During March, the fantastic Spring Forward celebrates women in digital and recognises their extraordinary achievements. The series of events aims to encourage women to take on greater roles within the digital industry (psst, there are still tickets available).
Today is also International Women’s Day, and depressingingly, the gender pay gap remains an issue. In fact it’s trending in the wrong direction. The gap stands at 14.9% for our industry, an increase compared to 2018.
Last year, we reported that on average, women were paid 5.45% more than men here at Pragmatic. This year’s stats are still positive. They show women are still paid slightly more than men on average here (1.97%). Ultimately, we’re trying to achieve pay parity. Therefore, whichever gender someone identifies as, they’ll get paid the same as anyone doing the same role. We’ve also rolled out industry benchmarking. This means people should be getting paid the same here as they could anywhere else.
This is undoubtedly positive news for us. However, we are still concerned about the lack of diversity in our technical team. Currently Pragmatic is 26.19% women, and 73.81% men, but we now don’t have any full-time women in the technical team. We do work with some great women contractor developers, but we’d love to increase the diversity in our permanent team.
Although equal pay is an issue within the digital realm and many other industries, it’s not the only concern we need to be discussing. It’s important to promote inclusivity in our industry, and make coding careers more accessible to everyone, with all kinds of life experiences.
Our initiatives.
We support our local Codebar by sponsoring some of their weekly workshops, which are completely free to attend. Some of our team also volunteer time with the University of Brighton Momentum programme, to support students in building confidence and finding their career path.
Internally, we remain committed to:
- Providing all of our employees with strong role models and have badass women in leadership roles
- Empower our employees by providing continuous support, mentoring, training and empowerment #YouveGotThis
- Recruit the best people there is and provide fair pay to all
Whether we have positions open or not, we are always keen to meet people from underrepresented groups to talk about possible opportunities to work together.