A piece by Rosamund Urwin in yesterday’s Sunday Times:
Ryanair pays its male staff in the UK more than three times as much as their female colleagues, the no-frills airline has revealed.
Women’s hourly pay at Ryanair is on average 67% lower than men’s. Only 3% of staff in its highest-earning quartile are women, the carrier has revealed. [J4MB: Hmm. Might the two things be connected?}
“Like all airlines, our gender pay in the UK is materially affected by the relatively low numbers of female pilots in the aviation industry,” it said. “In recent years, the number of female pilots applying to Ryanair has increased.”
Only eight — or 1.4% — of the budget airline’s 554 pilots in the UK are women, compared with 5.7% at arch rival easyJet. [J4MB: Hmm. Might pilots be paid more than cabin crew? If so, it’s not fair.]
The carrier used to publish a “Girls of Ryanair” charity calendar featuring cabin crew in bikinis. However, chief executive Michael O’Leary scrapped it four years ago, saying it did not chime with the family-friendly image he wanted to cultivate.
Last June, Ryanair’s chairman, David Bonderman, resigned from the board of car-hailing app Uber after being accused of sexism. He had interrupted fellow director Arianna Huffington to say that adding women to the board would just mean more talking. [J4MB: A good point, well made, David. It’s always good to interrupt Arianna Bloody-Huffington.]
Under new legislation, companies and charities must publish their gender pay gap data by Wednesday.
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William Collins’s important blog piece on the gender pay gap is here. Spoiler alert:
The median gender pay gap is in favour of women for part-time employees, and has been for 20 years. Post-tax, for full-time employees, the gap has been in favour of women for a number of years.
