The Jupiter Fixed Income team have engaged with HSBC on a range of topics, from their gender pay gap to carbon emissions. Find out what other points were raised and how HSBC responded in the full engagement study. 

 

HSBC cite their purpose on their website:

 

“Our purpose – Opening up a world of opportunity – explains why we exist. We’re here to use our unique expertise, capabilities, breadth and perspectives to open up new kinds of opportunity for our customers. We’re bringing together the people, ideas and capital that nurture progress and growth, helping to create a better world – for our customers, our people, our investors, our communities and the planet we all share.”

 

From the off, we found it striking that HSBC were keen for us to hear from their Global Head of Diversity, Carolanne Minashi, on what a priority diversity and inclusion was for them as a company. To that effect, they are open with the data they publish on this area:

 

“Our regional diversity data disclosures now extend across six markets, covering 70 per cent of our workforce. We have reported our gender pay gap since 2017 in the UK and have since extended our reporting to include gender and ethnicity for the UK and US, and gender for mainland China, Hong Kong, India and Mexico.”

 

This data can be sliced and diced across region, division, seniority, ethnicity and gender. We were keen to hear about their pay gap data in regions other than the UK, as so few organisations publish as much data as HSBC do. We noted that the gender pay gap of HSBC Bank Plc is an outlier, as one of the highest in the industry (second only to Goldman Sachs) with 50.4% mean and 51.3% median pay gap, and a 61.2% mean and 72.2% median bonus gap. Disappointingly, they explained that the key drivers were the fact that mostly women are employed in their call centre network, which is a low paid job, and that London is also the base of their global investment banking and capital market business, which is mostly male dominated and attracts high pay. However, we were encouraged by their senior female representation targets (see below) and also their ethnicity targets to address this inequity. We would note that at 35% target levels for senior women, this would still not fully represent the ‘all employees’ split of a 52% female workforce.1

Women in senior leadership

 

After achieving our ambition of 30% women in senior leadership positions in 2020, we set a new goal to reach 35% by 2025. At the end of 2021, we had 31.7% of women in senior leadership roles.

 

Appointments of external female candid