Companies across the UK have been given something of a get-out clause when it comes to gender pay gap reporting, with the government allowing firms to delay their disclosure of 2020 figures until October this year. However, several firms are reporting anyway, understanding the importance of the metric in delivering change across businesses.
JLL is one of those companies. But its figures have left the business unimpressed and disappointed. Its gender pay gap currently stands at 21.9%, a slip back on 2019 (21.2%) and static on its 2018. The bonus pay gap has shifted in the right direction, but not by much – moving from 72.8% in 2018 to 73.1% in 2019, and 70.7% last year. Women are still under-represented in senior roles, with just 27.5% of JLL’s female UK workforce being in the upper pay quartile of the business. Women make up more than half (55.5%) of employees in JLL UK’s lowest pay quartile.
For Alistair Meadows, head of investor-developer clients and JLL’s gender balance board sponsor, the results are not good enough and more needs to be done to move them faster in the right direction.
“We’re not settling for the status quo,” Meadows says. “Our gender pay gap data hasn’t moved enough and we’re impatient for change. Despite everything we’ve done in recent years, it hasn’t had the impact we hoped. And if the research is correct, it will take another century to make meaningful change – and we’re not prepared to wait.”
According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020, at the current pace, gender pay gaps can potentially be closed in – at best – 54 years in Western Europe, and at worst, in 163 years in East Asia and the Pacific. On average, reads the report, it will take nearly a century to achieve parity, “a timeline we simply cannot accept in today’s globalised world”.
In its move to not accept that speed of change, JLL has implemented a clear set of gender targets for the business. The agent – which has become the first to hire a female into the role of UK chief executive, with former PWC partner Stephanie Hyde taking over from Chris Ireland next month – has set itself strict targets to make sure that all key governance committees are 35% female by 2025, 50% female by 2030, and that some 35% of its directors are female within the next four years.
“It’s rare that decisions are so clear cut, but there was no doubt in our minds that gender targets should be the next logical step,” says Meadows.
Fellow gender balance board sponsor and head of UK finance at JLL, Emily Wood, adds: “Gender targets will widen the career pipeline as we focus on a high-performance culture, where talented individuals, no matter their gender, can progress. Ultimately, these important metrics will ensure we keep striving for change and hold ourselves to account.”
JLL says that its gender targets are an important step in its objective to have diversity of thought across the whole business. It plans to publish its ethnicity pay gap for the first time this year – following in the footsteps of Cushman & Wakefield – and will set itself targets to improve its ethnic diversity, too.
“Not only is this the right thing to do at JLL and for our sector, which has been slow to respond,” says Meadows, “it also aligns ourselves to clients with whom we want to share values.”
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