Our Gender Pay Gap

 

Featurespace is a high growth technology business operating in the fraud and financial crime prevention market. We aim to hire the best person for every role and to pay fair, competitive compensation for each role.

Through balanced and effective recruitment and selection processes, Featurespace makes every effort to attract talented women to apply for roles within the business. However, operating in the technology sector, the mix of applicants still tends to skew towards men, reflecting the relative proportions of men and women pursuing careers in software development and STEM type businesses globally. Featurespace has a female CEO and is passionate and committed to equality, diversity, and fairness.

At the snapshot date, the makeup of the Featurespace team was 70% men and 30% women. The number of men in senior roles is slightly higher with 76% of Upper Quartile pay roles performed by men and 24% by women. 30% of all managers across Featurespace are female, and we are working to increase this figure each year by encouraging women to apply for promotions and attracting more women into our recruitment talent pool. We are investing in training and mentoring to encourage women to step forward and seek promotion and expect this will have a positive impact on our hourly gender pay balance going forward.

The mean bonus gap in the year to April 2021 is heavily skewed by contractual sales commission payments. Featurespace operates a commission scheme for salespeople and a bonus scheme for other members of the company. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the management team elected to pause non-contractual bonus payments in order to manage costs through a period of uncertainty.  As a result, bonus payments in the period under consideration were heavily weighted towards members of the commercial team earning commission. Looking at bonuses and commission as a whole, 57% of the payments made to the company’s 266 relevant employees in the period were earned by nine individuals in the commercial team.  Seven of those team members were male and two female which is why the mean bonus pay gap seems so high during this period. Looking at the median gap, women received a slightly higher median bonus payment in 2021 as the bonus payments for the majority of the business were much more comparable. The quarterly bonus for all team members who have passed their probation was reinstated in December 2020, and therefore we would expect to see the median figures improve in 2022.