Men at Goldman Sachs earn more than twice the average hourly pay of women at the US investment bank’s British business and take home much bigger bonuses, in the latest example of pay disparity in the City.
The business’s gender pay gap report, published on Friday under new rules designed to shine a light on big variations in earning power between men and women, reveal that women earn 55.5% less an hour than men by the mean average measure at Goldman Sachs International. The median pay gap was 36.4%.
Although roughly the same proportion of men and women at the bank receive a bonus, women at GSI, which employs about 7,400 people who mostly work at its investment bank, receive on average 72.2% less than men (median 67.7%).
The bank said that the gap reflected the fact that more men than women held senior positions – taking up 83% of the best paid roles. In contrast, women hold 62.4% of the lowest paid jobs.
In a joint statement, Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, and David Solomon, the president and chief operating officer, said: “At Goldman Sachs we pay women and men in similar roles with similar performance equally. However, the real issue for our firm and many corporations is the under-representation of women and diverse professionals both in magnitude and levels of seniority. We have made some progress, but we have significant work to do.”
The huge pay gap at Goldman Sachs remains narrower than the 59% disparity revealed by HSBC on Thursday according to the mean average measure, which is calculated by taking all male and female wages and dividing them by the number of workers. The median gap was 29%. HSBC, which gave a provisional mean figure of 60% for 2018, has the widest pay gap of any major company that has reported so far.
All private and public sector organisations and charities with more than 250 employees must submit pay gap figures to the government by April under a scheme introduced this year. About 2,450 have filed figures so far, but the legislation is expected to affect about 9,000 companies, which collectively employ more than 15 million people.
Barclays International banking group has revealed a 48% mean gap; Lloyds 32.8% and the Co-operative Bank a 30.3% gap.
Goldman Sachs said it was committed to ensuring women represented 50% of the global workforce “over time”. “An important first step is to have women make up 50% of our incoming analyst class – and we are working to achieve this goal by 2021,” Blankfein and Solomon said.
- This article was amended on 29 March 2018 to correct HSBC’s mean pay gap and to add median figures.