An update on our gender pay gap, April 2020 and April 2021

The window for publishing 2020 gender pay gap was extended for 2021. We'll report on both a snapshot for April 2020 and April 2021, and look at the gender pay gap changes since we last reported in April 2019.

Between 5th April 2019 and 5th April 2021, we reduced our median gender pay gap to 4%, down from 20%

The change to our gender pay gap since 2019 is positive and a significant improvement from our 47% gap in 2017. But we’ll keep working to close the gap further.

We’ve reduced our gender pay gap mainly through hiring and promoting women into senior roles, including positions in our executive committee and senior management. 

We welcomed many exceptional women leaders over the last two years including our Chief Operating Officer Sujata Bhatia, our General Counsel and Company Secretary Stephanie Pagni, and our US CEO Carol Nelson. We continue this trend as we move into 2022 by welcoming our Chief People Officer Rachel Mooney.

Overall we increased the number of women in higher paid roles from 26% to 35% in this two-year period.

In 2021 we also met our Women in Finance Charter goal with 40% of women on the Monzo executive and the board.

We do however have a 33% gap in our mean and 40% gap in our median bonus figures*. We don’t offer performance bonuses right now, so this gap relates to recruitment activity bonuses like referrals and relocation bonuses. We know this data relates to a small number of people in 2021 (about 40 people), but we’ll continue to explore the reason behind the imbalance.

An overview of our gender pay gap for 2019-2021

We’ve chosen to focus on the median (the mid-point of pay distributed across our workforce) gender pay gap in our commentary as we think it gives the more transparent and representative view of any pay gap. The mean is often skewed by a few people at the top of the pay scale, but you can also see this in the table below.

The changes we’ve made

Making our hiring processes more inclusive

• We reviewed our job descriptions. For example, one of our tech leaders posted open roles on LinkedIn and received minimal applications from people from underrepresented groups. By rewriting the job description, almost overnight, the diversity of applications increased ten fold. We also now check for gendered language in job ads using software called Textio.

• We rolled out inclusive interview training to make sure our teams are aware of the kinds of biases that can happen in interview situations (like first impressions and cultural bias) and how to interrupt them. 

• We’ve focused more on creating a balanced pipeline of candidates and interview panels all the way up to leadership levels. For example, we made sure we had balanced shortlists when hiring for all roles at Vice President level and above.

• When we start hiring for a new role, we’ve made it part of the process for our hiring team and hiring managers to make sure we have a diverse interview panel. 

• We also now ask our candidates if there is anything we can do to make their interview process more inclusive.

Evolving our policies and work environment

All Monzo employees benefit from inclusive policies and an inclusive and flexible environment. But they’re especially important in attracting senior, skilled women to work at Monzo – whether or not they actually plan to or already have children.

We appreciate that caregivers have different experiences, so we offer:

• 52 weeks maternity, adoption or shared parental leave (caregiver leave) - 13 weeks at 100% pay, 13 weeks at 50% pay, 13 weeks at statutory pay, 13 weeks unpaid. Secondary caregivers are offered 6 weeks leave at 100% full pay.

• 6 days of leave per year for fertility treatments to support Monzonauts in their family planning.

• 10 days of paid leave following any form of pregnancy loss for either partner.

A lot of staff at Monzo work remotely, and our flexible working policies mean people at Monzo can choose where and when they work around their other commitments.

We also have policies to support Monzonauts’ mental wellbeing, including access to an Employee Assistance Programme and private healthcare, as well as immediate support from our trained Mental Health First Aiders. Mental Health First Aiders are staff we train to be a point of contact for any colleagues who are experiencing a mental health issue. Part of their role is to signpost people to professional Mental Health support, like the counselling service our Employee Assistance Programme provides. 

We have community groups in Slack (our internal messaging tool) that offer a safe space for employees to connect online or face to face, and raise awareness about their community among the wider business. We ensure these groups have a platform and use awareness days and other events to engage the wider company in their call to action. Our People team works with these community groups to keep improving our employee experience and reviews our exit interviews and surveys as part of our offboarding process to understand reasons for leaving. 

We’ve still got work to do

We’ve made some progress, but we can always do more. We’ll continue reducing our gender pay gap and increasing the number of women in higher paid roles by focusing on:

1. Making sure Monzo is a place where talented people who identify as women can stay and progress.

2. Attracting senior, highly-skilled women to work at Monzo, and creating an environment where they're included and supported.

3. Using meaningful data to monitor diversity in our processes and engage leaders further in our gender pay gap reduction efforts.

There are some things we can do to help make this happen, like:

Continuing to review our hiring process

We‘ll use diversity data analytics from our hiring system to monitor and report on where women may be dropping out of the process, and work directly with business areas to improve. This means we can make changes to the right part of the process, like the application process or the interview experience.

We now have a larger hiring team with dedicated people in each business area, all focused on ensuring diversity in our hiring process.

Setting goals that’ll have an impact on our pay gap

We set a company-wide goal in March 2021 to increase the number of people who identify as women in leadership roles by 10% in the following six months, which we’ve achieved. As of August 2021, women take up 36% of our leadership roles. We’ll put the same goal in place for 2021/2022.

Looking at the gender balance of our performance management process

We want the proportion of women receiving promotions in an area of the business to match the proportion of women in that area. Where that isn’t happening, we’ll review our performance processes, looking at things like manager coaching, enhanced talent reviews and extended succession planning. 

We've still got a way to go to get to a 0% gender pay gap but we'll keep working to narrow it and continue to publish where we are. If you have any feedback, we’d love to hear it.

The gender pay gap explained

The gender pay gap is the difference in earnings between people who identify as men and women, throughout a company and across all roles and career level. Although it does still happen, the Equality Act makes it illegal to pay people doing the same job different amounts. The gender pay gap, on the other hand, highlights the kinds of roles men and women hold within an organisation, and the different salaries associated with those roles. It exposes when women across a company are being paid less than men on average, and forces companies to confront why that's still the case. Often, that's because women are underrepresented at senior levels and in higher-paid parts of the company.

The numbers in the table above show a snapshot of our employees’ pay on 5th April 2019, 2020 and 2021. You can see the average hourly rates we paid people who identify as men and women on that date, and the percentage difference between them.

We've also put everyone in the company into four groups (or quartiles) according to how much we pay them, and you can see the percentage of men and women in each pay quartile.

Companies that employ more than 250 people are legally required to publish a snapshot of their gender pay gap on the 5th of April each year.