London: Facebook Inc. pays female staff in Britain just 0.8% less on average than male employees, but womens’ bonuses are almost 40% lower.
The mean average disparity in pay at Facebook is an improvement compared to Google’s UK arm, where women are paid on average 17% less than men. Google’s average bonus for female staff is 43% lower than male staff.
Amazon.com Inc. also released gender pay gap figures Thursday for its various UK subsidiaries. Amazon Video Ltd, for instance, pays women 40% less than men, using the mean calculation, whereas its Amazon UK Services Ltd business pays women only 2.1% less.
Highest earners
Among Facebook’s top quartile—or highest paid staff—about 30% are women. This decreases to just 19% in the second quartile, according to data published by the company. For Amazon Video, the figures are about 39% and 50% respectively, while Amazon UK Services hovers about the 30% mark for both of the top two quartiles.
The largest difference for the top percentile in Amazon’s report was within its London Development Centre unit, where just 8.2% of the highest earners are women. Within this division, more women receive bonuses compared to men—98% versus 95%—but female employees received a mean bonus pay 12% lower than male colleagues.
In a statement Thursday, the e-commerce giant said that using the median average rather than the mean, its own gender pay gap analysis for the collective Amazon UK workforce showed it paid women 0.7% more than men, however.
“We have programs that we’re continually working to further improve, to actively recruit and help advance more women into senior and technology-focused roles as we grow our business here in the UK,” an Amazon spokesman said in the statement.
US tech
Staff at the US tech giants are among some of the best paid in the UK. Around 1,000 people work for Facebook UK Ltd, sharing pay of $290 million over 2016, according to the latest available accounts.
Fiona Mullan, head of European human resources at Facebook, said the pay gap was due to the company’s engineering workforce, which represents over half of Facebook’s employees in the UK, and that more men are in senior leadership positions.
“Technical roles also tend to drive higher market rates of pay, both in terms of salary and total compensation, due to the demand for specialized skills,” Mullan said.
All companies with more than 250 UK employees have to disclose their gender pay gaps by 4 April. As of Friday, 6,356 of an expected 9,000 companies had submitted data to the government website. Among other companies known for out-sized paychecks, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. reported a UK pay gap of 56%, while Citigroup Inc. pays UK females 44% less than male employees on average. Bloomberg
[“Source-livemint”]