Our median gender pay gap is 0.63% in favour of women. What does this mean and what should our next steps be?
This year, we have once again advanced our median gender pay gap in favour of women. As a business founded in the traditionally male-dominated digital space, this feels like something to celebrate, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
Since we began reporting our gender pay gap, we have made strides towards increasing gender diversity within our leadership team. Out of six leadership roles in our London studio, three are women, including the Managing Director. We have focused on gender diversity in our recruitment, using diverse interview panels to remove unconscious bias and reaching out to a wider candidate pool by continuously reviewing where we advertise our jobs.
The result is that our overall pay gap is now in favour of women. That’s the headline, but it’s worth looking behind the statistics to see what the numbers are really telling us.
It’s at leadership level that the shift has been most marked, thanks to the proportion of women. Our overall pay gap stands at 10.78% in favour of women, a change from 1.84% in favour of women in 2020 and a significant change from the 13% gap in favour of men in 2016.
We have strong female role models at ustwo and we want this to continue, so it’s important to make sure that women at all levels are rewarded just as well. Our median pay gap shows a much smaller shift in favour of women of 0.63% which could change the narrative and indicates that we also need to look at how the figures play out across role type and at a more junior level.
Why are we sharing this data?
Transparency and accountability are core to our beliefs and the insights this data continues to provide helps us to know where we can improve. This is the fourth year we have shared gender pay gap data and we are proud of the work we have done so far. But this is a journey and one that we will continue on. We are passionate about our diversity and inclusion agenda and strive for fairness in everything we do.
We know that some areas of tech are disproportionately skewed towards males. We know that in the design industry there is a lack of black representation. The 2018 Design Council report found that people of Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds (BAME) make up only 13 per cent of design industry employees. It’s important to note that this figure also aggregates minority ethnic (by using BAME) so potentially obscuring some important facts we need to address. So we commit to looking at the ethnicity pay gap with a goal to achieve parity across all genders and ethnicities by role.
We are already doing work to try to address systematic issues. We have global and local D&I committees that seek to address representation and inclusion at both a global and local level. We are working with Abedesi from the Hustle Crew who is supporting us with our strategy and action plans.
We will continue to hold ourselves to account and be transparent on our journey. We want to widen the conversation as part of our whole diversity and inclusion efforts. If you are looking at your own gender pay gap when you get your data here are some questions you can use to explore the data further.
- Do people get stuck at certain levels within your organisation?
- Is there a gender imbalance in your promotions?
- Are women more likely to be employed into lower paid roles in your organisation?
- Do men and women leave your organisation at different rates?
- Do particular aspects of pay (such as starting salaries and bonuses) differ by gender?
- Do men and women receive different performance scores on average?
- Are you doing to support part-time employees to progress?
- Are you supporting both men and women to take on caring responsibilities?
This post was co-authored by Nicki, MD Europe and Tokyo studios, and Aisha, our People Lead. We’d love to know about things you’ve done to improve the diversity of your businesses. If you want to talk more please get in touch with nicki@ustwo.com and aisha@ustwo.com