30/04/2019
NEWS STORY
Last week it was reported that of the six F1 teams based in the UK, the gulf in pay between men and women was higher than the national average at all but one team.
While Racing Point, which employs 382 of the total 4,023 staff employed directly by the teams, paid its female employees an hourly wage 12.6% lower than that earned by men, women at Williams were being paid an hourly wage 25% lower than their male colleagues. The national average being 18%.
Claire Williams argues that the rules are misleading, while insisting that the involvement of women in motorsport is about more than money.
"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 said.
"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," she continued. "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.
"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."