The debate around W Series is ongoing for male and female racers segregation but internally, the issue of gender pay gap is also continuing on as F1 teams discuss how they are tackling the matter.
With the UK Government regulation of publishing the gender pay gap report in public, the F1 teams came under scrutiny when they did theirs for the 2017 and 2018 seasons. Williams, the team which has Claire at the helm, were found to be paying less to females.
The report suggested that Williams nearly paid 25 percent less to their female employees than their male counterparts, even though they have a slight increase in their female strength in 2018 from 2017, which sits at 17.6 percent.
Williams defended their report stating that the regulations under which they have to reveal the data could be misleading as it does not carry things they have actually done or are doing for their female employees for a better growth.
“For me, certainly, the regulations by which we have to report our gender pay gap, which we have to do now in the UK, are misleading or they can bring about misleading results,” she started when asked by the media.
“Certainly, for me, the means by which you test how well you are doing to ensure gender equality within your business is firstly by the number of women you actually have and year-on-year we have more and more women coming to work at Williams and I’m pleased to say not just in the more female-dominated roles we’ve had in motorsport in the past, of admin and marketing.
“More women are coming up now in engineering roles; we’ve got more women in our aerodynamics department, in vehicle design, development etc. But it’s about how you support that talent as well.
“We’ve just recently launched, about four months ago, at the start of this year, a women at Williams network, and I think we are probably the only team to do that. It’s about not only encouraging talent to come into our team but it’s about how you support them when they are there.
“And secondly, the most important number for me when we are looking at gender equality is how you much you pay your female staff versus your male, and we went through a big analysis on this two years ago, before we even had to report on gender pay, and we made sure that every woman that was doing the same job as a man was paid the same amount as that male employee for doing that same job.
“For me, those are the three greatest measures of gender equality within a business and so I have absolutely no qualms knowing that the women in our organisation are treated on an equal standing as our men.”
The question was then thrown open to other team officials where they talked about how they are implementing the rule set in by the Government to increase equality. “I think a lot has been said within Daimler,” started Mercedes’ Toto Wolff.
“Within the Daimler board there is more female representation and when you look at the motor racing side, Britta Seeger who is on the board for sales & marketing and Bettina Fetzer, vice-president for marketing, they were strongly behind us going into Formula E and they are very engaged, also they are at F1 very often and they are there on merit.
“The same in small is within the F1 team. I’m really happy to see that, from the young ones that are going us, it looks like the proportion of young ladies is much higher than it was in the past.
“Being an engineer, technician or mechanic is more of a career route than it was in the past. As you know, my wife has done a programme that was called ‘Dare to be Different’ and has joined forces with the the FIA now, in order to promote young women into the sport.
“So, I’m the first one to have seen how powerful that can be and I think the proportion of females in our organisation will grow, or is growing as we speak – and that’s good.” Meanwhile, Cyril Abiteboul mentioned of a near 50-50 ratio in key departments at Renault.
“Statistics are, in terms of quantity, pool of resources is much lower,” he said. “I think really what matters is that, for a given position, there is equality and parity of treatment for a given position. And that’s basically, the hurdle.
“As far as we are concerned, we are obviously very keen. We go up massively in terms of resources, that’s given us the opportunity to attract with equality – but also our executive committee, our management committee is almost 50:50 between men and women, so I think it’s a clear demonstration that we are serious about that.”
Another of the big brand and also a F1 team, Red Bull’s Christian Horner stressed on the pay equality irrespective of gender within their company. The team’s advisor Helmut Marko came under scanner for his comments regarding W Series, but Horner handled it well.
“I’m all for Girl Power,” he said. “Within our team, somebody that performs a role, it’s irrelevant whether they’re male or female. They’re paid the same for the role that they perform.
“We have some great engineers, some great designers, a growing contingent of more and more females coming into the business, which is great to see. Quite often we have a strategist on the pit wall that’s currently on maternity leave, in key and prominent positions.”
Finally, Racing Point’s Otmar Szafnauer stated: “At Racing Point and Force India before, we don’t really differentiate by gender at all. So, we differentiate by the ability to do the job. There are many – well, not many – but a few departments that I can think of now where we have both men and women.
“They’re led by women and that’s just because they’re better at what they do. I think if that’s the philosophy, the gender pay gap should naturally become zero, so that’s how we go about things.”
Apart from the teams, F1 itself had to share their date where they talked of lack of female students in departments which is prominent in the sport. “The motorsport industry remains predominantly male, largely because of the lack of women choosing to pursue careers.
“Whether it is in science, technology and engineering. We want to change that. As an organisation, we are committed to breaking the stereotypes when it comes to choosing a vocation when at school or college,” the report added.
Check out the various gender pay gap reports which F1 and the teams published:
