Livi is one of the few tech companies that has almost closed the gender pay gap. If you want the specific figure, women are paid 0.8% “more” than men, according to what is generally considered the most critical metric – median hourly pay.
Women represent just over 50% of our upper pay quartile, indicating equal representation at the most senior level. In fact, the data shows that there is a higher proportion of women compared to men across all pay quartiles.
Yet as I started this post, I was unsure whether or not this is something I should write about. Leaving aside our legal obligation to [report our gender pay gap], it doesn’t feel right in 2022 to announce our “positive” results with any sort of fanfare.
Because closing the gap should not be news - it should be unremarkable, commonplace, standard.
But I’m sure many of you will have seen the gender pay gap Twitter bot, set up to retweet organisations’ International Women's Day tweets alongside their gender pay gap. The feed provides ample evidence that closing the gap remains anything but commonplace.
And so I’ve decided to share what we’ve done at Livi to close our gender pay gap, and to keep it closed.
My aim is that everybody is paid equitably and transparently. This means that from hiring processes to flexible working arrangements and career advancement, equality is baked in from the start.
We’ve supported managers to remove gendered language from job descriptions, and trained our people to understand and interrupt bias throughout the selection process. We’ve improved representation in our talent pipelines and we know the value of diverse interview panels. And we will continue to educate, and re-engineer processes where necessary to mitigate bias.
We also recognised early on the disproportionate impact the pandemic has had on women. Many have been shouldering a greater proportion of parental duties during lockdown, so we provided support to working parents and caregivers to flex their hours and re-prioritise their work.
But we go beyond that. Our managers work with their teams on a one-to-one basis to understand individual circumstances and find the right support solution for each person. This framework is now a formalised way of working – we agree with every employee how and where they can best perform.
So I post this in the spirit of transparency, not triumph. What I really look forward to is the time when a closed gender pay gap doesn't even warrant a mention.
Juliet Bauer, Managing Director, Livi
