Our Commitment to Gender Balance

At Trainline, we are active supporters of equal pay for men and women: the payment given to men and women doing the same job at the same level.   Testament to this is the fact that, in April 2017, the difference between the average pay of men and women working at Trainline was less than 1%.

However, like most tech companies, we recognise we still have work to do to recruit more women into Trainline and address a gender imbalance that exists in our organisation, particularly in the technology specialist teams that make up half our people.  In April 2017, 30% of our team were women and this under-representation of women had an impact on our gender pay gap – the difference between average male and female pay.   At this time, Trainline had a gender pay gap of 16%. 

Our CEO Clare Gilmartin is personally and professionally committed to empowering women at every level in the business and is passionate about engendering a working environment that nurtures career opportunity for women.   We have been focussed on reducing our gender pay gap and have put in place several processes to help us improve.  These included training to educate hiring managers about key hiring principles, with further training planned on how to avoid unconscious bias; ensuring there is at least one female finalist for open senior leadership roles; and launching our mentoring programme.  We allow flexible working hours, home working and part-time working; and, in 2017, we improved our maternity and paternity benefits. 

Gender imbalance exists within many tech companies and needs to be tackled at an industry, as well as company, level. In 2017, only 3.9% of tech and telco professionals in the UK were female programmers and software developers.  Today, 34% of the Trainline team are women (up from 30% last April) but we want to increase this further.  We are actively working with the industry to attract more women to work in the technology sector, via our partnership with Code First: Girls, a UK-based social enterprise focused on building diversity and skills in the technology sector.  From 2018, Trainline is supporting Code First: Girls’ 20:20 campaign which aims to train 20,000 women to code for free by the end of 2020.