Women@IM, is one of the Company’s global Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) continues to grow. The purpose of the group was re-evaluated during 2019, and with that came a new Vision and Mission.
During 2021 Women@IM held several well attended Global Professional Development on-line events, which included subject areas such as Presentation Skills, Using Emotional Intelligence to Build Relationships and Your Career, Using Setbacks to Build Resilience and Succeed, and Activating Your Network.
There is a dedicated internal social media page for the Women@IM resource group. Senior role opportunities are highlighted on this platform, and podcast/articles are shared on a regular basis. Examples of what has recently been shared are “Women and Burnout”, The Power of Imposter Syndrome
International women’s day
International Women’s day was embraced throughout Iron Mountain in 2021, and was seen as an opportunity to drive positive change. There were many posts of our employees showing support #choosetochallenge (2021) on both our internal and external social media platforms, led by the Company’s President and CEO.
Events took place in 55 locations over 28 countries, which provided valuable information on the Global and UK gender parity progress made to date, and the current gaps that still exist.
In the UK for 2021 several virtual open discussions took place with senior leaders internally. The Company arranged a virtual talk from a well-known female author who discussed the essence of their book “Stop Procrastinating, Start Living”.
A mentoring scheme for women was also launched on this day, which has continued to be well received throughout 2021/2022.
Iron Mountain are currently partnering with a charity “Smalls for All”, a charity based in Scotland founded as a result of problems poverty stricken women and children have with accessing underwear in the UK and beyond. We used International Women’s Day to re-launch this charity. Iron Mountain also regularly provides volunteers to help out at the charities’ headquarters, and remain active in our support.
For IWD in 2022, #breakthebias, we have arranged a panel discussion of senior leaders which is being led by our Senior Vice President and General Manager, Europe and South Africa. This being supported by a women-led organisation whose mission is to help businesses retain and advance valuable female talent by making their employees feel supported and empowered at every stage of their lives and careers.
To continue our mission to have past, current and future employees view their experiences at Iron Mountain as an accomplishment and source of pride we intend that:
- We will relentlessly strive to be a world-class employer in every region in which we operate.
- By 2025 we will tighten our threshold for gender pay parity from +/-10% to achieve +/- 5% across all organizational levels in all countries where we are reporting (US, Canada, UK).
- By 2025, women will represent 40% of global leadership (defined as Director or Above)
- By 2023 we will expand gender pay parity reporting to cover all global operations by 2023
Phil Shepley, (Vice President & General Manager – Northern Europe) said:
Gender equality should be a given but in too many places and situations it isn't yet. Iron Mountain is growing and we are using this opportunity to address imbalance and provide opportunities to build a more diverse team. By being innovative and enterprising while being responsible and acting with good governance, we have an opportunity to show how a truly diverse team succeeds and how equality in our leadership teams and through our organisation drives better results.
I am pleased to report improvements from last year including:
- % of women receiving a bonus in both of our businesses has significantly improved with 91% of all women in the group receiving a bonus, up from 83% last year
- Median hourly pay of women across the group has increased by 8% on the previous year
- Median bonus of women across the group has increased by 24% on the previous year
So I will challenge myself and others to challenge gender bias and stereotypes and will work to correct the imbalance we see in work and society today because it’s the right thing to do. And the right thing to do is always good for business.
We will be proactively continuing on our journey of eliminating barriers and breaking the bias to allow our employees to fulfil their potential.
Pay and bonus gap data
The gender pay gap shows the difference in average hourly pay and annual bonus pay between women and men at Iron Mountain. It is different to equal pay, which looks at pay differences between men and women who carry out the same jobs, similar jobs or work of equal value. The gender pay gap shows the differences in the average pay between men and women regardless of role.
Our overall Gender Pay Gap picture shows we have work to do, as our pay gaps have increased in the last year – in part due to the departure of a couple of our highest earning women and also in part due to an increase in hiring in the UK in the past year in senior sales and IT roles which are typically very highly paid and the pool of candidates is typically male dominated.
We do however recognise some improvements from last year. For example, we have noticed decreases in our Gender Bonus pay in our corporate business (where our largest bonuses are usually paid) and at the Group level. This most likely can be explained by our decision to pay every annual bonus eligible employee on the same Enterprise scorecard, rather than regionally, and then funded all bonuses below Executive level to 105% as a reward for the hard work of our employees throughout the Pandemic. As the majority of our executive roles are filled by men, this helped to reduce some of the gap we have seen in previous years. In addition to this, at the start of the Pandemic, we paid all of our Frontline staff globally a one-off “Thank You” bonus for their commitment and service to our customers whilst working on client sites when other employees were working remotely. This was paid in addition to their quarterly frontline bonus payments and demonstrates our commitment to our staff and fair pay.
We are pleased that despite the increase in our gender pay gap that our average pay gap of 11% still falls significantly below the national average of 15.5% and our median gender pay gap for the group is only 3%. As part of our commitment to fair pay across the board, from Jan 1st 2022 we have significantly increased our internal minimum rate to 75p per hour above minimum wage. This allows our lowest paid employees to contribute more, not only to pension through salary sacrifice, but also to other benefit schemes such as childcare vouchers, purchasing additional holiday entitlement and flexing up different life and medical insurance schemes, which have increased in popularity during the Pandemic. We have also bought out all frontline bonuses, so employees can enjoy the comfort of knowing the additional income they receive on a quarterly basis would now become a guaranteed payment on a monthly basis. These came into effect mid-2021 and we expect to see positive benefits of these changes in the next Gender Pay report.
We try not to look at the pay gaps in isolation, as they are not the only measure of inclusion, although they are a good measure of highlighting areas for focus. We are not complacent about the challenges and we do still have areas of imbalance to focus on over the course of the next year, which we intend to resolve.
Group gender distribution by level
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