Citigroup is one of the only major investment banks to offer a frank insight into the gender pay gap across the organisation. Progress has stalled.
The Wall Street bank’s female employees make 26% less than male employees, according to its latest figures unveiled in its annual ESG report. This means that Citi’s median pay for women globally is 74% that of the median for men — the same as it was in 2020.
Citi’s chief executive, Jane Fraser, who took the reins in March last year is the only example of a woman running a major Wall Street bank. She has moved to improve work-life balance of Citi’s employees, offering a minimum of three days in the office as part of a hybrid working programme. She has also capped the number and length of meetings to allow staff “time to breathe”. In July, Fraser said that working parents should “use me as an example” of how to combine raising a family with a high-powered banking career.
But the latest pay gap numbers highlight the under-representation of women in senior and high-paying roles in the sector. Citi is the only major bank to disclose what it dubs “raw” gender pay gap numbers, which show the overall compensation difference across the organisation, rather than for men and women working in the same roles.
READ Citigroup narrows global gender pay gap to 26%
It has been revealing the figures since 2018, when the gap was 29%, a figure which former chief executive Michael Corbat described as an “ugly” number. Last year, 2021, marked the first year since then that the median global pay gap did not reduce.
Like for like in the same jobs, women globally are paid on average more than 99% of what men are paid at Citi, the report said.
Citi’s ‘raw’ compensation data for US-based minorities versus non-minority employees in the country shows a 4% median gap for 2021, an improvement from 6% a year earlier.
“The existence of our raw pay gap reflects a need to increase representation of women and US minorities in senior and higher-paying roles,” Citi’s report said.
Citi increased the proportion of women in senior and mid-ranking roles to over 40% last year, up from 37% in 2018. The proportion of Black employees at the same levels increased from 6% to 8% over the same period. In its biggest, most recent class of managing director promotions in December, 36% were women and 35.3% were from ethnically diverse backgrounds.
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Banks have been increasingly open about the number of women and ethnic minorities in their senior ranks, which often highlights the scale of the diversity issues they face.
Last year, Goldman Sachs revealed that it had just 24 Black men and 25 Black women out of 1,548 senior executives in the US, according to new figures, or around 3%. This was the first time the bank, which has set new diversity targets, revealed the numbers. The figures for 2021 will be unveiled in May.
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Source: fnlondon.com
