Snap has 53% UK gender pay gap, men dominate tech high earners

Men heavily outnumber women in better-paid roles like engineering and product development, Snap said in its report on the numbers. — AFP

Snap Inc said it paid women in Britain 53% less than men when judging median hourly wages, with several of its tech rivals still lagging the UK average.

The tech sector has become one of the UK’s best paid industries after firms including Google and Facebook have hired thousands of developers in the country.

Men heavily outnumber women in better-paid roles like engineering and product development, Snap said in its report on the numbers. Some 85% of the best-paid quartile at the business were men. Stock-based compensation also vests more frequently at Snap than some rivals; if it was excluded, the gap would be 20%, the company said.

One of its top competitors TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance Inc, said it paid women an average of 30% less than men. TikTok said the binary definition of gender required in reporting doesn’t represent its position on gender identification.

Since 2017, every UK business with more than 250 employees has had to report their pay gap averages. The median man at a UK business was paid 9.8% more than the median woman last year, compared with 10% in 2020, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of filings submitted to the government. The gap was 9.2% when businesses were first required to report the data in 2017.

Here’s how those numbers stack up against the UK arms of other big tech firms this time around, all of which are in favour of men:

• Alphabet Inc’s Google had a difference of 15%, also pointing to a lack of women in engineering, as well as senior leadership
• Twitter Inc said its men were paid 13% more than women
• Apple Inc reported a 9% difference across its three UK units, rising to 19% at the two not focused on retail
• Meta Platforms Inc’s Facebook posted a gap of 8%
• Microsoft Corp said its figure was 7%
• Amazon.com Inc said the overall gap at its UK workforce was 0.8%

The headline median gap shows the difference between men’s and women’s average earnings regardless of role or seniority. Several companies distinguish that metric from “pay equity” – the figure awarded for people with the same role and tenure.

Other outliers in the tech sector included Japan’s NEC Software, with men paid 42% more than women, chipmaker Intel Corp at 32%, payments operator PayPal Holdings Inc at 30%, and German cloud provider SAP SE, with a gap of 28%. – Bloomberg