UK Gender Pay Gap - 2017 Report

At Tripadvisor we offer exceptional career opportunities to all of our staff.

This year UK companies with over 250 staff will start reporting on their gender pay gaps. We welcome this as an important step forward for gender equality.

At Tripadvisor UK we believe that greater gender equality will be achieved if all companies are not only transparent about pay, but also go further by working to identify and address the root causes of pay gaps. This is the approach we are taking at Tripadvisor. We are currently conducting a comprehensive assessment of the various factors that impact equity, diversity and inclusion across our organization. This analysis will be complete in the first half of the year. What we learn will assist us in developing a thoughtful an action plan and will inform the steps we will take to address these issues.

The gender pay gap is a complex issue that affects the entire labor market. We are committed to making meaningful progress on reducing our gap over the long term. We are committed to ensuring everyone, regardless of their background, race, ethnicity or gender, has an equal opportunity to succeed and progress at Tripadvisor.

Beth Grous, Chief People Officer

THE STATISTICS

Our gender pay data was calculated in line with the figures required by the new UK regulations:

Average gaps for pay and bonuses

	Mean Gap	Median Gap
Hourly Pay	28.2%	15.3%
Bonus Pay	51.3%	61.2%

	Proportion receiving bonus pay
Women	98.1%
Men	95.7%

Pay by quartiles of the workforce

	Lower	Lower mid	Upper mid	Upper
Men	25.4%	39.7%	44.4%	57.1%
Women	74.6%	60.3%	55.6%	42.9%

At 15.3% our median gender pay gap is a little lower than the UK median of 18.4%, while our mean gender pay gap of 28.2% is higher than the UK mean of 17.4%. Naturally, we need to understand what is driving these gaps so that we can work towards minimizing them.

GENDER PAY VS EQUAL PAY

The gender pay gap is often discussed alongside equal pay. However, the two are entirely separate issues.

Equal pay is about men and women performing the same work being paid the same, whereas the gender pay gap is a statistical calculation of men’s and women’s average earnings across an entire organization.

We’re confident that we do not have an equal pay issue; we pay the same salary for the same job. We regularly analyze and monitor the levels of our pay, as well as the procedures we use and how we set our compensation levels. We establish pay ranges by role according to objective criteria such as market rates and other benchmarks, which we analyze and adjust regularly. We make sure male and female staff are always treated fairly and equally.

ANALYSIS OF OUR GAPS

Our analysis shows that the majority of our gender pay gaps are derived from the demographic breakdown of our workforce in two areas of our business.

Senior management

Tripadvisor UK has a higher number of men (82%) than women (18%) in senior management roles. As these senior roles are the most highly paid, the current underrepresentation of women impacts on our pay gaps. We’ve calculated that if we had a 50:50 gender mix in our senior management, our mean and median pay gaps would fall to 20.4% and 13.7% respectively, with similar impacts on the mean and median bonus gaps (falling to 34.8% and 58.3% respectively).

It is our long-term goal to achieve a greater balance of gender representation amongst our senior leaders. Creating more opportunities for women to reach the top is a key area of focus across Tripadvisor.

As a company, we are pursuing ways to ensure that, over the long term, we retain and support our entry and mid-level talent. It is important that men and women have both equal opportunity and support to become the senior leaders and role models of tomorrow.

Sales

Tripadvisor UK is a female dominated workforce: just 39% of our workforce is male. Those men that we do have are not equally spread out through the business. They tend to be clustered in sales: 52% of all men work at Tripadvisor UK work in sales functions. Further, sales is significant portion of the UK business: 37% of the total.

This demographic imbalance, combined with the fact that sales roles, which are often commission based, tend to be more highly paid compared to other jobs in the business, impacts our gender pay gaps.

We know that unequal pay is not an issue here; when we analyzed gaps by grade within the sales function, we found only very small gaps ranging from 4.4% down to minus 4.4% (i.e. in favour of women).

Work and family life

We recognize that when our employees become parents, they are likely to face new challenges and have additional demands on their time. We therefore seek to support and assist them, whether male or female, and strive to enable them to achieve their desired work/life balance while also continuing to make progress in their careers. For instance, we offer enhanced maternity pay and shared parental leave pay, operate a childcare voucher scheme, and have a designated private room where new mothers can express and where expectant mothers can rest.

Addressing the issue in future

At Tripadvisor we are committed to ensuring that we have a diverse and inclusive workplace where all of our staff can achieve success and progress. Having a diverse and inclusive workforce is simply the right thing to do—for our employees, and also for our business. To this end, our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (ED&I) team are currently working on the 2018 ED&I Roadmap, which will include a number of initiatives to be introduced during the course of this year and beyond.

We believe that addressing the national gender pay gap is an important issue that needs real action and requires every company in the UK to do their part. We recognize we have more work to do. But we also know that there is not one simple solution. Gaps cannot be closed overnight and not all of the solutions will be within Tripadvisor’s control. However, we have been, and will continue to be, committed to making Tripadvisor a place where even more women can thrive.