Building a diverse team where everyone feels included is important to us at Monzo. It’s key to our success as a company, and it’s the right thing to do.
Here’s our annual update on what we’re doing to improve, and our progress so far.
Please let us know thoughts, comments, suggestions or questions here
It’s great to see the progress that’s being made here. I was hoping to see an update on Monzo’s gender pay gap though.
I appreciate the fact that Monzo’s signed the Women in Finance Charter & I know that pay is equal across genders in equivalent roles.
But presumably there is a gender pay gap due to there being more men than women in management roles & it’d be good to hear what that is, for comparison with other banks and to see confirmation that, that’s being reduced too.
Also, for context, how many employees did Monzo have when the last report was published & how many do they have now? Presumably the more people that’ve been hired, the easier it will have been to correct the imbalances.
A good read, and great to see what you’re doing as an organisation. What are you looking at in terms of Shared Parental Leave? An area that’s been in the news a bit lately.
Hey Alex,
But presumably there is a gender pay gap due to there being more men than women in management roles & it’d be good to hear what that is, for comparison with other banks and to see confirmation that, that’s being reduced too.
We’ll be sharing info on our gender pay gap in the next couple of months. Totally agree that it’s important to be transparent and accountable about this anyway, and now that the company is over 250 people we’re required to publish our figures too.
We’ll share numbers for both this year and the previous one, and explain what we’re doing to try and improve it.
Also, for context, how many employees did Monzo have when the last report was published & how many do they have now? Presumably the more people that’ve been hired, the easier it will have been to correct the imbalances.
There were around 80 people in the company when the last update was published, in March 2017. Now, there are just over 300 of us.
Interesting to read - I see you have no one in the 60|+ age bracket (like myself). We do know a thing or two and might be able to help?
We’d like to have more over 60s represented too! Please feel free to direct people to our careers page, and we’ll keep working on making sure they’re included in our recruitment efforts too!
If they’re spending their time on this, rather than spending their time finding the best candidates on merit alone, you will fail to hire the best staff.
The applicant pool is predominantly men, and IMO the reasons for this go back to decisions that boys and girls have made between the ages of 0-18 - based on cultural legacy and all sorts of factors. You cannot change what has already happened in this cohort.
If you use genitalia as a criteria for artificially cherry-picking from the applicant pool you will fail to pick the best applicants and you will fail to build the best team in the industry.
What’s more, by artificially giving female candidates a leg up, you patronise all the strong female developers who got in on merit. And you vindicate and create prejudice against female developers.
This has been discussed before, I agree with Maria’s comments -
diversity feeds into merit - having a wider range of perspectives in a team increases it’s effectiveness in my opinion, particularly for a company like Monzo which is serving users with a diverse range of backgrounds.
Maria assumed talent is evenly distributed amongst the population. But it’s not.
If the candidate developer cohort includes, say 10 women and 90 men, then talent will be normally distributed (bell curve) over the population of women, and normally distributed over the population of men.
If, for social engineering purposes, you dictate that all 10 women must be hired, and then you’ll fill the remainder of roles from the male applicant pool, you have made a bad selection. Why? Because you hired the entire talent spectrum (untalented-talented) from the female pool.
You should have used a single talent-based cutoff and used this to select from both gender pools equally - even if that meant taking in a smaller number of women than met the criteria for your social engineering experiment.
No one’s dictating anything, especially for ‘social engineering purposes’ -
We’re expanding our senior team, and have asked the headhunters we’re working with for gender-balanced shortlists of potential candidates.
To help us address the imbalance, we now have two technical recruiters in the team. They spend their time sourcing candidates from demographics that aren’t already represented in the applicant pool for open job roles.
Did you read @bea’s update?
My understanding of what they’re trying to do is to get in before this stage so that the candidate developer cohort includes 50 women and 50 men. In other words, seeking out the talent that exists but otherwise wouldn’t normally apply for positions because of a whole host of structural and societal issues with the industry and standard recruitment process.
They are artificially manipulating the candidate pool. It’s artifical because it’s not done by technical merit but by genitalia.
If there are “structural issues” with the recruitment process then let’s resolve them
The worst thing we could do is artificially introduce more women into a process that suffers structural misogynist issues!
Erm, that’s what they’re doing!
Sometimes privilege can make people see things as very one-dimensional. As a privileged British white male, I constantly need to remind myself of that. Anything put in place to attempt to redress the balance is a-ok by me.
No they’re not - not by putting more women in!
What a peculiar statement.
I know this industry very well. I know that women, through ubiquitous social engineering policies like Monzo’s diversity initiative, have the privilege, and it is now men that must swim against the tide to be hired.
It’s there in black and white in Monzo’s policies and millions of other corporate policies. Female privilege is written in black and white terms.
It is pure virtue-signalling to suggest otherwise.
Thanks Bea. I’m quite disappointed that Monzo’s increased the size of their team by almost 3x but they’ve only managed to reduce the percentage of men in the company from 66% to 62.6% to be honest. Hopefully the speed of the ‘rebalancing’ (London’s population is 48% male & 52% female) will increase.
@anon40779440 - You are right in a sense - It is artificially being manipulated.
However, the balance will only change when there are more females/ethnic minorities in managerial/director type positions, so younger people of the same sex/race can look up to them.
Your thought process will simply continue the dominance of men in the banking industry, with no change in sight.
Id like the best candidates for the job 