Diversity at Trainline

Our Commitment to Gender Balance

At Trainline, we know that a diverse team is crucial to delivering the best app and website experience for our global customer base. A diverse team also results in a more engaging, inclusive, and creative workplace for our people. We’re committed to diversity in all forms, whether gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, nationality, or diversity of thought and working style.

We have done a lot of work with the wider industry 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.

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 and, in the last year, have hired more women than men across our three offices in London, Edinburgh and Paris. Many of our new female hires are in our technology specialist teams, which account for more than half our people, and more than a third (35%) of our people company-wide are women.

Our new practices include:

• The launch of People Led Groups (PLGs), 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 PLGs focus on many areas of diversity, including women, ethnic minorities, differently-abled and LGBTQ+.

• The launch of our learning and development programme (Know How You Grow) to help junior women and men at Trainline thrive and progress to more senior roles with the organisation.
• Our hiring managers have taken training on how to recognise and avoid unconscious bias.
• Making it mandatory that female candidates are interviewed for senior management and leadership roles, with a minimum of one female on each shortlist.
• 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.

However, a continued shortage of women in tech – as well as in the rail industry - can limit the number of female candidates applying for open roles, particularly for senior and leadership positions.  As a result, the majority of new female team members we’ve welcomed over the last year have filled junior roles in the business; we’re committed to supporting them in progressing their careers at Trainline and are excited to see the great things they will achieve. With more junior women joining our organisation, and despite more than a third (35%) of our people being women in April 2020, we have seen our gender pay gap* increase from 20% in April 2019 to 26% in April 2020.

We are not satisfied with this and will continue to review and adapt our strategy to tackling gender imbalance. As well as continuing to support and mentor women in more junior roles at our company, we’ll make sure we are laser-focused on getting the best senior female tech talent through our doors.

We review our plan to reduce our gender pay gap on a quarterly basis and our hiring plans monthly, at executive level. We have also welcomed Jenny Duvalier to our Board as a Non-Executive Director tasked with overseeing diversity & inclusion, within a wider remit of workforce engagement.

 

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:

• 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
• Code First: Girls, a UK-based social enterprise focussed on building diversity and skills in the tech sector. In this, our third, year of supporting the organisation, we helped them reach – and surpass – their target of training 20,000 young women in the UK to code for free
• Ada Tech School in France, 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

*The difference between the average mean hourly pay of women and the average mean hourly pay of men at Trainline