At Thought Machine, we calculate our gender pay gap based on UK Government guidance:
The gender pay gap is the difference between the average (mean or median) earnings of men and women across a workforce.
Companies that employ more than 250 people (like Thought Machine) are legally required to publish a snapshot of their gender pay gap each year, using data from the year prior. The following data is a snapshot of our gender pay gap position as of April 2024.
The data is not a measure of pay equality (it is a legal requirement for men and women performing equal work to receive equal pay). By looking at the data in aggregate, we see a picture of the overall differences in pay between men and women in the business. This data also reveals the kinds of roles held by men and women – and which gender is more or less represented in different salary bands.
It is an opportunity for us at Thought Machine to observe the disparity in pay between men and women across the business and ask ourselves the question as to why those differences exist.
We have collected and analysed data with regard to:
Since 2020, we have been actively working to improve our gender representation, leveraging our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) and implementing strategies to recruit and retain more women across the organisation. However, in 2023, hiring was more limited than usual, and throughout 2023 and 2024, we made redundancies across the business. As a result, we lost women in key senior leadership roles, particularly in Marketing and HR departments, which has affected the upper quartiles of our Gender Pay Gap. Despite this, we have reduced our median pay gap marginally, from 19.61% in 2023 to 19.25% in 2024.
As above, we have marginally reduced our median gender pay gap from 19.61% to 19.25%. However, a series of redundancies, including some at senior levels, have impacted our mean pay gap, which has increased from 18.32% to 21.52%.
During our 2024 pay review cycle, we shared each team's gender pay gap with Managers and Divisional Heads, to encourage them to be mindful of existing gaps and potential bias when assigning pay changes. This has had a positive impact as we have increased the percentage of women in the upper and middle quartiles of pay. In 2024, we reviewed the performance review process, ensuring the criteria is more objective and introduced ‘calibration rounds’ to reduce bias in performance scores. Additionally, we have increased hiring of females in entry-level engineering and traditionally lower-paid roles. This, in turn, has increased the number of women in the lower quartile of pay.
Despite making fewer new hires this year, we have maintained roughly the same percentage of women in the organisation, with marginal movement from 24.82% in 2023 to 23.74%. We are working on initiatives to ensure we hire and retain women (women comprise 31% of 2025 hiring). It’s important to recognise that there is a limited number of potential female hires in the industry, which is driven by many socio-cultural factors. Overcoming these challenges requires collective efforts across the industry. We hope that an increasing number of women studying Computer Science at an undergraduate level will shift this needle in time.
Bonus pay gap
We have continued our focus on increasing the number of women who join our engineering department through our internship programme, achieving a 50% representation of women in 2024's intake. Since 2021, our internship programme has consistently maintained this 50% female representation. We’ve seen positive results, with 75% of our permanent hires from 2023 internships being female (2024 Interns are still at university). While this has resulted in a greater percentage of women in the lower pay quartile, we are dedicated to this strategy. It strengthens Thought Machine’s ability to attract female talent over the long term and also positively influences the technology ecosystem by providing more women with valuable experience in the tech industry and software engineering roles.
Each year, we monitor promotions and level changes by gender across the company. We are pleased to share that in 2023 and 2024, women were promoted at a similar rate to men relative to their representation in the organisation. This has contributed to more women moving into the upper middle quartiles of pay.
2024 saw us roll out a Mentorship programme, which has had steady uptake. While this is not aimed solely at women, it is targeted at junior-mid levels, where a higher percentage of women sit. As this initiative is still relatively new, we have not yet been able to measure direct results. However, we have informally received feedback that it is improving mentees' confidence in their ability, encouraging them to seek challenging projects and develop further, and improve soft skills relevant to senior roles, such as stakeholder management and influencing others. We expect this will increase promotion and progression opportunities, consequently improving gender representation of women in upper pay quartiles over time.
We have also observed positive trends demonstrating that we are retaining women at a similar rate to men. We’ve found the percentage of women who stay with the organisation for three, four or five years is similar to the make-up of women in the organisation overall. We are confident that in time this will contribute to women being better represented in both the upper and upper middle quartiles of pay, and will help us narrow the pay gap over time.
In addition, our Inclusion Council continues to work with our People Leadership team to build more inclusive policies. We’ve implemented a Menopause policy to provide support, hopefully encouraging women to stay with the organisation long term.
Lastly, we have seen great success from our “return to work” coaching programme designed for individuals on maternity or adoption leave. Women participating in the programme have reported increased confidence in both leaving and returning to their roles. They also feel more supported by their managers during this transition. We are optimistic that these initiatives will improve the retention of women and help further close the gender gap by encouraging more women to re-enter the workforce after an extended break.
How can we further progress in closing the gap moving forward?
Continue to hire more women actively
Internal mobility
Succession planning
Signed – Matt Wilkins, Chief People Officer, Thought Machine
