Pay, sex and the City

Send us Fan MailThe remedy recently imposed upon BNP Paribas for a sexual discrimination case it lost in 2019 could have far reaching effects on the gender pay gap and for transparency over incomes — one of the City’s great taboos — more broadly.Not only did the French bank have to pay Stacey Macken, who won the tribunal, over £2m in compensation but it  has been instructed to conduct a pay audit that will see it produce pay data for all of its London branch staff — from the canteen to the C-suite, via the trading floors — to show whether it is paying people fairly in relation to each other and the jobs they do. No other company has been instructed to do this before though some have done it voluntarily.Should the data reach the public domain, then it will offer great insight into what BNP Paribas pays and  for what jobs. That data will be valuable to BNP Paribas’s many rivals but should they be thinking about doing a pay audit themselves in an effort to narrow the gender pay gap, pay staff fairly relative to each other and to head off grievances and embarrassing public tribunals brought by their own staff? We discuss the implications. We also take a look at an eye catching piece of debt issuance by Turkey — a country with $11bn to raise on the debt markets this year but whose access to those already volatile markets has been complicated by rampant inflation and unorthodox monetary policy. Turkey’s debt officials have found a way to bring a blockbuster deal to complete over a quarter of that funding task in one fell swoop. Listen in to find out how they did it.Meanwhile, as the IPO market finds its feet again, we discuss what deals will work and what won’t; and finally, we investigate the gigantic problem looming over government debt markets in some parts of the eurozone and what the ECB will do about it.