TikTok reports average 5% hourly gender pay gap at Irish operations

Women employees of TikTok, the social media platform owned by Chinese technology company ByteDance, earn on average 5 per cent less per hour than their male counterparts in the State. However, women employees receive slightly larger bonuses than male employees on average, according to TikTok’s gender pay gap report, published on Wednesday.

The tech company – which employed some 2,000 people at its European headquarters in Dublin at the start of the year and has announced plans to grow its headcount here to more than 3,000 – is the latest in a host of Irish-based companies to issue gender pay gap reports in recent weeks to meet an end-of-year deadline under new reporting requirements.

TikTok said that the report, the first of its kind that the social media company has produced, is “positive in terms of the lack of a material bonus gap and even distribution” across its pay scale.

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On average, hourly pay for TikTok’s women employees in the State was 5 per cent lower than for its male employees. The differential compares favourably with other tech multinationals with a significant presence in Ireland, including Amazon, which recently reported average gender pay gaps of between 4.3 per cent and 19.7 per cent across its four main Irish entities.

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TikTok said the 5 per cent hourly pay discrepancy can be partly explained by the composition of its Irish workforce, with women slightly better represented in the highest-earning quartile of employees.

“The relatively even distribution across [the three lower-earnings quartiles], coupled with the strong female representation in the upper quartile, may be contributing factors to the low, single-digit pay gap figure at both the mean and median level,” it said.

“At the same time, in the upper-middle quartile – the second highest-earning quartile – the proportion of men exceeds that of women more significantly relative to what is observed in other quartiles, with a difference of 7.5 per cent. This suggests that increasing representation of women in this quartile could help to make further progress towards reducing the gender pay gap further over time.”

Meanwhile, bonus pay at the Irish operation was 3.4 per cent higher for women than for men but determining the factors behind this phenomenon was “challenging”, TikTok said.

One possible reason is that a slightly higher proportion of women employees (87.7 per cent) than men (87.3 per cent) received bonus payments at all, TikTok said, based on “a variety of factors, including individual performance, job level, base pay and the mix of pay”.

“While this first report is positive in terms of the lack of a material bonus gap and even distribution across the majority of quartiles determined by pay, we recognise that we have more work to do,” TikTok said.

“For 2023, we’re committed to making further progress towards reducing the gaps identified in this report, including a continuous review of our benefits provision, with a renewed focus to support diversity, inclusion and equity, as well as recruitment practices and learning and development. We’re still a young business in Ireland and fully committed to building on this strong foundation as we strive to create and sustain a truly diverse and equitable workforce.”