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How we stack up on equal pay

As part of our support for the Spring Forward Festival, a month long celebration of women in digital, we thought we’d explore how we stack up against the pretty gloomy industry stats. The gender pay gap in creative agencies reported here is depressingly between 20 and 44%! After some calculations, we found that there is a gender pay gap here, but unusually trending the other way – women on average are paid 5.45% more than men.

We were delighted with the figures, but weren’t too surprised. We have women in every department and leadership positions, and pay fairly benchmarked against industry levels.

“Pragmatic is the first place I’ve ever worked in this industry with more than one woman on the leadership team. In fact, in a previous role, I was the only woman in a 100 person team.”
Mollie Pugh – Client Services Director

Where we want to improve

Our technical team is skewed towards men. We’d love to encourage more developers to follow in the footsteps of Georgia Cottle, who’s speaking at WordCamp London 2018 about her journey from maths degree to a developer working on our biggest clients in a year! One of the ways we reach under-represented groups is through supporting our local Codebar.

“Attending Codebar and seeing so many women who are great at what they do gave me the confidence to pursue a career in development. Agencies sponsoring and hosting workshops like Codebar is a great way to encourage women into the industry.

The workshops offer a collaborative environment for under-represented groups to learn how to code. They give students the opportunity to get advice from those with industry experience, which is really valuable when you’re just starting out. After CodeBar, I joined Pragmatic. I didn’t think I would be working on enterprise clients within a couple of months, but I was entrusted and empowered to smash it!”
Georgia Cottle – Developer

There hasn’t been a specific initiative to combat pay equality and diversity here at Pragmatic, we just believe in:

  • Empowering any employee to take on any role by providing support, mentoring, training and encouragement
  • Recruiting the best people we can find, and paying people in a fair way using industry benchmarks
  • Providing strong role models by having women well represented in the Leadership Team.

There’s still a long way for the industry and Pragmatic to go when it comes to diversity and equality, but these small wins encourage us and have given us reason to celebrate the women we work with.