Blackstone Group LP said its female employees in the U.K. earn an average of 30 percent less than male colleagues, providing a rare glimpse into the gender pay gap in the private equity industry.
Although more than 400,000 people work in private equity in the U.K., 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 U.K. 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.
While the salary data show some large gaps, bonuses paint a worse picture at most financial firms. At Blackstone, the average incentive compensation for women is 75.4 percent lower than men’s, with the median pay gap stands at 84.9 percent.
The reported figures don’t provide a like-for-like comparison, and men and women are paid the same in similar roles at Blackstone, the firm said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg.
“The figures are impacted by the legacy under-representation of women in higher-paid investment positions in finance,” according to Blackstone. “Creating a pipeline of women for investment roles is imperative for Blackstone.”
The shortage of women at private equity firms is particularly acute even in the traditionally male-dominated finance industry: it’s lower than the representation at venture capital and real estate firms, where women comprise 21 percent of employees, according to Preqin.
“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.”
Blackstone has multiple initiatives underway for the hiring and retention of more women, it said. One sign of progress: The ratio of women recruited globally as analysts has doubled to almost 40 percent since 2015.