Women employees of leading Irish law firm Matheson earn substantially less than their male colleagues, the company’s gender pay gap report for 2022 reveals.
The company said it had a mean (average) gender pay gap of 15 per cent and a median pay gap of 26 per cent, both weighted in favour of male employees, based on hourly earnings. This is likely to be well above the current average gender pay gap in the State, which European Commission statistics body Eurostat placed at 11.3 per cent in 2018.
The report shows the group’s overall gender pay and bonus gaps based on hourly rates of pay as of June 19th, 2022, and bonuses paid in the year. On that date, the firm employed 775 people, including part-time and temporary staff. Two-thirds of its employees were women.
The median hourly pay gap of 26 per cent is calculated by ranking all employees from the highest paid to the lowest paid and taking the hourly wage of the person in the middle. The mean hourly gender pay gap of 15 per cent is driven by a number of different internal and external factors, including that the company has more men than women in senior higher-earning positions.
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The gap between men and women can largely be attributed to a disparity in bonus pay, which is paid on a pro-rata basis, which means staff on family leave are negatively affected. A much higher percentage of women employees receive pro-rata bonus payments under the scheme each year, due to the higher number of women employees availing of various forms of family leave at any given time.
The mean bonus pay gap between male and female employees is 42 per cent in favour of men, while the median bonus pay gap is 59 per cent. When bonus payments are excluded across the firm, the mean hourly pay gap is 1.5 per cent weighted in favour of women employees.
Of the 79 employees availing of family leave in 2021, for example, 62 were women. Even within this group, women employees took more leave than male employees, accounting for 97 per cent of all family leave taken.
“Each period of leave impacts on the results, since it means the female employee will not have the same opportunity to earn the same bonus as a male employee who does not take such leave during the same performance period,” the report notes.
The report says the firm “remains fully committed to supporting employees availing of family leave, in particular to ensure that when they return from leave, they can quickly return to the same level of performance and avail of the same earning opportunities as their colleagues”.
