Female bankers in the U.K. are earning less fixed pay and smaller bonuses that their male counterparts, new data reveals. How do UBS and Credit Suisse rank?
The news from J.P. Morgan last week shocked women in the City: the U.S. investment bank's females bankers earn less than half – 47 percent – of the fixed pay that their male colleagues take home, and just over one-third of the bonus value.
The data was released under new regulations for companies with at least 250 employees in Britain. While everyone from Nestle to Royal Dutch Shell must disclose the difference between what women and men earn, the data backs up arguments over pay differences in the U.K. finance hub with hard data for the first time.
Women have long found the air thin in the male-dominated finance industry in Switzerland – prominent women like UBS rainmaker Ros Stephenson are rare.
Swiss Measures
The government data shows British bank HSBC pays female employees 59 percent less on average than men. At Barclays, the gap is 48 percent, while at Goldman Sachs women in the U.K. earn about 56 percent less than men.
What about the Swiss, which have been vocal advocates of getting women back into the workplace after family breaks and of self-imposed quotas for management jobs? Credit Suisse on Tuesday reported a 39 percent gap from women to men, greater than the 31 percent disclosed by UBS earlier this month.
CS Deadline
When it comes to bonuses, Swiss banks look more like their U.S. and U.K. rivals. At Credit Suisse, women earned payouts on average 70 percent lower than those received by men, while the gulf was 57 percent at UBS. That compares with a bonus gap of 79 at Barclays, 72 percent at Goldman Sachs, 86 percent at HSBC and 64 percent at J.P. Morgan's securities unit in London.
The British government is hoping that public disclosure will draw attention to the disparities and lead to more efforts to close the gap. Credit Suisse, like UBS and other foreign-based investment banks, employs thousands in the U.K.
The pay gap measures the difference between the average salary of men and women, calculated on an hourly basis. It mirrors the fact the men in senior roles in the financial industry far outnumber women, who dominate junior positions.
UBS Quotas
In 2015, UBS pledged to increase the ratio of women in management roles to one third. Men accounted for 79 percent of the quartile earning the highest hourly pay in April 2017, the timestamp on the disclosures.
UBS said the number of women hired into U.K. businesses has increased 37 percent in the last three years. Among other measures to improve gender diversity, the bank recently introduced a program in the U.K. similar to one in the U.S. and Switzerland to help people returning to work after an extended break.
«Closing gender representation at all levels will take time across our industry and require concerted action,» Carolanne Minashi, UBS’s global head of diversity and inclusion, said.
