Our 2022/2023 Ireland Gender Pay Gap Report
13 December 2023
Inspiration starts with inclusion
At Pinterest, our mission is to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love. Each month, 400+ million people around the world come to Pinterest to discover, decide and do what they love. We’re working hard to create a positive place on the internet and are proud to build personalised and relevant experiences on our platform that help move our diverse population of users from inspiration to action.
Core to our mission and everything we do is creating belonging. As we continue to grow and evolve, we’re taking meaningful steps to ensure anyone who joins our global workforce, visits our platform or partners with us feels welcomed, valued and respected for their individual perspectives and life experiences.
An important component of inclusion at Pinterest is ensuring employees are appropriately rewarded for their contributions. As an equal pay employer, we focus on ensuring pay equity. In this report, we’ll examine a distinct but related concept, which is gender pay gaps. The purpose of this report is to provide details on our gender pay gap statistics for Ireland in 2023, explain the reasons for our gaps, note any progress from our report last year and outline measures we are taking to reduce our gaps.
Pay equity vs gender pay gap
There is a distinct difference between pay equity and a gender pay gap. Pay equity is about ensuring that employees who perform comparable work are paid similarly. Pinterest is an equal pay employer and takes regular steps to ensure that employees are being paid fairly and equitably, regardless of gender or any other protected category.
The gender pay gap is very different. A gender pay gap is the output of a statistical calculation comparing the average figures for both the pay and the bonus of women compared to men. It does not involve comparing like with like and is best thought of as a measure of representation. A low or zero gender pay gap means that an employer has a good spread of men and women across all levels of the business. A high positive gender pay gap generally means that an employer has a disproportionate amount of male representation in the more senior level roles with higher compensation opportunities. A high negative gender pay gap generally means that an employer has a disproportionate amount of female representation in the more senior roles.
Compensation at Pinterest includes fixed and variable pay and may include base pay, incentive compensation and equity. Building on our work in 2022, we have further increased transparency around compensation ranges and levels on a regional basis in 2023, and we have continued to refine our internal processes to share this information with our employees. In a dynamic workplace, maintaining pay equity requires vigilance and ongoing monitoring. Twice a year, we analyse compensation and make adjustments when necessary to continue to stand by this very important commitment.
In this report, we’ll discuss Pinterest’s gender pay gap in Ireland, based on criteria established by the Irish government.
Pinterest Ireland 2022/2023 data1
Interpreting the data
The mean (most commonly known as average) gaps are calculated by adding up all values and dividing by how many there are in each data set (i.e., the total number of male or female employees). This statistic can be distorted by individual outliers (e.g. low or higher earners) or where a group at either end of the earning scale is predominantly male/female. The median gaps are calculated by placing all values in order and finding the value that sits in the middle. Median figures are not distorted by outliers (low or higher earners). Neither mean nor median is the “better” statistic. They show different things. The median assists with interpretation of the spread of the data.
Our data shows that we have a mean pay and bonus gap, which means average pay and bonus for women in Ireland is lower than for men. However, we also have a negative median bonus gap, which means the bonus paid to the middle woman is actually higher than the bonus paid to the middle man. Our median pay gap remains low at just 2.5%—this shows that there is very little difference in terms of total compensation between the middle man and middle woman at Pinterest.
We’d also like to acknowledge that our data indicates that women and men are equally benefitting from our market-leading benefits packages: 100% of employees receive benefits in kind.
What are the causes of our gaps?
As discussed above, our median pay gap is very low at just 2.5%. This is because, in general, we have a broadly even spread of men and women across the business. Our mean pay gap is higher at 16.5%. This is caused by a relatively small number of outliers in two areas:
There is a higher representation of men in our most senior level roles of Director and Senior Director. Women occupy 49% of our senior roles: There are 28 men and 27 women in the more senior level roles in Ireland. However, women comprise 58% of the workforce. Although this overrepresentation in senior roles is small, these roles are more highly paid and have a greater impact on the mean pay gap.
Our Engineering team is predominantly male with just 28% of these roles held by women. These roles include some of the highest earners at Pinterest and contribute toward the mean pay gap.
Our progress on the measures we are taking
Although our mean pay gap is comparatively moderate, our median pay gap is closer to zero, and our data positions us well against our competitors, we are still taking action. We are continuing to significantly invest in local and global initiatives to improve representation, especially at the senior levels, including in the following areas:
Recruitment:
At Pinterest, we have developed a robust strategy focused on building a diverse pipeline of talent. Our hiring teams directly build these relationships and we work with external partners to broaden our reach.
We continuously look at our process to ensure it is inclusive and equitable. Some of the steps we’ve taken to strengthen our process in 2023 include:
Expanding our Diverse Slate process, which requires diverse representation on all slates, to all markets, including Dublin.
Rolling out a global interview training programme to ensure best practices are followed, such as ensuring balanced representation on interview panels and mitigating bias.
Building an external talent community that allows us to connect with and stay engaged with talent long-term, prior to, during and post-employment with Pinterest.
Engaging in external partnerships with organisations like Pyladies Dublin and Python Ireland.
Ensuring our job descriptions leverage gender neutral language.
Development:
We will focus on the continued development, retention and advancement of our employees, which includes the development and progression of female talent. Some of the steps taken in 2023 include:
Our EMEA Personal Leadership coaching, launched in 2022 and completed in March of 2023, partnered leadership development coaches with 10 EMEA employees from marginalised gender identities (women, transgender, non-binary and gender nonconforming). All 10 participants received in-depth coaching, and upon completing the programme shared enormously positive feedback.
Our Women@ Pinclusion Group2 continues to help drive skill-building, professional development, recruiting and retention for all women employees, including in our Dublin office. Progress in Ireland since last year includes:
In 2023, two of our four Global Leads for Women@ worked from our Dublin office.
Facilitating workshops on topics such as “Harnessing your inner critic,” and Women’s Health (covering important topics such as Breast Cancer, Menopause and Egg Freezing) and hosted networking opportunities to meet with cross-functional partners and leaders from throughout the company.
Our annual women’s conference is an important opportunity for all employees to learn from women who are influential voices, educators and creators. General themes include actionable allyship, personal growth, self-defined success, intersectional experiences and wellbeing. In April 2023, we had a viewing party in our Dublin office to increase visibility of this excellent initiative for our broader Dublin population.
We also want to note that this report examines gender gaps with a binary lens as required by the Regulations—looking strictly at disparities between men and women—given current data constraints. We are exploring expanding how we ask employees about their identities in a voluntary demographics survey subject to compliance with local legal requirements. Our hope is that this will help us better understand pay equity for transgender, gender non-conforming and non-binary genders in the future.
This report acknowledges that there is still more work that needs to be done. We will continue to identify opportunities to improve our efforts and engage transparently along the way. We are fully committed to providing opportunities for women and all other underrepresented groups at all levels, in all countries, and in all areas of our business.
