eir becomes Ireland’s first telecoms provider to issue Gender Pay Gap Report
10th March 2021. eir, the principal provider of fixed-line and mobile telecommunications services in Ireland, has today issued its first Gender Pay Gap Report, which identifies the difference in the hourly wage of men and women, irrespective of their job, qualifications, experience or working pattern. eir’s gender pay gap stood at 11.2% for 2020, which is 2.7% below the national average gender pay gap, but something which eir intends to further reduce as a key priority in the coming years.
A number of factors contribute to this gap and eir is working urgently to improve these. A higher percentage of male employees work in specialised engineering roles, building and maintaining the physical and IT networks, with an average tenure of nearly 30 years, which contributes to higher salaries. Another contributing factor is that the majority of female employees (59%) work in customer facing roles with typically lower lengths of service and a comparatively lower salary, though with higher pay and better long-term opportunities than eir’s competitors including monthly bonuses, pension contributions and, unusually for a call centre, sick pay and paid maternity and paternity leave.
The overall gender pay gap does not affect all parts of the organisation and in many areas of the business there is pay parity, including customer operations and senior management. eir is led by a female CEO, who oversees a gender balanced senior management team, with two-thirds of eir’s commercial teams led by women.
Carolan Lennon, CEO of eir, states: “As eir’s first female CEO I am very proud that our company is led by a management team made up equally of women and men. This is a management team which values diversity and understands that an inclusive organisation, which really values differing viewpoints and skillsets, delivers real and tangible business benefits. We are publishing this, our first gender pay gap report, to demonstrate how important we feel this issue is and to make a public commitment of our firm intention to reduce this gap. We continue to embed actions that are aimed at increasing the gender balance and culture of diversity and inclusion in the workplace, and by extension reducing our gender pay gap.”
While not a legal requirement, eir has made the decision to publish its first gender pay gap report to set out its commitment to embedding transparency and equality in eir.
As women continue to be generally underrepresented in STEM education, eir has designed an apprentice programme to help build a more diverse pipeline of talent, and in recent years has placed a much greater emphasis on attracting more women into these roles.
To tackle the gender pay gap and ensure that this margin decreases into the future, eir continues to ensure recruitment practices operate in a gender-neutral manner, removing opportunities for bias as far as possible. eir has been committed to improve gender representation across the organisation, through the insourcing of care function, continued recruitment and apprentice programme, along with a strategy of promotion from within, developing a robust succession planning process, continuing to support internal networking opportunities and building a culture of career development.
Other findings from the report:
Key statistics
- Main population: 80% male, 20% female
- Senior Management Team: 50% female, 50% male
- Leadership: 65% male, 35% female
- Increase in female new hires has increased from 30% in 2016, to 37% in 2020
- Recently insourced functions have seen a 60/40 split in favour of female employees
Specific initiatives to achieve ongoing reduction in the overall pay gap:
- Externally benchmarked competitive salaries
- Removing bias from recruitment
- Ensure diversity is embedded in succession planning
- Continuously improve family friendly and flexible working arrangements
- Create development opportunities in areas of underrepresentation
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