How one big bank is—slowly—shrinking its pay gap

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January 22, 2021

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Jen Psaki makes her debut as White House press secretary, Rep. Liz Cheney’s vote for impeachment inspires some GOP backlash, and Citigroup updates its gender pay gap. Have a relaxing weekend.

– Mind the gap. Citigroup remains one of the few companies to offer the public a glimpse of its gender pay gap. On Thursday, the bank issued an update on where it stands.

Women at the company globally earned roughly 26% less than their male counterparts’ median pay last year, a slight improvement over the 27% gap in 2019, and 29% gulf in 2018. The bank said that “U.S. minorities” earned 6% less than the median pay of non-minorities, which is similar to 2019 figures and an improvement from 7% in 2018.

This type of pay gap analysis—referred to as unadjusted—looks at aggregate numbers rather than comparing employees with the same title or experience, so Citigroup’s stats reflect a dearth of women in positions higher on the pay scale. By the end of this year, the bank wants to increase representation at the assistant vice president through managing director levels to at least 40% for women globally and 8% for Black employees in the U.S.

The bank says it’s making some headway by requiring managers to interview multiple diverse candidates instead of just one.

Still, Citigroup’s head of HR Sara Wechter told Bloomberg, the effort to shrink the pay gap “keeps me up at night because I know it’s a lot of work, but we’ve got to be delivering against these things.”

Indeed, you’d like to see the bank’s pay gaps closing at a quicker pace. But the bank does stand out—for its transparency, and for not following the lead of, say, the U.K., which cited the pandemic as a reason to delay some diversity efforts. What’s more, Citigroup’s numbers likely run counter to the overall trend; economists expect the COVID-19 crisis to widen the gender pay gap in the U.S. by five percentage points.

Claire Zillman
claire.zillman@fortune.com
@clairezillman

Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.

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