GS Goldman Sachs Group Inc

By Liz Hoffman and Margot Patrick 

Women working at the main U.K. arm of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. make 36% less than men, reflecting a dearth of females in the bank's senior ranks and laying bare a continuing challenge for Wall Street as a whole.

A filing by the firm Friday, which followed ones in recent weeks by Barclays PLC, UBS Group AG and others, shows the financial industry is increasingly out of step with the broader economy as women graduate college at higher rates than men and make gains elsewhere.

The numbers also come at a time of intense focus on how women are treated at work. U.S. companies including banks have been rocked in recent months by allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination.

The U.K. government has singled out the financial sector as a particular area of concern. That focus intensified after the Financial Times reported in January that hired hostesses were groped at an all-male charity dinner attended by many senior executives in the finance industry.

Data on pay at Goldman, only a snapshot of pay for about 5,000 people, was released Friday as part of a gender-pay disclosure mandated by the U.K. Similar disclosures aren't required in the U.S.

Goldman's data don't indicate men are paid more than women for the same jobs, which is illegal in the U.K. They also don't speak to how the rest of Goldman's 36,600 employees are paid.

However the trend is borne out by the makeup of Goldman's partnership, a status symbol unmatched on Wall Street and bestowed every two years to a select few. Women make up just 15% of Goldman's 450 or so partners, and they are disproportionately represented in back-office jobs such as compliance, legal and human resources rather than in profit-making businesses, according to a Wall Street Journal review of the pool.

Of the four women with a seat on Goldman's powerful management committee, only one runs a business that makes money for the firm. There are 27 men on the panel.

That is progress from 1996, when just seven of Goldman's 173 partners were women. But it is still out of step with current workplace trends.

In a memo to Goldman staff, Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein and President David Solomon said the firm pays men and women in similar jobs with similar performance equally. But, they added, "The real issue for our firm and many corporations is the underrepresentation of women" in senior seats. "We have made some progress, but we have significant work to do."

That starts with bolstering the firm's recruiting pipeline. Goldman aims to have women make up 50% of its incoming analyst classes by 2021. Already Goldman has changed the way it recruits junior bankers, looking beyond the Ivy League to attract a more diverse pool of candidates.

Two years ago, the firm began closely tracking its summer interns -- who account for three-quarters of its analyst class -- with the goal of retaining nontraditional candidates who might fall behind.

Mr. Solomon, who won a succession battle this week after his chief rival for Mr. Blankfein's job resigned, has been particularly vocal on the issue. In his prior job running Goldman's investment bank, Mr. Solomon brought in senior women and pushed the firm's recruiters to get closer to parity in its lower ranks.

But it typically takes a decade or more to become a managing director at Goldman, meaning initiatives will take years to pay off.

"Even though we've moved the ball forward, it's not easy to move it forward as quickly as we would like," Mr. Solomon said on a podcast in October.

Other U.S. banks with U.K. operations, such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp., are expected to disclose their own pay numbers in coming weeks. The deadline for doing so is April 4.

Last month, Barclays reported a median gap of 44% between men's and women's pay and a 73% gap on bonuses. At the London arm of Switzerland's UBS , women are paid 25% less, in part because they hold only 21% of the best-paid jobs.

The U.K. disclosures so far show that women typically fill about half of firms' junior and midlevel roles, but rarely more than a third of higher-paying positions.

Among Goldman's highest quartile of earners, 83% are men. Nearly two-thirds of the lowest quartile of earners are women.

Write to Liz Hoffman at liz.hoffman@wsj.com and Margot Patrick at margot.patrick@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 16, 2018 16:27 ET (20:27 GMT)

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