Yeah. There was nothing normal about the way we deplane that aircraft. Do you think the general public is aware with the issues involving Allegiant? No.

People believe that if they hold a certificate and they're flying, they must be safe. The FAA is on it. But the FAA is not on it, you say? It does not appear that they are on it when it comes to Allegiant, no. Most of the public is also unaware that Allegiant CEO Maurice Gallagher was one of the founders of ValueJet, another low-cost carrier with the same business model as Allegiant. Value Jet never recovered from the crash of one of its planes in the Everglades in May of 1996. Lorena Alkali, like the former NTSB member John Golia, says she would never fly Allegiant. Do you know anybody in the industry that flies Allegiant?

No. No, and I know that a lot of people talk about how they don't fly a legion. So it's very concerning. I know people that worked at the FAA who say they would never fly a legion. I mean, that's quite an admission. I mean, this seems like one of those secrets that everybody knows. And then if you have a plane go down, it'll all come out. You know, if, God forbid, there is an accident, I think there will be a lot of people saying, well, we knew. We knew and we did nothing.

The Me Too movement has shaken the workplace to its core. It has such power that it has come to mean more than sexual harassment. Me Too is now also about the issue of unequal pay between men and women. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a woman made 60 cents for every dollar made by a man in 1960. Forty years later, in 2000, that gap had been narrowed by just a dime, and it has taken nearly two decades more to shave another dime off the gap. Today, women still make 20% less on average than their male counterparts. A tech company called Salesforce

is the perfect example of just how tough it can be to close that remaining pay gap. Salesforce is huge. 30,000 employees, $10 billion in annual revenue. And it was just ranked by Fortune as the number one best place to work among big companies. That helps explain why founder and CEO Mark Benioff was so cocky when the woman who runs his human resources department came to talk to him in 2015 about equal pay. So when Cindy Robbins came to you and said, you know, we may have a problem with unequal pay in the company, what was your reaction? Well, I said, that's not possible here. You know, it's not possible. Why was it impossible? It's impossible because we have a great culture here. We're a best place to work. And we don't do that kind of thing.

We don't play shenanigans, paying people unequally. It's unheard of. It's crazy. Crazy because Benioff had already made promoting and retaining women a priority at Salesforce. But personnel chief Cindy Robbins says he never ordered an audit to make sure men and women were being paid equally. Did you suspect that there was a problem? I suspected there was some level of disparity because we've never really had this as part of our pay philosophy or as our pay culture. And the assumption was it was true in all companies at that point. It was. It started to be talked about, but not really.

And what I told Mark was, the one thing we can't do is do the assessment, look under the hood, see a big dollar sign, and shut the hood. So did you agree to the audit just to prove to her that she was wrong? I really felt that there's no way that this can be true. But you said, let's do the audit. I said, well, we have to do it. She actually, she said, well, do you agree that we're going to pay men and women equally? I said, of course I agree.

Well, you know what it's going to cost you, don't you? I don't know. What is it going to cost me? Well, I don't know, but you have to agree first. So I said, okay, I agree. I agree. All right, let's do this. So they did the audit, and Benioff found that Salesforce did have a persistent pay gap between women and men doing the same job.

And it was widespread? It was a lot of cases? It was everywhere. It was through the whole company, every division, every department, every geography. So how did you remedy that? We said we're going to pay men and women equally at Salesforce. And we're going to go through and we're going to level set every job and every division, every department, and we're going to make sure that we have gender equality. So when you went to correct, how much did it actually cost? It cost about $3 million for us to do those adjustments the first year. More than 10% of the women at Salesforce got bigger paychecks. As a pioneer in cloud computing,

Salesforce was already a powerhouse at the time, the fastest growing software company ever. 150,000 companies use its products to manage every detail of their relationship with their customers. One of the reasons it's considered such a great place to work is that from 1999, when he founded the company, Benioff has emphasized philanthropy and social responsibility. He pays employees to give their time to local schools and charities. And Salesforce has donated more than $180 million to nonprofits. Why do you think, given your culture, why do you think it happened here? I think it's happening everywhere. But why particularly here and why is it happening everywhere? There's a cultural phenomenon where women are paid less. And the World Economic Forum says that it will take more than 100 years for us to pay men and women equally.

So we better get going now. I think what he is doing is absolutely phenomenal, and he is committed. Alan Kullman is the former CEO of DuPont and now co-chairs an organization of high-powered businesswomen pushing for equality in the corporate world. Our daughters are facing the same issues that we faced early in our career. And we made a decision that unless people like us did something about it, who would? What they did was form Paradigm for Parity, which basically tries to jawbone big company CEOs into closing their gender gaps. What we're saying is they should have gender parity at senior leadership in the company. That means 50% of your most senior leaders are women.

So it's not about pay. It's really about numbers of women in the upper echelon. So pay is an outcome of an unlevel playing field. Until you level that playing field, you're going to get that same outcome. We saw in our company a lot of meetings where there were just men. Like we would have a meeting and I would look around the room and I'm like, this meeting is just men. Something is not right. And these would be the leadership meetings. These would be a leadership meeting. And then I said to myself, I am not going to have any more meetings that aren't at least a third women.

Really? Absolutely. But that meant giving everybody promotions. Not necessarily. It meant identifying who the high potential women were. Potential. Yes. Okay.

So a door opened. Our job was to stay invited to these meetings going forward. Technology companies are notoriously male-dominated, both in their overall workforce and in management. So achieving power parity in Silicon Valley is a struggle. So what percent of the leaders in this company are women? 20% of our leadership are women. What would you like? Oh, well, I would love 50. I'm a woman, you know, I'm an executive. Did you yourself in your career ever discover that you were being paid less than a man who was doing a comparable job? You know, there were times in my career where I said, I don't know if this is the right pay. And I kind of thought, well, if I say something,

it's going to go up the chain. And do I want to be viewed as the complainer? This is so what women across the board fear. Women are afraid to ask for a raise. This is a huge problem that we have. This is part of a total package. You can't look at one of these things independent of the other. At some point, you're going to ask me about Me Too, because that's the fourth door. You can say equal opportunity is one critical part of gender equality. Then you can say equal advancement, that's a critical part of gender equality. Then you can say equal pay, that's the third door. And the fourth door is preventing sexual harassment. All of these things together is gender equality.

One recent case of gender inequality in Hollywood got so much attention that it ended up in Jimmy Kimmel's monologue at the Oscars. We all know the story. Mark Wahlberg was paid a million and a half dollars to reshoot his scenes while Michelle Williams, for her reshoots, got per diem. She was paid $80 a day for the same thing. Ironically, the reshoots were for a film titled All the Money in the World. To his credit, Mark Wahlberg announced he would be donating all $1.5 million to the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund.

So I guess now the ball's in your court, Michelle. What are you going to do with that $80? We had the Me Too women speak up, and now we've had a rash. A small rash, but a rash of women speaking out and saying, I'm not paid the same. It's interesting that it's coming at the same time as Me Too. It's as if women are gaining muscles. It's about time. When Ellen Kuhlman was running DuPont, she found that one thing holding women back, especially when it came to promotions, was unconscious bias. And the perception is, do they need longer in a job to prove themselves as opposed to a man?

We were promoting women every 30 to 36 months into the same kind of jobs as we were promoting men every 18 to 24 months. So if you go out 10 years, they're being paid vastly differently. I'm going to read you a statistic. When men had children, their earnings went up 6%. So they're rewarded for being a father. When women have children, their earnings decrease 4% with each child. Unconscious bias. The assumption that they're not committed. The assumption that they won't be there when you need them. Our example is Shannon is the proud parent of a new baby boy. Some companies are now offering their employees unconscious bias training sessions

in which facilitators try to help people identify attitudes they may not even know they have. Shannon is a woman who returned to work last month after taking maternity leave. The assumption is Shannon will be tired, not able to give work her full attention, and the conclusion is I'd better not give Shannon any challenging tasks. She won't be able to concentrate. That's the so-called mommy penalty. At Salesforce, they have worked to address it by offering on-site daycare, generous family leave, flexible schedules, and now equal pay. But Benioff has found out just how hard bringing that about really is.

We did it the first time. We were so happy with ourselves. It was great. Then all of a sudden, we kind of did our audit again, and the same thing happened again. We're like, how can this be? Yeah. But it turned out we had bought about 2,000 companies. kind of did our audit again and the same thing happened again. We're like, how can this be? Yeah. But it turned out we had bought about 2,000 companies. And guess what? When you buy a company, you just don't buy its technology. You don't buy its culture. You also buy its pay practices.

So they would come in and the men were paid much more. And then that got eaten up into your statistics, into your audit. So you had to redo the whole thing all over again, costing as much as the first time. It cost us as much as the first time. In total, it's now cost us $6 million. Are you going to have to do this audit every year? More than every year. We're going to have to do this continuously. This is a constant cadence. You're going to have to constantly monitor and keep track of that.

That's easy today. We run our company the same way every company is run, with computers and technology and software. What do you think, that we're running our pay scales on three-by-five cards? There is power in data. I'm looking at all forms of data now that I was not looking at a couple years ago in my role. I'm looking at how women and men are given merit increases, stock grants, promotions, and taking a look at is there bias? Is there disparity? Hello, I'm Mark Benioff. I'm the CEO of salesforce.com. Benioff's become a national figure, an activist CEO who takes public positions on controversial issues. In 2015, he threatened to pull Salesforce investments

from states that passed anti-gay or anti-transgender laws. Now his cause is equal pay for equal work. This is your passion. This is part of who I have become as a leader, that I believe as a CEO that I can show other CEOs how to create a great culture in their company. You can't be a great CEO and say that I'm not committed to gender equality today.

I don't think it's possible. Well, you say that companies have to do this, but you are talking to CEOs, some of whom are telling you, I can't do this. Many CEOs will just simply say, I'm not interested. I've had CEOs call me and say, this is not true. This is not real. And I'll say to them, this is true. Look at the numbers.

Look at your own numbers. Look at your own numbers. For many years, CEOs have publicly embraced the concept of equal pay, but then complained about how hard it is to get there. Remember that prediction that it'll take a hundred years to get to pay parity? A hundred years? Really? No, it's crazy, isn't this? Yeah. This is ridiculous. It won't take a hundred years. Or will it? Well, you know, I mean, there is a lot of resistance, but there's never been an easier time to make this change. CEOs with one button on one computer can pay every man and every woman equally.

We have the data. We know what everyone makes. There's no excuse. Everybody can easily do this now. 50 seasons of 60 Minutes from April 15th, 2001. Mike Wallace set out to interview Mel Brooks about his Broadway show, The Producers. But Mel Brooks had his own idea. Tell me something. The show... Is that a $100 watch? Let me see that one.

It's about a $40 watch. It's a beautiful watch. Isn't it? Yeah, I love that. It's a $40 watch. Really? Yes. Lights up in the dark. What a cheap son of a bitch you are. You got the right. You're a great judge of

character. Tell me this. What did you pay for your jacket? I don't know. This is hopsack. Hopsack is like fancy burlap, right? Am I right? That's exactly right. It's like burlap shrunk down. You know that six months ago that your jacket carried coffee beans?

Do you realize that? I'm telling you. That came from Colombia full of coffee. Wait a minute. He reeks of Colombian coffee. I gotta tell you. I'm Steve Croft. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.