If not for its shiny new brand, splashed across newspapers and billboards this week, Absa stands out for another reason: the bank’s CEO, Maria Ramos, is the only female leader of a JSE top 40 company.
Ramos, who earned nearly R30m in 2017, is a rarity in the boardrooms of SA’s listed firms, where women occupy an average of just 25% of executive roles, according to PwC.
The professional services firm, in a study published on Thursday, found that women working for listed companies earned less than men in all major sectors. The median pay gap, not accounting for specific roles, ranged from 5% to 10%.
This gap could be more extreme at the lower and higher ends of the workforce, said PwC associate director Leila Ebrahimi. "As men and women climb up the ranks, men are able to negotiate higher salaries and women may leave the workforce," she said.
The rest of the economy doesn’t fare much better. The Businesswomen’s Association of SA found in its latest census that only 10% of CEOs in the country are women.
South African companies are not alone in battling a lack of gender diversity at senior levels, despite diversity being shown to improve profit and returns. Only 6% of S&P 500 companies have female CEOs, with 25% of boards in the S&P 500 boasting more than two female directors.
This has dire implications for the gender pay gap within organisations, as compulsory reports published in terms of the UK’s gender pay gap reporting rules reveal.
South African companies with UK operations employing more than 250 people also had to publish their gender pay gaps — the results were not pretty.
Investec Asset Management had the biggest gender pay gap among asset managers, according to Reuters. Men were paid on average 48.8% more per hour than women at Investec’s asset management unit. This fell to 47.2% in its wealth and investment business, with the private bank reporting a 35.2% average hourly pay gap. The bonus gaps were even larger.
The primary reason for Investec’s giant gender pay gaps is the low number of women in senior leadership roles. "We are confident that men and women are paid fairly and equitably relative to their role, skills and experience, and this is central to our reward philosophy," it says in its gender pay gap report.
Vitality, Discovery’s UK business, reported an average hourly pay difference between men and women of 29.8%. "Our pay gap is explained by the underrepresentation of female employees in senior leadership roles," Vitality said.
Admittedly, calculating pay gaps in an organisation, without taking into account the type of role and level of seniority, is a blunt instrument.
None of SA’s major banks and insurers were willing to share their gender pay gaps with Business Day. They only said they paid men and women equally for doing equivalent jobs — a requirement of SA’s employment equity laws — and where pay gaps existed they were working to rectify them.
In PwC’s experience, South African companies were not very aware of what their gender pay gap was and had a far greater focus on racial diversity, Ebrahimi said. Companies were, however, increasingly interested in finding out whether there were discrepancies in pay between men and women, she said.
"It is a key investment imperative to ensure that gender diversity exists at board level, management and throughout the organisation. We have engaged a couple of companies specifically on that point," said Robert Lewenson, head of environmental, social and governance engagement at Old Mutual Investment Group, which manages more than R600bn in assets.
Research showed that companies with a higher level of gender diversity delivered better returns, Lewenson said.
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