Between 5 April 2023 and 5 April 2024, our median gender pay gap reduced from 8.1% to 6.3%
We're pleased to see the gap continue to trend down over time but know we have to maintain our focus and efforts in order to continue on this trajectory. In this report we'll share the details of our gender pay gap and the factors that influence it.
Why our gap's reduced
In our last report our gender pay gap had narrowed from 9.3% to 8.1% and that trend has continued into this year with a further 1.8% reduction. The reason for this continued reduction is our focus on increasing the proportion of women in our tech teams. As shown in our Diversity & Inclusion report, we've increased the representation of women in tech roles by 3 percentage points overall, and the number of women in tech leadership roles by 1.5%. Because salaries for tech roles are comparably higher across the industry, our pay gap has continued to decrease at a company level.
Our median bonus gap is 2.3% where historically it has been 0%. We don't pay performance bonuses at Monzo, but for gender pay gap reporting purposes, the taxable value of exercised share options count towards this gap. In the last year we've seen a significant increase in the number of colleagues exercising their options, with a higher proportion of men choosing to do this compared to women. Individual colleagues choosing to exercise their options will mean our bonus gap will fluctuate year on year.
The only other activities which influence our bonus gap are recruitment-related bonuses such as referral and relocation payments.
An overview of our gender pay gap for 2020-2024
We know that many of the initiatives and changes that we implement can take a while to embed and show results. For example, since 2020 we've seen the median hourly rate gap narrow from 14.3% in 2020 to 6.3% in 2024.
Women now represent 37% of all leadership roles at Monzo. We've seen this impact our gender pay gap as the representation of women in our upper hourly pay quarter has increased by 3.2% since last year. However, representation of women in our upper middle hourly pay quarter reduced by 3% due to more men being hired in this quadrant over the last year, as many of these senior roles were in tech. We have increased representation year on year of women in technical roles overall but we need to continue to invest in our Women in Tech strategy (which you can read more about below) in order to continue building on this progress and further narrow the gap. Long term in order to drive down the gap there needs to be an industry wide commitment to bringing more women into Tech as without that coordinated effort and investment there will only be marginal gains due to there being less women in the market.
| Gap (relative to men) | Gap (relative to men) | Gap (relative to men) | Gap (relative to men) | Gap (relative to men) |
| 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
Mean | 15.7% | 15.6% | 18.0% | 18.3% | 17.3% |
Median | 14.3% | 4.3% | 9.3% | 8.1% | 6.3% |
Mean bonus | 6.2% | 33.4%* | 56.0%* | 46.5% | 41.9% |
Median bonus | 0.0% | 40.0%* | 0.0% | 0.0% | 2.3% |
Proportion receiving a bonus payment | -4.6% | 13.2% | 44.9% | 46.8% | 38.1% |
| Women/Men | Women/Men | Women/Men | Women/Men | Women/Men |
| 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
Upper hourly pay quarter (highest paid) | 32.8% / 67.2% | 34.9% / 65.1% | 38.2% / 61.8% | 35.3% / 64.7% | 38.5% / 61.5% |
Upper middle hourly pay quarter | 45.6% / 54.4% | 50.1% / 49.9% | 48.6% / 51.4% | 52.5% / 47.5% | 49.5% / 50.5% |
Lower middle hourly pay quarter | 43.2% / 56.8% | 47.9% / 52.1% | 51.4% / 48.6% | 48.3% / 51.7% | 51.7% / 48.3% |
Lower hourly pay quarter (lowest paid) | 51.8% / 48.2% | 47.5% / 52.5% | 52.1% / 47.9% | 50.8% / 49.2% | 53.0% / 47.0% |
What we’ll keep doing to close our gender pay gap
We have a consistent strategy that's focused on improving our gender pay gap over time. It's focused on four pillars: attraction, controls, growth and belonging.
How do we make Monzo an attractive place so that top talent wants to work with us?
What controls, policies and procedures are in place to challenge bias and ensure we're consistent in all of our People policies?
How do we grow and develop the people who are already here to create sustainable pipelines for future leaders?
How do we ensure a strong sense of inclusion and belonging throughout people's time at Monzo to enable them to flourish?
Our initiatives won't vary hugely from year to year as these are practices that we'll continue to nurture and develop over time. Some of the key initiatives we continue to invest in are:
Improving our performance management - this year we revamped our performance framework. Historically we had a five level framework but we've now moved to ten levels in order to better align with the broader industry and increase opportunities for progression. This meant refreshing all of our competency frameworks and gave us the opportunity to provide greater clarity on what moving between levels looks like and the expectations at each level. This is in direct response to feedback from listening sessions we have done with women at Monzo and is part of our overall strategy to increase clarity and consistency. There's still a lot of work to be done in this space to ensure there's a consistent framework around impact and expectations so we're able to better support career planning.
Creating opportunities for growth - since our last report we've run talent reviews for all of our leaders who are at Director level and above. These sessions focused on action planning for the future; supporting people in taking their next steps and identifying areas for growth and development. This is in addition to embedding a succession planning process throughout the population in order to identify opportunities for the next wave of leaders. These types of activities support the pipeline of women going into senior positions, and the representation of women in higher paid roles. We've also launched a career pathways pilot for early careers development to ensure we're supporting career growth at every level.
Maintaining diversity at the very top - Our Board Diversity Policy ensures we're looking for, hiring and retaining board members in a way that promotes diversity.
As signatories of the Women in Finance Charter we've recently submitted that, as of September 2024, we have 50% women representation in our executive committee and board. Our board is made up of 66.6% women and our executive committee is 33.3%.
Our women in tech strategy:
It's a priority for us to improve gender diversity in the tech area of our business, and there are 7 key things we're working on to achieve this:
Recruitment - active sourcing means our hiring team is reaching out to women rather than relying only on direct applications. This means we now have a bigger pool of candidates to consider.
Onboarding - we have a dedicated onboarding programme for our engineers and are rolling out diversity and inclusion onboarding for leaders so they understand their role in contributing to gender equality.
Talent marketing - we have a 12 month programme of recruitment events dedicated to women in tech. We also run a 12-week programme where Monzo engineers mentor engineers from the Coding Black Females network. This programme is now in its third year.
Progression - we're arranging dedicated conversations between women in tech and our most senior tech leaders to discuss career progression.
Community - we're working with our employee diversity and inclusion networks to form committees with specific teams to work on issues that are important to them, like career development and social community. We're looking forward to launching our parents in tech group this year, too.
Inclusive leadership - diversity and inclusion is a core part of our leadership principles, so it's now baked into our employee onboarding sessions. As part of our continued focus on raising the bar on management and leadership, we'll also be building out an inclusive leadership curriculum over the next year.
Social mobility - we're in the third year of our Customer Operations Engineering Sponsorship programme where colleagues in customer support roles go on an immersive software engineering course, with the opportunity to become full-time junior engineers once they've completed it.
We'll keep holding ourselves accountable and report on our gender pay gap annually, while continuing to look at our longer term strategy for lasting impact within Monzo and our industry.
Find out more about how we're improving gender representation in our latest Diversity and Inclusion report.
The gender pay gap is the difference in earnings between men and women, throughout a company and across all roles and career levels. The Equality Act relates to paying people doing the same job different amounts. The gender pay gap, on the other hand, highlights the kinds of roles men and women hold within an organisation, and the different salaries associated with those roles. It exposes when women across a company are being paid less than men on average, and forces companies to confront why that's still the case. Often, that's because women are underrepresented at senior levels and in higher-paid parts of the company.
The numbers in the table above show a snapshot of our employees’ pay on 5th April 2020, 2021, 2022,2023 and 2024. You can see the average hourly rates we paid men and women on that date, and the percentage difference between them.
We've also put everyone in the company into four groups (or quartiles) according to how much we pay them, and you can see the percentage of men and women in each pay quartile.
Companies that employ more than 250 people are legally required to publish a snapshot of their gender pay gap on the 5th of April each year.