Meta has a pay gap problem, with women abroad getting lower pay and smaller bonuses than men

• Meta once aimed to get its global workforce to half women and underrepresented groups by this year.
• The company still pays women abroad less than men and gives them much smaller bonuses.
• Globally, the number of women working for Meta has increased just 1% since 2018.

If you're a woman working for Meta abroad, chances are you're getting paid substantially less than the typical man who works there.

The company, formerly known as Facebook, continues to pay women less than men, whether they're hourly workers or on salary, according to Meta's most recently available reports on pay inequity in the U.K. and Ireland. The company also hands women smaller bonuses, the reports said.

While most of the company's employees are in the U.S., which does not require pay gap disclosures from companies, Meta has about 3,000 workers in Ireland and about 5,000 in the U.K., making up roughly 10% of its current global workforce, although a new round of layoffs is expected soon.

The report on Meta's pay gap in Ireland is the most recent, having been released quietly in December as part of a new law in the country that went into effect last year. In 2022, women working across Meta in Ireland were paid 15.7% less on average than men at the company. The difference in bonus pay in the country is even larger, with the average bonus for women being 43.3% lower than those that go to men.

For women working at Meta in the U.K., where the company operates out of London, the pay gap is smaller but still prevalent, according to a report from last year detailing pay data from 2021. The average woman there was paid 2.1% less than the average man. And again, the difference in bonuses is much more stark, with the average bonus going to women being 34.8% less than bonuses paid to men.

The pay gap at Meta in the U.K. is actually worse than it was when it first started reporting figures in 2018. At that time, women were paid on average 0.9% less than men, although their bonus pay was 40% less.

Base pay at Meta often starts around $150,000 a year, so a woman earning that much in Ireland can expect that a man is making about $23,000 more than her. A woman in the U.K. can expect a man is making about $3,000 more.  

The company for several years has said it's working toward a "vision" that half of its global workforce be women and people from "underrepresented groups." Two years ago, it planned to reach that goal by 2023. Now the goal appears to have been pushed back to 2024, with the company's diversity report from last year falling short of that goal. As of last year, women make up 37% of the workforce, up just 1% since 2018 when Meta began sharing its diversity report.

A Meta spokesperson said the company "regularly conducts pay equity analysis, and our latest analysis confirms that we continue to have pay equity across genders globally and by race in the US for people in similar jobs (accounting for factors such as location, role and level)."

In the reports showing an ongoing pay gap, Meta said its problem of pay inequity comes down to fewer women in technological roles. In Ireland, while the company said its workforce is almost half men and women, men hold more high-level and tech-focused jobs, according to the report.

"As tech jobs like production engineers are typically paid more in the market, it has a disproportionate impact on pay gaps," Meta said in the report. Similarly, equity awards and bonuses for these types of roles are also larger.

In the U.K., Meta admitted to having an ongoing problem of "unequal representation" in its ranks, with more men working at the company overall and in technical roles, "particularly senior technical roles." The company added that most of its U.K. workforce is dedicated to engineering.

"The pool of this talent, particularly for more senior positions, continues to be predominantly male," Meta said in its report.

Are you a Meta employee or someone else with insight to share? Contact Kali Hays at khays@insider.com, on secure messaging app Signal at 949-280-0267, or through Twitter DM at @hayskali. Reach out using a non-work device.