Financial Services

Royal Bank of Scotland pays female staff 37% less than men

Women also receive average bonuses that are 64 per cent lower than male employees, bank says

Fri Feb 23 2018 - 11:42

Royal Bank of Scotland pays its female staff on average 37 per cent less than men at the bank, becoming the second British financial services company to reveal an acute gender imbalance between employees under new disclosure requirements.

The government-owned lender said women receive average bonuses that are 64 per cent lower than male employees, blaming the disparity on the disproportionate number of men in senior roles at the Edinburgh-based bank.

The results are even worse than Barclays, which reported on Thursday that female staff at its UK retail bank earned on average 26 per cent less than men. The gap widened to 48 per cent at the division housing Barclays's corporate and investment bank.

The gender pay gap “is not where we want to be,” RBS Chief Executive Officer Ross McEwan, said . “We need to have more females in senior roles and we set some ambitious targets in the next three years to improve it and that’s what affects the gender pay gap.”

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Men make up about 70 per cent of the employees in RBS’s highest-paid quartile, mirroring the proportion of women in the bank’s lowest-paid quartile.

RBS and Barclays are the first major banks with British operations to disclose their gender pay gaps under new requirements. As of Friday fewer than 1,200 companies have provided the information out of an expected total of around 9,000. The government has written to companies reminding them of their obligation to report by April 4th, with the Equalities and Human Rights Commission warning of potential sanctions for firms that delay disclosure.

“The world has a problem getting women through the ranks and to the top, and that is particularly true in finance where participation rates are dismally low,” said Tom Kirchmaier, a research economist at the London School of Economics.

- Bloomberg

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