HSBC has the worst gender pay gap among UK banks, reveal new figures that show the gap widening for female workers. The bank released an update showing its average gender pay gap grew to 61% in 2018, compared to 59% a year earlier. It means women employed at HSBC earned just 39p for every £1 pocketed by male colleagues. Its median pay gap also grew from 29% to 30%. It makes HSBC the worst performer for gender pay disparity among UK banks that have issued data. The average pay gap at Lloyds currently sitting at 31.5%, while Barclays has yet to issue its pay gap data for 2018 but reported a 48% difference a year earlier. Royal Bank of Scotland said in February 2018 that its pay gap was 37.2%. HSBC said in its report that the pay gap was “driven by a number of structural issues” across its workforce, including the fact that fewer women are in leadership positions, which come with bigger salaries. While female employees account for around 54% of HSBC’s total UK workforce, only 23% of its senior roles are held by women. At the junior level, however, two-thirds of its staff are female. A higher proportion of HSBC’s female workers work part-time as part of flexible working schemes, which are often taken up by working mothers. “While we encourage both men and women to work flexibly, the majority of those currently doing so are women,” HSBC said. The UK-headquartered bank originally released 2018 gender pay gap figures in March last year, based on a February snapshot showing a 60% average pay discrepancy for female workers. However, those were provisional results that now have been refreshed to reflect its headcount as of early April. Companies with more than 250 UK workers are required to publish annual gender pay gap figures, as part of government rules that came into force in 2017. It is aimed at pressurising companies into improving the recruitment and promotion of women into senior roles, and closing their gender pay gap.
Newly released figures from HSBC reveal it has the widest gender pay gap of any UK bank, at 61% compared with last year’s 59%. The figures mean that for every £1 ($1.3) earned by a male employee of HSBC, female workers earn 39p. Female employees make up more than half of the bank’s workforce, at 54%, yet account for 23% of its senior roles. In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s