Unsurprising news hit the real estate industry last week. It is suffering from a not insignificant gender pay gap, the cause of which is an overwhelming lack of women in senior roles.
It would be easy to talk about what an unbalanced, outdated, male, pale and stale industry real estate is but this isn’t about easy. This is about the difficult task ahead. This is about how you solve a problem like the gender pay gap.
See below for a long-listen podcast, our five solutions and pay gap data from 42 of the biggest firms.
Let’s get the numbers out the way.
Looking at the 42 most well-known and biggest real estate firms that published gender pay gap reports last week (see graph below), the industry has an average mean pay gap of 28.7%. That means that on average men earn 28.7% more than women. That’s twice the national average of 14.1%.
The average mean bonus gap is more shocking at 51.4%, meaning men get bonuses that are more than half as big again as those earned by women. Ouch. The reason, as mentioned above, is clear in the gender splits across pay quartiles. On average, women make up around a quarter of earners in the top quartile and 54% of earners in the bottom quartile.
So that’s the cold hard facts (and see here if you want more of them), but what are the solutions?
Here EG offers five potential remedies to fix the gender pay gap and create a more balanced real estate community.
1. Start at the bottom
While the proportion of women in senior roles across the industry leaves a lot to be desired, on the whole the real estate sector has started to deliver parity in its graduate figures. Initiatives such as Pathways to Property are starting to pay dividends. But most of the firms that submitted gender pay gap reports believe more can be done.
British Land’s head of operations for Canada Water, Emma Cariaga, believes that closing the gender pay gap can be done not just by getting more women into senior roles, but also through encouraging gender parity in lower level jobs, where women on the whole outnumber men.
How are the main firms intending to close the gender pay gap?
“There is a lot of focus, rightly, on getting women on boards and getting people moving up through the industry,” says Cariaga, “but part of the problem is that we also have too many women in the bottom pay quartiles. We’ve been looking how we can raise the profile of some of those roles and job opportunities that create career opportunities for men and women.”
2. Get into schools
The future lies not within businesses today, but in the employees and leaders of tomorrow. That means engaging with the next generation and the generation after that. Getting into schools to talk to young girls (and boys) about a career in real estate and what can be achieved was highlighted by a number of firms as key to delivering a more balanced workforce.
“When I left school 30 years ago and fell into the world of property my biggest frustration was that at no point at school did I ever get any career advice about this amazing world of property,” says CBRE UK managing director Ciaran Bird. “Now, I look back 30 years later and that same school and many other schools across the country still know nothing about property and that is frankly embarrassing and unacceptable.”
Editor’s comment: Gender pay gap reporting is just the beginning
He adds: “I don’t want to get into politics but Theresa May talked about changing this [gender pay gap] almost overnight and that is impossible unless you get deep into schools. This is a diversity challenge. How do you educate people not just about property but about sticking to property and about how many opportunities there are for the brilliant young ladies out there who can come into this amazing industry.”
Bird and GVA chief executive Gerry Hughes both believe that the RICS needs to play a stronger and stricter role in promoting real estate as a viable, accessible and diverse career opportunity by working closer with and being more demanding of government.
3. Break free from the 9-5
Ever since the first whisper of the word millennial, the nature of work has changed. While working full-time from home has not become the new normal, working flexibly and being agile is fast becoming so.
With the rise of the smartphone and a growing network of freely available wifi, employees’ ability to work wherever and whenever they want to has grown exponentially. Life and work is just not as easy to separate as it used to be. And with a growing focus on wellness, people’s demands to operate in a way that works best for them will only increase.
Add to that the impact of employees taking career breaks to have children – and the high cost of childcare making the need to work flexibly inevitable – and it is clear that to create a gender balanced workforce employers simply must offer agile working.
Click here for the full story behind the agents’ gender pay gaps
And not just for women. Making it okay for the men in the business to work flexibly so that they can pick up the kids from school is just as, if not more important, than enabling women to work non-standard hours.
One female employee of a large firm suggested that all jobs should be advertised as part or full time to capture all the best candidates.
“Women get trapped at companies if they are part time and are also less likely to be promoted,” she said. “Being able to change jobs and remain part time (and it isn’t forever) is key in my opinion and experience. I really can’t see that every job requires a five-day week of work in today’s world.”
Luckily, the majority of firms reporting are already developing flexible working practices.
4. Promote shared parental leave
Take-up of shared parental leave across the UK as a whole has been poor, if not shocking, at around 2%.
“Shared parental leave is probably at the heart of it. The more we can portray taking time off to spend with your children or taking career breaks as something that is attractive to men and women the better,” says BL’s Cariaga.
“There are men [within BL] who really feel passionate that there is benefit to men in taking shared parental leave and the more that men do take it, the less it [career breaks for child rearing] becomes a female or perceived female issue.”
At JLL, chief operating officer Richard Howling is the most senior employee to take advantage of shared parental leave. He is now acting as a role model for staff in a bid to encourage more men to take up the opportunity.
Just one person took shared parental leave at JLL in its first year of availability, three in the second year and six in the most recent year. UK chief executive Chris Ireland is keen to see that number continue to grow.
5. Be patient
Whether you are the leader of a firm keen to turn an uncomfortable pay gap into a more positive story, or a female frustrated at the shocking, but largely predictable, figures revealed last week, remember that this is not something that can be fixed overnight.
CBRE’s Bird is not complacent about the agent’s comparatively small gender pay gap saying it has only managed to deliver a 17.3% mean gap after more than a decade of hard work.
See all the companies that have filed their figures
At BL, where chief executive Chris Grigg has been very vocal in championing its women and demanding more balance from its advisers and partners since he took up the role in 2009, pay gap figures were not as healthy as one might have expected at almost 40%. Change, it seems, take time, effort and patience.
GVA’s Hughes, who admits embarrassment at the slow progress made by UK real estate businesses, including his own in achieving gender parity, says it is important that the sector does not try to fix the pay gap problem overnight.
“This is a systemic problem that requires a medium to long-term series of initiatives to address the core problem. If we try to fix it too quickly we could do more damage than good so we need to be quite careful,” he says.
“This is a rubicon moment for the industry,” adds Hughes. “There is no going back. The stats have been published, they will be used for comparison purposes, if businesses do not make progress against the base position that has now been set, they will be held to account.”
And so they should. While the graphs and charts and leader boards available in this article and across EGi deliver an uncomfortable story about the state of the real estate industry for women, they also provide a starting point and an opportunity for businesses to come together and deliver improvement year on year.
To send feedback, e-mail Samantha.McClary@egi.co.uk or tweet @Samanthamcclary or @estatesgazette
