TikTok, Stripe, Eir, Cisco, VMware and others have published their gender pay gap data for Ireland over the past few weeks.
The issue of gender pay gaps is sure to be a topic we hear more about this coming year as various interest groups debate whether these reports positiviely impact companies’ diversity and inclusion policies.
Ibec has warned that reporting gender pay gaps may not address the underlying problem of women having lower representation in certain sectors.
Indeed, some companies, such as Google, Amazon and HubSpot who released reports in December 2022, said that their gender pay gaps tended to be skewed in favour of men because of the lack of women in highly paid roles.
Since more company reports have been published and analysed, HR body CIPD said it has become clear there are some gaps in the information reported.
“Information around rates for part-time workers and bonus payments is lacking in some places as are overall employee numbers and we would encourage employers to address this in order to give as clear a picture as possible of conditions for its workers,” said director of CIPD Ireland Mary Connaughton.
“We are seeing a lot of pledges to set targets for female representation at senior/board level, set up employee resource groups, review recent promotions, examine the take up and support or options such as parental or parent’s leave, flexible work and more,” Connaughton added.
CIPD Ireland will share more in-depth analysis on the gender pay gap reports published in December in the coming months.
In the meantime, let’s take a look at some of the companies that have been reporting their gender pay gaps in Ireland.
Airbnb
The company said it is hoping to have women represent half of its staff globally by 2025. More than half (56pc) of its employees in Ireland are women, with the figure being 49pc worldwide.
Despite the majority of its workers in Ireland being women, Airbnb’s hourly mean pay gap is 23.9pc and its median is 14pc in favour of men. Its bonus pay gaps are also in favour of men.
It said the reason these gaps are skewed in favour of men is that it has more women than men working in lower paid roles in the company.
Cisco
Cisco’s Irish workforce is 74pc men, while 26pc are women. It said that it had “accelerated” its overall representation of women in Ireland in the past few years. Much of this acceleration was achieved in the lower pay bands, however.
It acknowledged that this has had the effect of widening overall median and mean pay gaps.
Currently, both the median and mean hourly gender pay gaps are 22pc.
Eir
The majority of Eir’s workforce is made up of me-, which it attributes to “a lack of female involvement in STEM subjects (from an early age) and a wider societal issue of low female applications for technical careers”.
It says it has managed to increase the number of women it hires following targeted D&I programmes. There are more women than men working part time at the company.
Currently, Eir’s mean gender pay gap is 7.18pc, while its median gap is 18.6pc – an improvement from 2020/2021.
Of the total portion of women employed at Eir, 63pc are in the lower and lower middle pay quartiles, whereas men are primarily among the highest earners.
HPE
HPE said its long-term goal is a “neutral” gender pay gap which it hopes to achieve through cultural company change.
Its overall national mean gender pay gap is 15.4pc, while its median is 13.8pc.
Like a lot of companies on this list, HPE said the gap is skewed in favour of men because of the low representation of women in higher-paid jobs.
Just over two-thirds of HPE’s total Irish staff are men.
Stripe
The Irish-founded tech company hit headlines a few months ago when it cut 14pc of its global workforce.
The data from its 2022 gender pay gap report is from before these layoffs were implemented, however.
As of June last year, the company’s hourly mean gender pay gap was 0.3pc, while the median was 3.3pc.
At this time, 45pc of Stripe’s staff were women.
TikTok
Like Stripe, TikTok’s Irish employee gender divide was broadly even for men and women across all four pay quartiles.
But whereas Stripe’s four pay quartiles (lower middle, middle, upper middle and upper) were all skewed very slightly in favour of men, TikTok’s lower and lower middle pay bands were slightly dominated by women.
For the mean hourly pay gap, the percentage was 5pc in favour of men, while the median was 1.4pc.
The company said it was “still a young business in Ireland” and added that it was “fully committed” to building on its progress so far to improve its D&I performance.
VMware
VMware’s mean hourly gender pay gap was 8.4pc and the median was 14pc. Where part-time employees were segmented, the mean pay gap was -35.7pc and the median was 25.6pc, meaning women are on the flip side of this particular pay gap.
All pay quartiles were dominated by men, with the gender gap increasing as pay bands increased.
VMware noted that its product engineering department was mostly men. The company said it was taking steps to address its gender pay gaps and that it aimed for 1 in 3 of its hires to be women in future.
Workhuman
Like VMware, Workhuman also experienced a reverse pay gap (ie one in favour of women) when it came to part-time employees – although its gap was not as large.
For all employees, Workhuman’s mean hourly pay gap was 30pc, while its median was 32pc.
Workhuman said: “We identified that the primary driver of our gender pay gap in Ireland was the higher proportion of men in senior and executive positions.” Indeed, 76pc of Workhuman employees in the upper pay band are men. Women workers, however, have greater representation in the low (66pc) and low middle (59pc) pay brackets.
Overall, 53pc of Workhuman’s workers are women. The company said it was “committed to narrowing its gender pay gaps”.
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Updated, 5.05pm, 6 January 2022: This article was amended following a correction issued on the data provided by Workhuman.
