Banks face UK grilling in probe over big gender pay differences

Bloomberg

The biggest banks in the UK are among the worst offenders in paying women less than men and face being summoned to explain themselves, according to Nicky Morgan, the Conservative member of Parliament who will chair hearings this summer into the finance industry’s alarming gender pay gap.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., HSBC Holdings Plc, Barclays Bank Plc and others could be asked to testify in front of a cross-party panel on how they plan to rectify pay disparities, Morgan said in an interview. Men at all three lenders earn at least 49% more per hour than women, on average.
“We were very disappointed with those figures and want to know what are they going to do about it because it’s just not sustainable for companies to only pay lip service to this issue,” said Morgan, who held the post of equalities minister between 2014 and 2016. There aren’t any plans yet to punish offenders. Financial-services companies have come under intense public scrutiny since the government made it mandatory last year to release pay disclosures annually, revealing some staggering imbalances in wages. Goldman’s pay gap fell to 50.6% in the latest filings in April while HSBC’s widened two percentage points to 61%. A lot of the criticism about the pay gap centers on the lack of women in more senior—and thus well-compensated—positions.