Our Gender Pay Gap
At Featurespace, our mission is to make the world a safer place to transact. We are a high-growth technology business operating in the fraud and financial crime prevention market. We are committed to prioritising, building, and fostering an inclusive and equitable workforce. Our aim is to hire the best person for every role and pay fair, competitive compensation for each role. Equal representation of genders across the workforce is integral to our goal of embedding diversity, equity, and inclusion in all our workplaces globally. Through balanced and effective recruitment and selection processes, Featurespace makes every effort to encourage women and non-binary people to apply for roles within the business and pride ourselves in our retention rate amongst our team. Operating in the technology sector still means that the mix of applications we receive for the roles we advertise tend to skew towards men, reflecting the relative proportions of men and women pursuing careers in software development and STEM related roles globally. With a Senior Management Team made up of 33% women, Featurespace is passionate and committed to equality, diversity, and inclusion.
At the time of the data being captured (5th April 2023), the makeup of the Featurespace team was 73% men and 27% women. Although we have some employees who identify as non-binary, when calculating the Gender Pay Gap we are only permitted to report on men and women as the genders. Across the business, 30% of our team members in senior roles are women, demonstrating our commitment to develop and progress women from within our organisation into leadership roles.
When looking at our data in more detail, we can see that within each quartile men and women have almost identical mean hourly pay, with women receiving a higher mean hourly rate in 3 out of the 4 quartiles. Areas we have identified for improvement include attracting more women into the highly technical and highly paid roles and developing those skills of more junior level employees to progress their careers. We understand that the technology industry still has work to be done to encourage more women to study STEM subjects at school and university. Our recruitment team are committed to attracting more women into these technical roles in several ways; a few examples of which are by creating the Featurespace Employee Value Proposition, social media posts for Women in STEM, inclusive wording in our advertised vacancies and a focus on flexible working and maternity policies. On top of this, we are committed to working with local schools to spark interest in STEM subjects in girls at an early age. This year we are also exploring Women Leadership skills development programmes using our Apprenticeship Levy.
We are proud to report that a slightly higher percentage of women received a bonus in the period (81% of women vs 80% of men), which is great news regarding our Bonus Gap. However, for the year up to the snapshot date, both the mean and median bonus gap are quite heavily skewed. This is because these figures are based on our sales team’s success, and during this period, 28 employees were earning commission, of which only 8 were women.
When we look at the bonus data without any commission payments included, a much clearer picture emerges. 76% of women received a bonus throughout the year, and 73% of men. This also changes our mean bonus gap to 11.6% and our median bonus gap to 15.6%. As our bonus payments are calculated using both the performance of the individual and their annual salary, we can see the median correlates with our gender pay gap percentage. This displays our fair and consistent calculation method, rewarding our people based on their overall performance, in line with their seniority in our business.
Building a culture of inclusivity that is rooted in community is crucial for everyone at Featurespace to feel supported, valued, connected, and empowered to do their best work. Over the years, we have made significant progress in creating a workforce that represents the communities our products ultimately serve – those interacting with the global financial system in any way (that’s all of us, really!). We focus on diversity and inclusion in hiring, employee engagement, and leadership development to strengthen representation and inclusion at every level of Featurespace.
We are committed to continuing to increase the number of women in all areas of our business, with a focus on career development, to build a pipeline of diverse talent at every level of the company.
