Men at Goldman Sachs earn more than twice the average hourly pay of women at the US investment bank’s British business and take home much bigger bonuses, in the latest example of pay disparity in the City.



The business’s gender pay gap report, published on Friday under new rules designed to shine a light on big variations in earning power between men and women, reveal that women earn 55.5% less an hour than men by the mean average measure at Goldman Sachs International. The median pay gap was 36.4%.

Quick guide What is the gender pay gap, and what must UK companies report? Show Hide What is the gender pay gap? The gender pay gap is the difference between the average hourly earnings of men and women. The figure is expressed as a proportion of men’s earnings. According to the ONS, the gap between what UK male and female workers earn – based on median hourly earnings for all workers – was 17.9% in April 2018, down from 18.4% in April 2017. Data in 2018 showed that men were paid more than women in 7,795 out of 10,016 companies and public bodies in Britain. What is being published? All companies and some public sector bodies in Great Britain, except Northern Ireland, with more than 250 employees had to report their gender pay gap to the Government Equalities Office for the first time by by 4 April 2018. The second year of gender pay gap reports - and the first indicator of how public bodies and companies are performing - must be filed by April 2019 What’s the difference between the mean and the median figures? Commonly known as the average, the mean is calculated by adding up the wages of all employees and dividing that figure by the number of employees. The mean gender pay gap is the difference between mean male pay and mean female pay. The median gap is the difference between the employee in the middle of the range of male wages and the employee in the middle of the range of female wages. Typically the median is the more representative figure, because the mean can be skewed by a handful of highly paid employees. What will happen if companies don’t report? The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said that, while it would approach employers informally at first if they failed to publish figures by the deadline, businesses could ultimately face “unlimited fines and convictions”. However, information published following a freedom of information request by the Guardian showed that no companies have been fined to date despite hundreds failing to accurately file their gender pay gap figures on time.

Although roughly the same proportion of men and women at the bank receive a bonus, women at GSI, which employs about 7,400 people who mostly work at its investment bank, receive on average 72.2% less than men (median 67.7%).

The bank said that the gap reflected the fact that more men than women held senior positions – taking up 83% of the best paid roles. In contrast, women hold 62.4% of the lowest paid jobs.

In a joint statement, Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, and David Solomon, the president and chief operating officer, said: “At Goldman Sachs we pay women and men in similar roles with similar performance equally. However, the real issue for our firm and many corporations is the under-representation of women and diverse professionals both in magnitude and levels of seniority. We have made some progress, but we have significant work to do.”

The huge pay gap at Goldman Sachs remains narrower than the 59% disparity revealed by HSBC on Thursday according to the mean average measure, which is calculated by taking all male and female wages and dividing them by the number of workers. The median gap was 29%. HSBC, which gave a provisional mean figure of 60% for 2018, has the widest pay gap of any major company that has reported so far.

All private and public sector organisations and charities with more than 250 employees must submit pay gap figures to the government by April under a scheme introduced this year. About 2,450 have filed figures so far, but the legislation is expected to affect about 9,000 companies, which collectively employ more than 15 million people.

Barclays International banking group has revealed a 48% mean gap; Lloyds 32.8% and the Co-operative Bank a 30.3% gap.

Goldman Sachs said it was committed to ensuring women represented 50% of the global workforce “over time”. “An important first step is to have women make up 50% of our incoming analyst class – and we are working to achieve this goal by 2021,” Blankfein and Solomon said.

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