Diversity at Trainline
Trainline’s purpose is to empower greener travel choices connecting people and places. We achieve this by removing barriers and creating strong connections for our customers and partners.
Our approach to diversity, inclusion, and belonging follows the same principles. Removing barriers and creating connections results in an inclusive environment where every Trainliner can be their true self, and a workplace where everyone belongs, is celebrated and their differences are valued, creating an awesome employee and customer experience.
As a technology business operating in the world of rail, we face the challenge of a limited pool of female candidates, particularly when hiring within our engineering and data teams. To tackle this – not just at Trainline but across the wider tech industry - we’ve done a lot of work with our partners on the issue of women in tech over the last few years. This involves supporting grassroots charitable organisations focused on helping younger females enter the industry, as well as working directly with schools on mentoring students from difficult backgrounds to help them see that a career in tech is within their grasp.
Progress in the last year includes:
- Ongoing investment in our Diversity Networks, made up of representatives from across the business – spanning all levels of seniority and all functions - who are focused on making Trainline an even more diverse and inclusive place to work. The Diversity Networks focus on many areas of diversity, including gender equality, ethnic minorities, differently-abled and LGBTQ+
- Ensuring that female candidates are interviewed for leadership roles. We achieved 50:50 gender-balanced shortlists for all Executive hiring
- Significant investment in our family-friendly policies
- Launched our first ever Apprenticeship programme
- Ongoing focus on our mentoring programme which gives every mid and senior-level woman and man the opportunity to partner with an executive team mentor who can advise, champion, and support them in their roles and career
- Specialised digital learning covering inclusive hiring practices and focusing on ‘inclusive’ consciousness
However, while progress is being made, we recognise that there is still much to do. Many of the new female team members we’ve welcomed over the last year have filled roles outside of our technology and data teams and within other functions at Trainline. Their careers at Trainline will grow as we invest in their development and we’re excited to see the great things they will achieve. However, for now, many of these roles do not sit in the upper salary quartiles and as a result, we have seen our mean gender pay gap* increase from 26% in April 2020 to 30% in April 2021.
The widening of the gap is mainly attributed to the demographics within our technology and data functions. These functions represent two-thirds of our workforce and attract a higher proportion of male employees and the salary levels within these teams tend to be higher than other functions.
We continue to reassess and improve the recruitment processes we use, to make it even easier for young female tech talent to join us. We’ve seen good results from these processes so far, as the number of women at Trainline continues to grow. In the last year, this number has increased from 35% to 37%. In addition, we’ve increased the number of females hired to 39% during this reporting period, with the number growing to 43% at the end of 2021. We’re incredibly proud that these hires include our first-ever female Chief Technology Officer, Milena Nikolic.
We will continue to review and adapt our strategy to tackle gender imbalance. As well as continuing to support and mentor women in more junior roles at our company, we’ll make sure we’re laser-focused on getting the best senior female tech talent through our doors.
We will continue to review our plan to reduce our gender pay gap on a quarterly basis and our hiring plans monthly, at the executive level, working closely with Jenny Duvalier, our Non-Executive Director tasked with overseeing diversity & inclusion, within a wider remit of the workforce engagement. We’re also launching a new Diversity & Inclusion Action Plan to facilitate an even more inclusive and representative culture that attracts people from all backgrounds and where all Trainliners can thrive and feel like they belong.
We know that we have a responsibility to continue to support women in the wider tech industry and a role to play in ensuring females of all ages and backgrounds have access to a career in tech. For this reason, we support a number of charitable organisations, including:
- Future Frontiers, a charity that equips students from disadvantaged backgrounds with the information and mindset to achieve their career aspirations, pairing over 200 secondary school students with Trainline employees in our London and Edinburgh offices
- Ada Tech School in France is a computer science school dedicated to helping more women learn to code through training courses that are designed to tackle gender and cultural biases of technology. As well as supporting the school by providing mentors and insight into working in tech, we have welcomed a full-time apprentice from the school to work in our Paris office
- Multiverse, is a mission-driven tech start-up committed to creating a diverse group of future leaders through high-quality apprenticeship programmes that combine work, training, and community
*The difference between the average mean hourly pay of women and the average mean hourly pay of men at Trainline