Paying and treating Hippos fairly is really important to us, so we want to be as transparent as we can on our gender pay gap
In this report, we refer to men and women in the way current government guidance asks us to.
What is the gender pay gap?
The gender pay gap is the difference in earnings between people who legally identify as men and women.
It’s not the same as paying people differently for the same job, which is illegal under the Equality Act.
The gender pay gap shows an important relationship between how much men and women earn and the roles they hold in an organisation
Hourly pay
We don’t pay hourly at Hippo, but hourly pay is one of the key metrics used by the government to compare pay between men and women. We’ve included basic salary, any allowances or regular payments and any bonuses paid in April 2023.
This data is from a snapshot date of 5 April 2023.
264 Hippo’s were included, of which 43% were women.
It does not include employees of The Data Shed as they were part of a separate legal entity at the time.
Quartile pay
To understand more about our gender pay gap, we broke hourly pay into quartiles.
These quartiles are made up of Hippo’s who earn the most per hour (upper quartile) through to Hippo’s who earn the least per hour (lower quartile). We then looked at how many men and women were represented in each quartile.
The results show there are more men than women in the top three quartiles for hourly pay. It also shows that there are more women in the lower quartile of hourly pay than men.
Bonus pay
We do not have contractual bonuses at Hippo. For this data, we used employee referral payments and the cash value of any vouchers given out when Hippo’s reach any length of service milestones.
Our data on bonus pay will probably move year to year due to employee referral payments. These are paid when Hippo’s make successful referrals and are not gender specific.
Other things to consider
People choose different benefits
Calculations of our gender pay gap take into account things like mobile allowances, salary sacrifice schemes, Electric Vehicle (EV) schemes and other benefits that depend on the individual choices of Hippo’s.
These can affect employee salaries in lots of ways and impact measurements of our gender pay gap.
74% of people in the tech industry are men*
There have been more men in the tech industry for a long time.
More men occupy senior positions due to the length of time they’ve had in the industry.
As more focus is placed on providing opportunities for women to enter tech, we should see more women occupying senior roles.
* Source: Women in Tech Survey January 2023
Women occupy lower seniority roles in Engineering and Data
We have significantly increased our Engineering and Data capability over the last 18 months.
This has resulted in more men joining this part of Hippo than women, with more of those women joining in lower seniority roles.
What we’re doing about it
Tackling the gender pay gap at Hippo is a big part of our Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging strategy.
We’re publishing all our work out in the open on our website. That way everyone can see what we’re doing to try close our gender pay gap.
I can confirm that the information and data in this document is all true from the snapshot date of 5 April 2023.
Lara Longhurst
Chief Operating Officer