Blackstone sheds light on gender pay gap in UK PE

Bloomberg

Blackstone Group LP said its female employees in the UK earn an average of 30 percent less than male colleagues, providing a rare glimpse into the gender pay gap in the private equity (PE) industry.
Although more than 400,000 people work in private equity in the UK, most of the firms have fewer than 250 employees, exempting them from new rules requiring companies to disclose their compensation levels for the two sexes by a Wednesday deadline. At Blackstone, women earn 65 pence for every 1 pound paid to men on a median hourly basis, the New York-based firm said in a statement.
Blackstone’s pay gap represents broader trends in the industry: women make up 9.4 percent of senior positions in private equity, and only about 18 percent of the industry’s workforce, according to an October report from data provider Preqin. Companies’ disclosures in the UK offer a view across the whole workforce rather than employee-to-employee comparisons, and in many cases, the pay differences reflect a lack of women in more senior—and thus better paid—roles.
“The gender pay gap is linked to the number of senior women in the industry, and at this stage our efforts are concentrated on increasing the number of women working within in it,” said Gurpreet Manku, assistant director-general and director of policy at the British Private Equity and Venture Capital Association. “Our focus is to encourage more women to work in the industry and improve the representation of women in senior roles.”
The proportion of women in private equity is lower than in other alternative asset classes such as venture capital and real estate, where women comprise 21 percent of employees.