Women face wage battle in British finance sector

LONDON — There had never been much doubt that in London’s testosterone-fuelled financial sector female workers’ salaries lagged far behind those of their mostly male colleagues.

Now this has been confirmed in black and white after the British government forced UK-based banks to publish their so-called gender pay gaps.

Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative government demanded that individual financial institutions reveal wage differentials between men and women across all employees.

The results are unflattering for an industry that has long been marked by male-filled boardrooms and trading floors.

Men employed in London’s ‘City’ financial district earn significantly more per hour than women excluding bonuses, according to the banks’ data.

May is eager to see a change in the gender gap, or percentage difference between the average male salary and the average female salary — in an eventual push toward pay equality.

However, women still face an uphill struggle because nationwide across all sectors, British men earn 18.4 percent more per hour on average than women, according to official data from the Office for National Statistics.

Among retail banks, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group have pay gaps of 37.2 percent and 33 percent, respectively.

Among institutions that are more focused on investment banking, the difference is even wider.

Britain’s Barclays has a gap of 48 percent at its Londonbased investment bank unit. The equivalent is 55.5 percent at US giant Goldman Sachs.

The gap at HSBC’s entire UK operations is 59 percent.

Karen Frank, chief executive of private banking at Barclays, said that her company was slowly closing the gap but simply needed to attract more women into top positions.

Barclays has noted that the gender gap is driven by two factors: The higher proportion of men in senior jobs and the higher proportion of women in more junior positions.

Conservative lawmaker Nicky Morgan, chair of parliament’s influential Treasury Committee, said recently of the massive gender pay gap at Barclays’ investment banking unit: “For this to be the case in 2018 is shocking,” although she acknowledged that the bank had committed to supporting the progression of female employees into senior jobs.

At the same time, Frank insists that women must perform harder and better than men to achieve that goal.

“We have to have the confidence to speak our mind, take risks and set our bar high,” she said.