Female employees at the Blackstone Group’s U.K. offices earn an average of 30 percent less than male staff, the private equity firm reported Tuesday.
When bonus compensation is taken into account, the pay gap grows still wider: Men working at Blackstone earned bonuses worth 75.4 percent more on average than the bonuses given to female staff for the 12-month period ending in April 2017.
According to Blackstone, much of the gap can be attributed to fact that more men are employed as investment professionals, typically the highest paying roles at asset management firms. Close to three-quarters of male employees are investment staff, while less than a fifth of Blackstone’s female workers are investment professionals.
Instead, nearly three-quarters of women employed by Blackstone work in support and administrative roles. The disclosure was made in compliance with a government mandate that requires companies with 250 or more employees working in the U.K. to reveal the difference in earnings between male and female staff.
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Other financial services companies that have reported their U.K. pay data include Goldman Sachs Group, HSBC Holdings, Barclays, and State Street Corp. HSBC said its salary gap last year was 59 percent, with a bonus gap of 86 percent. Barclays International, the division that houses Barclays’ corporate and investment bank, paid women just under half of what they paid men on average.
Goldman Sachs, which is currently facing a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. over perceived gender bias, reported a pay gap in Britain of 55.5 percent, plus a gap in bonus pay of 72.2 percent on average.
“We are a meritocracy, and gender is not a factor in the way that we pay our people,” the bank said in a statement on its website.
State Street, which has taken a strong stance on gender balance at the board level, reported a comparatively small salary gap of 17 percent for its U.K. employees. Still, bonus compensation varied hugely, with male employees earning bonuses worth an average of 48 percent more than bonuses paid to female staff for the period between April 2016 and April 2017.
