Great Britain: financial sector still failing to narrow the gender pay gap

While companies with more than 250 staff have until 05 April to comply with the legal requirement to publish their third annual gender pay gap data (c.f. article No. 11073), initial indications from roughly a quarter of these businesses have already started to leak through to the press. One thing standing out from the leaks is that the UK’s dominant financial sector continues to be a laggard. The BBC has calculated that the average salary gap in this sector based on these preliminary numbers has risen to 23.1% in 2019, compared with 22.2% in 2017, and that the bonus-gap between males and females has also widened to 37.7%, compared with 35.3% in 2017. Overall, males in finance earn around a minimum of 25% more than their female counterparts, and this difference can rise to even above 40%, such as for instance the case with HSBC, which has recently reported a 47% gender pay gap for 2019 that exactly matches that of the year before. “It will take time to redress the imbalance and the results of our work today may not fully be realised until today’s pipeline of new joiners becomes tomorrow’s business leaders”, stated an HSBC spokesperson, who argued that this gap is a consequence of female under-representation at senior management level and their over-representation in junior positions. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) calculates the UK-wide gender pay gap as being 17.3%.