EasyJet’s new chief executive, Johan Lundgren, has taken a £34,000 pay cut to match the salary of his predecessor, Carolyn McCall.
Mr Lundgren’s starting annual salary was £740,000, while Ms McCall was on £706,000 when she left the airline in November.
Lungren’s bonus and other elements of his remuneration package are identical to McCall’s at the time.
The gender pay gap in EasyJet, which is a FTSE 100 company, is currently 51.7 per cent, but the budget airline says this is not because of unequal pay for women.
The pay gap comes in because there are far fewer female pilots than male pilots in the industry as a whole – only 4 per cent of commercial pilots are women, and only 5 per cent of EasyJet’s pilots are women.
The budget carrier has set a target that 20 per cent of new pilots should be female by 2020, up from 6 per cent in 2015.
Lundgren said:
“I want us not just to hit our target that 20 per cent of our new pilots should be female by 2020 but to go further than this in the future.”
“To show my personal commitment I have asked the board to reduce my pay to match that of Carolyn’s when she was at EasyJet,”
“I also want to affirm my own commitment to address the gender imbalance in our pilot community which drives our overall gender pay gap.”
McCall started her new job at ITV this month. She is one of only eight female chief executives of a FTSE 100 company.
The broadcaster is paying McCall a base salary of £900,000, £41,000 less than her predecessor Adam Crozier, and her pension allowance has been reduced to 15 per cent of her salary compared with his 25 per cent.
