Fashion portal Fynd counters gender pay gap, pays female employees 10 percent more

By

Isabelle Crossley

Published
Apr 30, 2019

The online-to-offline fashion e-commerce platform Fynd has taken a new approach to addressing India’s gender pay gap and has started to pay its female employees 10 percent more than male employees.

Google-funded start-up Fynd has started to pay its female employees 10 percent more than their male counterparts, ET Bureau reported. Although the 130-employee strong business has 40 percent female employees, only between four and six percent of its engineering team are currently female, the business’ co-founder Harsh Shah told ET Bureau. Raising pay is one way the business intends to encourage women to apply for engineering positions.

“We thought of coming up with an affirmative action policy where we pay women more,” said Shah. “That, we felt, would not only boost the pipeline by making the position more attractive to apply for, but set a benchmark for other companies.” The business will also conduct recruitment drives for female engineers in Pune, Mumbai, and Bengaluru in May this year to promote the positions. 

According to the Monster Salary Index, women are paid on average 19 percent less than men in 2019. However, there has been some improvement as in 2013, the rate was 24.81 percent according to the report Gender Pay Gap in the Formal Sector 2006-2013. 

Fynd is a multi-brand fashion and beauty business that retails brands including Nike, Superdry, Adidas, Cult Fiction, and Deezeno. The business recently launched the makeup brand Faces Canada online.