gender pay gap report 2020 and 2021 - gocardless.com

Gender Pay Gap Report 2020 and 2021

Published 5 October 2021

Eva Ducruezet Chief People Officer

We want GoCardless to be a diverse, inclusive and fair workplace for all. Sharing our pay gap data keeps us accountable for the progress we're making on improving gender equality. Research shows that teams with better gender equality are happier; they have higher productivity, more job satisfaction and lower turnover. We are committed to increasing the representation of gender and other underrepresented groups, at all levels and in all areas of our business.

In this report, we are sharing our gender pay gap data for both 2020 and 2021 to understand our business today and to use the insights to continue to improve for the future.

Foreword

2 Gender Pay Gap Report 2020 and 2021

The gender pay gap is a UK government initiative designed to measure the average pay for men and women, irrespective of their roles, to help reduce the difference. Since 2017, companies with more than 250 employees have had to report a series of figures annually, as a snapshot of the previous year’s data.

This is not a measure of equal pay - which is a legal requirement to pay people performing an equal job at equal pay (Equality Act 2010). The gender pay gap, whilst also about pay, highlights the types of roles men and women hold in an organisation and is used to analyse whether there is an imbalance of genders at senior level or in high-demand roles such as engineering.

In this report, gender definitions are based on current legal definitions and collection requirements. However, we recognise that not everyone’s gender identity fits within this binary, and not everyone is yet legally able to be defined as the gender that they would like to be. In the future, we’d like this report to be a more inclusive representation.

Since our last report in 2019, GoCardless has seen significant growth in headcount, doubling in size, and we are continuing to change quite rapidly as an organisation. Therefore, we have chosen to report both April 2020 and 2021 data together to provide a more accurate and transparent representation of our organisation today and the action we plan to take going forward.

In summary, GoCardless has seen an overall improvement in both the mean and median gender pay gaps since 2019. We are encouraged to see we have started doing

the right things to progressively recruit more females into more senior roles as reflected in our median pay gap reduction and changing talent distribution at the top. The mean and median bonus pay gaps show a level of volatility due to the small population size, which we will be working towards stabilising. However, we are seeing an increase in the number of women also receiving bonuses which is a start.

We know we have more work to do overall to close the gap and we have invested in resource and capability to drive our Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) agenda in support of this commitment. Specifically, we have started to focus on:

• Bringing in Diversity & Inclusion leadership, in addition to the efforts of our well-established and proactive Employee Resource Groups, to bring focus and accountability to the overall agenda

• A review of our Rewards approach, improving governance and providing more clarity on pay decisions

• Strengthening our hiring practices and capability to remove bias and attract more diverse talent

• Designing our talent development philosophy to support our scaling organisation

Introduction


As of August 2021, GoCardless is an organisation of 646 people globally (575 in the UK). Since our last report in April 2019, we have grown by 333 people – and by 274 people just in the UK – which means we have more than doubled in size over the past 18 months. Most of our hiring has been to our London teams, impacting this report directly.

During this significant growth, we have placed a strong focus on our recruiting practices which means that in 2021 alone we have boosted the number of females by 118 (103 in the UK), which accounts for 55% of the global growth. Our overall percentage of women in the business has increased since 2019 by six percentage points to become 43% females vs 57% males.

This change is starting to be reflected in our data as we hire more women into senior leadership roles at GoCardless. Since 2019 we have also worked on bringing more women into our sales and product development teams, both of which have seen the proportion of females increase by more than 10 percentage points. However we know this focus needs to be maintained to bring us closer to creating balanced teams across the organisation.

The UK gender pay gap for 2020 and 2021

The table below shows the 5 April snapshots of pay, as required for gender pay reporting, over the past three years at GoCardless.

41.9%

24.9%

35.5%

85%

70%

64%

34%

Hourly pay gap

Bonus pay gap

% of employees receiving bonus

Upper

Upper Middle

Lower Middle

Lower

35.8%

48.3%

29.9%

15%

30%

36%

66%

36.1%

46.0%

34.4%

81%

73%

55%

34%

32.1%

58.1%

29.9%

19%

27%

45%

66%

19.9%

58.8%

35.6%

78%

63%

55%

40%

34.9%

53.2%

26.7%

22%

37%

45%

60%

Median

Median

Men

Men

Hourly Pay

Bonus Pay

% of employees in each hourly pay quartile

Mean

Mean

Women

Women

2019 20192020 20202021 2021

The shape of our business


Overall, we are seeing a reduction in our mean pay gap and a significant drop in our median pay gap. It’s important to observe the overall downward trends since the mean in particular can be volatile year-on-year based on one or two senior hires. Since April 2019, we have increased our percentage of women in our senior leadership population from 16% to 28%. We are pleased to see that the hourly pay gaps have been slowly reducing as a result of the focus on recruiting more female talent into senior roles. This means that the median hourly wage for females is increasing at a faster rate than the same metric for males.

This is further supported by the increase in percentage of women in the top two quartiles and a decrease of women in the lower quartile. Conversely the proportion of men in the top two quartiles has decreased, and increased in the lower pay quartile. However, we still have more men in the most senior and highly-paid positions so more work is needed to bring greater balance.

We are continuing to grow the organisation and can already see that on average, in the past six months, females comprised 47% of our new hires. This, along with a focus on reviewing hiring practices in our teams with fewer females such as engineering and sales, means we are building a pipeline of female talent which will, in the longer term, positively impact our gender pay gap and talent distribution.

The mean and median gender pay gap

28%Proportion of females now in leadership positions, up from 16% in 2019.

In 2021, GoCardless has a mean pay gap of 34.9% and a median pay gap of 19.9%, both showing a downward trend since 2019


GoCardless has a mean bonus pay gap of 53.2% and a median bonus pay gap of 58.8%, both overall increases on 2019 but showing a level of volatility

Both the mean and median bonus pay gaps are volatile year-on-year. This is a result of the relatively small number of people receiving a bonus. Over 2020 and 2021, on average, 30% of our UK population received a bonus.

We have a small number of bonus schemes and eligibility for most schemes, including sales commission and senior leadership bonuses, is driven by role to make sure employees in the same role have the same bonus opportunity. Schemes such as hiring referral bonus are open to all employees and are paid out based on a successful hire. Over 2020 and 2021, on average, 60% of bonuses paid were for our commissioned population, 15% for senior leadership and around 25% for other adhoc bonus arrangements such as our referral bonus.

Today a majority of our sales headcount is male. While there is work to do to bring greater balance in this area, the good news is that the proportion of women receiving bonuses is increasing as we hire more women across the business. In our sales team the proportion of females has increased from 13% in 2019 to 26% in 2021.

Gender pay reporting is giving us the insight to get better at establishing effective systems to improve gender balance across the company, especially in senior and higher-paid roles.

The mean and median bonus pay gap

We have work to do to bring greater gender balance.


GoCardless is committed to building a diverse workforce in which everyone is able to thrive

We have increasingly placed a focus on Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) at GoCardless. Our ambition is to look beyond pure demographics and foster a culture where true diversity of thought is nurtured and recognised as adding undeniable value to how we do business.

Closing the gap

Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)

GoCardless has a history of strong, active volunteers who have been leading a range of D&I efforts in recent years. Thanks to these employee-led groups we have been able to further our efforts in voluntary diversity data collection this year, to develop support for parents and carers, offer community mentoring opportunities in partnership with Career Accelerator, help to raise awareness and empathy during significant events of the past year, and importantly, offer more employees a community of people with whom they share experiences and interests. Our ERGs include:

• BEAM, which aims to increase the opportunity for the Black, Ethnic and Asian Minority community

• Inspiring, which is on a mission to encourage gender equality for all

• Pride, which works to ensure the LGBTQIA+ community feels represented and empowered to be themselves

• Access, our newest group representing the needs of disabled and neurodiverse current and future employees

Hiring practices

Given the large number of hires we have been making in recent months, we have continuously reviewed both our hiring processes and channels to eliminate bias. We’ve introduced programs that attract diverse talent and we continuously seek to create hiring experiences that are fair, transparent and accessible by all. A few examples of recent initiatives:

• We've been partnering with Work180 to promote women in technology which helps drive brand representation and more applications from women.

• Introducing facilitated ‘Decision Meetings’ at the end of every recruiting process to ensure hiring managers engage with feedback from every interviewer, and that all feedback is supported by facts and data from the interviewing process.

• Training interviewers in our product development organisation, where over two-thirds of our employee growth is happening, to implement rigour and standardisation across all interviews.

Reward practices

In 2021 we completed an organisation-wide review of salaries, re-mapping all roles to market benchmarks and increasing salaries for over half of our employees. This has helped us to address internal pay discrepancies and drive greater competitiveness against the external market. We have also introduced systematic pay benchmarking when opening new roles, for both base and bonus pay, to help ensure compensation decisions are data-driven, independent from the candidate's personal situation or ability to negotiate.

In addition, we decided to increase our level of investment and capability in reward strategy by appointing a Head of Rewards. Now we’re working to enhance our governance and processes around rewards to make sure our commitment to pay equity translates into action at every step of the employee journey.


Looking ahead

We publish this report, as of October 2021, fully aware that we are underperforming in comparison to our sector (mean gap of 21.7%) and the overall UK gender pay gap statistics (11.7%). We want to do better and step-up the pace of our efforts. We are committed to strengthening the diversity of our talent base and attracting the best people from all walks of life, as well as building a place where people feel like they belong and can thrive.

We have ambitious plans as an organisation to scale and therefore we have an opportunity to address a number of the gaps we have identified in this report. To strengthen our commitment we have recently appointed our first Director of Diversity & Inclusion, an experienced culture change leader, which will allow us to have a more strategic and systematic approach to building a diverse and inclusive organisation for the long term and as we scale. The Director will work with the executive team and ERGs to define clear D&I targets that GoCardless will commit to achieving over the next three years, and to develop a structured roadmap of initiatives aligned with those targets. This will create greater clarity and accountability across the entire organisation on D&I progress.

Hiring practices

Further standardisation of the process to remove bias and increase organisation capability. This will include the testing of innovative, new technology, establishing robust frameworks to assess skills and training programmes for both talent team and hiring managers.

Talent development strategy

Establishing a more transparent framework for how we grow and develop talent in a scaling organisation. This will include a review of how we assess performance and promotion, bring more transparency on internal career opportunities and provide clear expectations on the behaviours we want to see aligned to our values and commitment to building an inclusive organisation.

Reward communications

We want employees to better understand their reward packages, how individual reward decisions are made and the impact of company and individual performance on rewards. We’re working to improve our communications to provide employees and candidates with greater clarity on GoCardless reward opportunities.

Currently we are starting work on the following:

We are committed to strengthening the diversity of our talent base and attracting the best people from all walks of life.


About GoCardless

GoCardless is a global leader in account-to-account payments, making it easy to collect both recurring and one-off payments directly from customers' bank accounts. The GoCardless global payments network and technology platform take the pain out of getting paid for 65,000 businesses worldwide, from multinational corporations to small businesses. Each year GoCardless processes more than US$20 billion of payments across more than 30 countries. GoCardless is headquartered in the UK, with additional offices in Australia, France, Germany and the United States.

For more information, please visit gocardless.com and follow us on Twitter @GoCardless.

I confirm the accuracy of these numbers in line with the Equalities Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017. Hiroki Takeuchi CEO, GoCardless


gender pay gap report 2020 and 2021 - gocardless.com

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