Gender pay gap: Women at Revolut are still earning 25 per cent less

Fintech giant Revolut has all but stalled in closing its gender gap in 2021 compared with the previous year.

In its second gender pay gap report for 2021, Revolut revealed that it is closing the gap, but at a snail’s pace.

Looking at the mean hourly pay gap, it has decreased from 23.1 per cent to 22.7 per cent.

This is a decrease of just 0.4 percentage points.

The median hourly gap has decreased slightly more at 6.1 per cent from 31.1 per cent in last year’s report to 25.2 per cent in this year’s.

In a blog post, the company outlined a number of initiatives it has taken since its 2020 report to reduce the gap.

This includes launching its diversity and inclusion framework led by a specialist, holding focus groups and extending its maternity leave.

In the last report, the company shared its commitment to increasing the number of women in Revolut’s leadership to at least 20 per cent.

This followed an explanation that while the number of men and women is roughly equally split in the lowest paid quartile, there are far fewer women in higher paid quartiles.

As it stands, it remains that there are two women and 12 men on the company’s global leadership team.

There is just one woman on the board of directors – Caroline Britton, Chair of the Audit Committee – and one on the executive leadership team –  Deirdre Halligan, Head of Global Affairs and Wealth & Trading. 

If the company hired just one more woman it would have achieved its goal.

“This year’s UK Gender Pay Gap Report demonstrates that we must do more to ensure women are provided with fair and equitable opportunities here at Revolut,” Revolut co-founder and CEO Nik Storonsky said.

“As CEO, it’s my duty to make this a reality, so that next year and in the years following, we can report an ever greater reduction in our Gender Pay Gap.”

Others in the digital banking space have shown greater improvement, with Wise,Monzo and Starling Bank now all sitting at or below a 20 per cent gap in both mean and median hourly pay.

With the largest gap of the three, Wise shares a similar company breakdown to Revolut.

Women make up roughly a fifth of top leadership roles, but are roughly equal in number to men in the lowest quartile.

This perhaps explains why, while there was a decrease in the mean hourly gap by 3.43 percentage points and in the median by 4.48 percentage points, it still has gaps of 20 per cent and 19.52 per cent respectively.

While Monzo only saw a 0.1 percentage point decrease in its mean hourly pay, it still remains the smallest gap at 15.6 per cent.

It also saw the greatest decrease in median hourly pay gap of 10 percentage points, from 14.3 to just 4.3, making it by far the smallest pay gap.

Starling also saw good improvement, and now sits at 16.1 per cent and 10.3 per cent difference in mean and median hourly pay gaps respectively.

Since 2017, companies with more than 250 UK employees are required to report the gender pay gap, the difference between the average (mean or median) earnings of men and women across their workforce on a given date.