Apple says male UK staff earn average of 5 percent more than women
On average, men at Apple's U.K. operations earn 5 percent more than women, the company revealed on Tuesday, a day ahead of a deadline for British companies over 250 people to disclose their gender gaps.
Women do however come ahead by 2 percent when going by median, Reuters reported. Apple said the discrepancy in average is attributable to having more men in senior roles, who in turn get higher salaries, bonuses, and stock grants.
30 percent of the company's U.K. staff are women, up from 28 percent in 2014, Apple noted. The company has over 6,000 local workers in all.
In a statement, Apple said it would take steps to try and close any gaps, for instance no longer asking hires for their salary histories as of this year.
The multinational company regularly prides itself on its attempts to reduce racial and gender gaps in labor. Nevertheless, significant differences remain -- an internal report in November pegged its international gender split as 68 percent male and 32 percent female, with only 29 percent of leadership roles being in female hands.
Among top-level executives, 5 out of 16 are women, among them retail head Angela Ahrendts and general counsel Katherine Adams. The board of directors has two women, Andrea Jung and Susan Wagner.
Women do however come ahead by 2 percent when going by median, Reuters reported. Apple said the discrepancy in average is attributable to having more men in senior roles, who in turn get higher salaries, bonuses, and stock grants.
30 percent of the company's U.K. staff are women, up from 28 percent in 2014, Apple noted. The company has over 6,000 local workers in all.
In a statement, Apple said it would take steps to try and close any gaps, for instance no longer asking hires for their salary histories as of this year.
The multinational company regularly prides itself on its attempts to reduce racial and gender gaps in labor. Nevertheless, significant differences remain -- an internal report in November pegged its international gender split as 68 percent male and 32 percent female, with only 29 percent of leadership roles being in female hands.
Among top-level executives, 5 out of 16 are women, among them retail head Angela Ahrendts and general counsel Katherine Adams. The board of directors has two women, Andrea Jung and Susan Wagner.
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The so-called gender wage gap is really just a justification for hiring more women in senior roles.
/s
Your statements are predicated upon a worldview of unimpeachable egalitarianism. This is not something reflected in reality, and is thus not of much use.
EDIT: Let me clarify. Not only is it not reflected in reality, it is not the nature of reality to be egalitarian, and by that metric it is not of much use to envision such a system.
The best thing that can be done to remedy this situation and return the total focus of an organization to maximum productivity with happy employees is to make the compensation system a non-issue. I don’t know of a “perfect” system but there are some long established examples that have done a reasonable job of making compensation a non-issue so that the total focus of the organization on fulfilling the organization’s mission, e.g., the US military. Compensation for military members is based on concrete and established factors like rank, time-in-service, time-in-rank, and in some cases mission related adders. Gender and other bias driven factors aren’t in the equation. The salient point is that the entire compensation system is public knowledge within the organization and everyone basically knows what everyone else in the organization is making. This makes compensation a non-issue and totally transparent so everyone stays focused on the mission. It’s pretty obvious why this is vital to an organization that literally lives or dies based on mission effectiveness and productivity. Why would non-military related organizations with billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of employees not attempt to implement some sort of compensation model, whatever it may be, that suppresses all the negative influences of current medieval based models and puts total focus back on productivity?
The metrics identified in the above report deserve a closer analysis by Apple HR staff and senior management, but this is just one icicle on the visible part of an iceberg that is killing motivation, throttling productivity, and making employees miserable. C’mon Apple, break the mold.
—Popular British Saying
In the far more cutthroat competition among businesses in the civilian sector each business wants to use salary as one competitive tool to acquire and retain the best employees in an at-will employment structure. A company that makes all salaries equal within each job and makes that information public to all employees, and therefore to its competitors, had better be paying better than its competitors, or it will find itself at a disadvantage to those other businesses who do not make this information public and can therefore pay any individual they see as higher value to their mission a higher salary and compensation package versus its other employees in that same job. And they can expand or narrow an individual’s job description to match, or take advantage of, the individual’s unique capabilities and knowledge.
Only if all businesses standardize salaries and make that public would your suggestion work. That’s the reason it can work for the military; each branch might be in competition with the others for recruits, but they all pay the same by rank, time in service and job classification/hazardous duty, etc.
No. If the discrepancy is entirely due to the lack of women at higher levels in the organisation, then they will need to promote more women to senior levels. At the very least, they need to look at why there are more men than women at those levels, and see what, if anything, can be done about it. It may turn out there are reasons for it that are unrelated to the broader issues of gender inequality. Past experience would tend to dictate that this is unlikely, though.
Still, on the face of it, 5% is pretty impressive. I suspect most companies, especially tech companies, fare much worse.
What do you mean? It's a brilliant parody of typical gender inequality denialism. I mean they go straight from "Men work harder" to "but women have hormones, periods, and stuff...", and then constructs a strawman about paying women more for the same work than men. That's just genius. Unless, of course, they actually believe it, but that couldn't be possible, could it?Hmm... how many female coal miners are there?