TSB publishes its gender pay gap data

TSB has today published its 2018 gender pay gap report, standing firm on its commitment to tackle the root causes of gender imbalance and continue to build a more balanced workforce for the long term.

TSB was one of the first companies in the UK to publish its gender pay gap in July 2017 with the launch of its Gender Balance Matters report. TSB has a firm commitment to not only publish its gender pay imbalance, but to also examine the root causes of its gender imbalance, clearly set out the signature actions it is taking to tackle it and report on progress made.

As of April 2018¹, TSB’s median gender pay gap – the number used most often to compare companies – has modestly improved to 23% down from 24%. The Bank’s mean gender pay gap remained unchanged at 31%.

Helen Rose, Chief Operating Officer and Executive Sponsor for Gender at TSB, says: “Although our median gender pay gap has only seen a small improvement, it’s a step in the right direction. Furthermore, the actions we’ve taken in the past year, including a number of senior female appointments demonstrate our long-term commitment.

“The solutions are going to be different for every organisation. That’s why we’re committed to really explaining our numbers and clearly setting out the steps we are taking to address our gap.

“Because it is only by being transparent and sharing information that we can drive change and help all UK businesses work towards making the gender pay gap a thing of the past.”

Understanding TSB’s gender pay gap

For many companies, it is a lack of female representation in senior roles that has the biggest impact on their gender pay gap. But for TSB it’s actually the number of women employed in non-senior management, more junior roles that has the biggest impact.

That’s because TSB employs significantly more women (68%) than men (32%) in non-senior management roles. If the Bank achieved a 50:50 gender mix at this level, the mean pay gap would reduce by 22 percentage points to 9%.

Helen Rose continues: “There are no quick fixes and there’s a lot more to be done, but we are making progress. A great example of this is our new SME banking leadership team which we announced in September 2018.

“We set out to build the team to reflect the businesses and communities we serve and we’re proud that of the 11-strong leadership team, eight roles are held by women. And our first 16 SME field relationship managers, based in the local community, are made up of 6 women to 10 men. But it’s not just gender we’re balancing, 20 percent of the team are from BAME backgrounds making us one of the most diverse SME banking teams in the UK.

“Our focus is on embedding the values of inclusion and diversity throughout our organisation to bring about change.”

An update on TSB’s signature actions

When we published our 2017 report we signed up to three signature actions. Here’s how we are progressing against them.

Attracting more women to TSB and financial services

• We joined up with ‘Women Returners’, an organisation that connects employers with a network of professional women following a career break and ran our own pilot Women Returners programme. We plan to continue to support this programme by taking part in the Returners Financial Services Scotland Programme 2019, a returnship programme in Edinburgh starting this September.
• We have also done some work to improve the gender balance of shortlisted candidates when we recruit for new roles. While we’ve had some real success in this area, such as building our SME banking leadership team, overall we’ve had mixed results. They work well in areas where there is a decent pipeline of female candidates but it is much harder, and therefore it has less of an impact, where there isn’t.

We are committed to continuing to challenge our external recruitment agencies and working closely with them to push for better balanced shortlists. And in the longer term we must also help the push for more girls to take up STEM subjects in school – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to ensure there is a bigger pool of candidates to draw from in the future.

Growing our own talent

• In 2017 our Bank Executive Committee team began championing talented female Partners from our rising stars talent programme. Feedback from this has been positive with those who took part saying it has helped them gain exposure to broader networks and new experiences. To build on this success we will be creating a talent championing network group.
• We also set up a ‘Partners for Partners’ buddying scheme to encourage people to come back to TSB when they have had a career break. Research shows that women often report the transition back to work is difficult and many feel disconnected and disengaged when they return.
• Our ‘Partners for Partners’ scheme pairs up people with a ‘buddy’ who has been through the same or similar experience. Initially we have focused on men and women returning from parental leave and have matched 19 people to a buddy. We plan to extend this further in 2019.
• We give Partners choice and flexibility in how they work and have flexible work policies which mean Partners can find a work/life balance that suits them and us. To help, we’ve introduced our new digital workplace where Partners can access the systems they need to do their jobs either at home or in the office. We’re looking forward to seeing the impacts of this investment as we move into 2019.

We will talk about gender balance in a transparent way

• It’s not enough to just report our figures we also need to explain the core drivers of it, so we can explain the reasons for the gap and what we’re doing about it. We regularly engage with policy-makers and other businesses to understand what they are doing to tackle gender imbalance, and to share the lessons we are learning.

For more information see TSB’s Gender Pay Gap data here.