How U.K. firms are narrowing pay gaps
From mentoring employees to new hiring practices, companies shamed into action
LONDON— A law firm is giving female lawyers more flexible work schedules. A technology giant wants to increase the ranks of its female engineers. And a media company is recruiting greater numbers of women to mirror its client base more closely.
New rules in Britain requiring companies to publish the extent of their gender pay gap have spurred a far-reaching debate over inequality in the workplace. Businesses — the vast majority of which pay men more than women — are increasingly being shamed into action.
The hurdles are plentiful. Men hold most high-level roles.
Women take more time out of work to look after children.
Higher-paying sectors, like sales and those requiring technical skills, are dominated by men.
What, then, can be done?
‘Me and 30 other guys’ When Stella Worrall started working as a field technician last year at Virgin Media, she felt more than a little conspicuous.
More than 96 per cent of the company’s field technicians, who install the boxes and cables that deliver television and broadband services to people’s homes, are men. Some of Virgin’s technical sites did not even have women’s toilets. And the environment could feel intimidating because there were simply no other women around.
“My training was me and 30 other guys,” Worrall said. “It was quite daunting at first.”
Virgin reported a median pay gap of 17.4 per cent, meaning that women earned around £83 for every £100 earned by men (£100 is about $170). Women make up half the company’s customers but only 29 per cent of its staff, and female clients are increasingly requesting female field technicians to install Virgin’s media services at home.
To meet the demand, Virgin Media, a subsidiary of Liberty Global with about 13,000 employees, is widening its recruitment net. It has experimented with all-female sets of interns, and requirements to have one woman on every short list for a vacant job, said Catherine Lynch, Virgin Media’s chief people officer.
The company has also sought to increase the proportion of senior women through mentoring and by encouraging women to apply for promotions. That has raised concerns that some women promoted were younger than usual or lacked experience in the departments they were moving into. Lynch insists, however, that the moves will pay off. Turning up in tech Myfanwy Edwards spends a lot of time at universities, encouraging women to study technology and engineering.
Edwards, a programmer and engineer who has worked at the Japanese technology company Fujitsu since the 1980s, has risen through the ranks and now works with management to recruit and promote women.
When she was hired, most of her colleagues at Fujitsu’s offices in Britain were men.
So were most of the company’s clients.
Like many big companies, Fujitsu found that its gender pay gap stemmed mainly from an underrepresentation of women in senior management roles and in more highly paid areas, especially technical and sales positions.
To rectify that imbalance — women in the British operations are paid a median of £82 for every £100 earned by male colleagues — it has sought to promote female engineers and the work they do.
After rotating through different departments, Edwards was in 2014 the first woman to be named a “senior distinguished engineer,” a company-wide award. Today, 16 women have received those accolades. She was later elevated to an exclusive 10-person group of fellows that decides who will receive the distinguished engineer awards — but she is the only woman. Women in wine Majestic Wine is a rare company in Britain — its gender pay data revealed that it pays women more than men. That was mainly because most male employees work in lower-paid warehouse jobs, stacking wine pallets or lifting heavy loads.
Still, Majestic says it is eager to get even more women out front at its stores.
The only thing that Hannah Butson knew about reds, whites and rosés when she applied for a job at Britain’s biggest wine retailer was that she liked to drink them.
But when Majestic Wine ushered her into training for a professional wine qualification, her ambitions grew. After intensive courses in wine tasting and blind taste tests, “it was really easy to describe a wine,” she said. She was soon a senior assistant manager, and she now helps run a large store near London’s financial district.
In a traditionally male-dominated industry, she remains one of the few women helping customers at the company’s 210 British outlets.
Two-thirds of Majestic’s 1,500 employees are men, and only about a quarter of applicants for jobs are women.
“There is that real conception of an old man, swirling a glass, explaining all these flavours that they’re getting from a wine,” Butson said.
By having employees such as Butson running tastings and finding wines for customers, Majestic is hoping it can throw off gender-related preconceptions about wine — and become a more attractive employer for women.
It is hard to get female recruits in the door, said Sarah Appleton, the company’s head of human resources.
To attract more women, Majestic adjusted its job postings by dropping requirements for previous industry experience, to avoid evoking an image of wine as mainly a man’s domain. (Recruiting language that seems masculine or feminine can create barriers and discourage women from applying, studies show.) It focused only on necessary skills and emphasized that wine knowledge could be taught within the company.
“If we require wine industry experience, the wine industry is male-dominated, so we’re fishing in a pool of men,” Appleton said.
Butson has seen changes already. She is working in a store with women for the first time since she started in 2016. Two of her three female colleagues applied for jobs after attending wine tastings.
“It’s just about getting rid of that stigma that it is a male-dominated industry,” Butson said.
“It’s just about getting rid of that stigma that it is a male-dominated industry.” HANNAH BUTSON SENIOR ASSISTANT MANAGER AT MAJESTIC WINE