Detailing our 2020 gender pay gap metrics.
In 2017 the Government introduced legislation requiring all organisations with more than 250 employees to publish their gender pay gap annually. The gender pay gap measures the difference between the average hourly earnings of men and women across the whole of an organisation.
This is our first gender pay gap report and serves as another stepping stone in our journey of being a truly open, transparent business.
Originally intended for publication in April 2021, our report (like a lot of other things) was postponed until 5 October 2021 due to COVID-19.
This means that the data in this report is now at least 18 months old, comprising pay information taken from April 2020 and bonus data captured between April 2019 and March 2020 (as per Government guidelines).
Publishing these metrics will create a starting point, which we can monitor, learn from and improve on. We’ll continue to report our pay gap data every April, with our next report due by 5 April 2022.
Making cultural and strategic changes that empower our employees and customers is a priority as we scale and grow. We’re taking the necessary steps now to drive change.
Right now, we’re not where we want to be and we understand it won't change overnight. It’s very clear from our numbers that we’ll need to get straight to work.
What is the gender pay gap?
The gender pay gap shows the difference in average hourly earnings between men and women working in our organisation at a point in time (regardless of job role, seniority or geographic location).
The gender pay gap is different from equal pay. The 1970 Equal Pay Act made it illegal to pay people doing the same job differently based on gender.
While the pay gap metrics act as a useful measure, analysing the data further can help us understand whether we need to review our pay or leave policies, or if our approach to hiring and internal progression needs to be refined.
(The gender definitions we use are based on the current legal definitions. As a business we recognise that not everyone’s gender identity fits within this binary approach).
How we've calculated the data
Our pay gap data was taken on the snapshot date of 5 April 2020. For our bonus gap data, we captured all bonus pay received between April 2019-March 2020 (as per the Government's guidelines).
The calculations include all ‘Relevant Full Pay’ employees, including full-time and part-time employees, permanent and fixed term contracts.
There are two measures of the pay gap – median and mean.
The median pay gap is calculated by listing all female and all male employees’ hourly rate of pay, finding the midpoint for each and then comparing the difference between the two.
The mean average is calculated by adding all female employees’ hourly rate of pay and dividing by the total number of female employees, then completing the same for male employees and calculating the difference.
A positive percentage means that the pay gap is in favour of men and a negative percentage is in favour of women.
Our results
Median gender pay gap
|
Male Median Hourly Rate (If you lined up every man in the business according to pay per hour, the person bang in the middle would earn this) |
£17.89 |
|
Female Median Hourly Rate (If you lined up every woman in the business according to pay per hour, the person bang in the middle would earn this) |
£14.92 |
|
Median gender pay gap |
16.6% |
Mean gender pay gap
|
Mean Hourly Rate of Male Full-Pay Relevant Employees (How much the average male earns hourly) |
£29.17 |
|
Mean Hourly Rate of Female Full-Pay Relevant Employees (How much the average female earns hourly) |
£20.56 |
|
Mean gender pay gap |
29.5% |
Bonus gender pay gap (based purely on bonuses and commissions)
If all the men and all the women were lined up according to bonus earnings, the man in the middle would earn 46.2% more than the woman in the middle.
|
Median bonus (Men) |
£4,678 |
|
Median bonus (Women) |
£2,519 |
|
Median bonus gap |
46.2% |
If the bonuses of men and women are averaged, men earn 48.2% more than women.
|
Mean bonus (Men) |
£13,432 |
|
Mean bonus (Women) |
£6,951 |
|
Mean bonus gap |
48.2% |
Bonus proportions
Gender pay gap quartiles
How we see our results
In April 2020 we had 392 (full pay) employees based across various locations including London, Bristol, Belfast, Hull and some field roles.
Our overall median and mean pay gaps were heavily influenced by the employee mix within our top pay quartile. When we analysed this further, the pay gap in our top quartile was significantly higher than the other three quartiles. In summary, fewer women were in senior leadership/higher-paid roles.
The majority of our bonus payments (performance and commission) between April 2019 and March 2020 were paid to eligible roles within our Commercial and Operations departments. These roles sat at varying job levels across different locations (Hull, London and field roles).
We’re not content with our gender pay numbers and it’ll be a journey to get to where we really want to be. But we’re confident that we can learn from our results and improve - but this will take time.
Plus, we'd like to build on our reputation as one of the UK’s Best Places to Work, and lead the way as a diverse, fair and inclusive place to work.
What we're doing now
Our goal is to be an employer of choice for high-quality talent, who fairly represents people of any gender. It’ll make us a better business and our customers rightly expect it of us. There’s work to do to get there, but we’re committing to the following steps:
Focusing on fair recruitment
We’ll continue to only partner with recruiters who make providing gender-diverse candidates a priority.
We’ll monitor our job ads, ensuring that they appeal to the broadest range of candidates and are free from any implicit gender bias.
We’ll ensure that there’s at least one woman on every interview panel and every job shortlist.
Generating our own diversity data
We’ll produce regular diversity data within our overall management information dashboards and supply this to Senior Management on a regular basis. These insights help inform and educate decision-makers on the make-up of their teams, pay parity, future reward decisions and growth opportunities.
Looking at career progression
We’re in the early stages of building career paths by department, which will help to level the playing field by improving progression opportunities and the transparency around this process.
Reviewing pay systems and policies
Alongside reporting on our gender pay gap annually and developing a regular and focussed action plan, we also want to ensure that our pay practices reward fairly and are not based on negotiating skills. Our first steps in this area are to:
- Undertake ongoing quarterly equal pay audits across the business
- Ensure that all pay increases come via Reward for internal and external benchmarking context
Bettering our people policies
We’re about to review all leave policies e.g. paternity and shared parental leave and intend to communicate our plan to improve by end of 2021.
Looking to the future, we’re working towards improving things, but we’re not expecting an overnight change. The plans we’re putting in place now will only start to influence the metrics that we publish from April 2023 onwards.
We care about equality across the board, whether it’s gender, race, religion, colour, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, neurodiversity or disability.
Closing the gap on these figures will take more than just promises. We’re already behind where we would like to be, but we’re going to work constantly and keenly to bring equality to Paymentsense.