Jen Keane is the founder PayGap.ie. Jen launched the site because of the lack of accessible, standardised gender pay gap data in Ireland. Drawing from her own challenges as a woman in tech, she built PayGap.ie as a central resource for collecting and publishing company pay gap reports. Her journey highlights the difficulties of gathering and maintaining this data due to inconsistent reporting formats and the absence of a government portal, while also emphasising the importance of transparency, accountability, and actionable insights to drive real change in workplace equality.

1. What was your background before you began Paygap.ie

I’m a graduate of NUI Maynooth and The Open University. I’ve been working in tech for almost 20 years now, first as an engineer and more recently as a product manager. I’ve always been interested in data, and gender equality in tech has been a focus area of mine for almost as long as I’ve been working. I’ve created and run programs to keep young girls interested in STEM, helped family resource centres win funding to run STEM programs, taught kids Scratch programming, and fixed more family computers than I care to remember.

2. What inspired you to launch PayGap.ie, and how did your own experiences in the tech sector influence your approach to developing the site?

I often say that the shortest possible answer to this question is “I’m a woman in tech”. It’s a glib but honest answer – I’ve been working in tech for my whole career and in that time, I’ve seen how opportunities that I had to fight hard for were handed to male coworkers without them even having to ask, I’ve sat through meetings with this VP and that CTO and they’ve almost always been male. I’ve spent a lifetime being the only woman in the room. Despite this, there are still many who dismiss these experiences as just that – one person’s experience. It’s much harder to dismiss data.

I was inspired by the UK Twitter Gender Pay Gap Bot (sadly now defunct). It was a bot that used the UK data to quote tweet gender pay gaps of companies who posted on International Women’s Day. When I heard we would have gender pay gap reporting in Ireland, I looked forward to maybe being able to develop the same bot for Irish companies. Once it became clear that there wouldn’t be a central portal available, and I realised there wouldn’t be a dataset for me to use like the UK data, I started planning. My project evolved from a simple table on a page on my blog to the site that exists today over time, as each year passed and no other central source appeared.

3. What have been the main challenges in gathering, standardising, and maintaining gender pay gap data from companies?

I’ve hit several challenges in getting the data together. The guidelines only say that a company has to have the report available but the guidelines don’t give any direction about where it should be or what it should look like. Because of that, there’s no telling where a company will have put the report on their site, so I have to spend a lot of time clicking around likely spots and doing targeted searches to try and find reports for each company. This was especially difficult in the transition from 2023 reports to 2024 reports, as a number of companies reported for the first time that year, and no one could provide me with a list of companies due to report, so I had nothing to go on. I spent a lot of my Christmas holidays googling the phrase “gender pay gap report 2024” last year!

Beyond that, because there’s no standard report format, there has been no way to automate my work – every figure in the database has been read and manually entered by me. This has given me a unique insight into the quality of reporting to date too, as I’ve seen the missing data and the errors.

Lastly, although companies are supposed to keep reports available for at least three years after publication, many don’t. They restructure their site and move the reports, overwrite the same page every year, get bought by another company, or simply remove previous years data. This means I have a lot of on-going maintenance too – I have to regularly check all the links out to my reports to see if they still work, and find replacements when they don’t. I archive every report when I find it in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, so I can always fall back on replacing report links with their archived version. This dataset has never been a “set and forget” kind of project.

4. The Irish government is introducing its own gender pay gap reporting portal, how optimistic are you that this will be completed on time and will it be up to standard?

In some ways, it is already late. Companies take a snapshot of their payroll data in June and have until that same date in November (previously December) to report. While most companies wait until the very last minute to publish their data, if they had their systems well prepared, they could easily produce a report days after their snapshot. In my opinion, the portal should have been ready for the snapshot month (i.e. June 1st) so that companies could upload their reports whenever they are ready.

While I and some others, have completed some research into the issues with the reports currently being produced, I haven’t seen any evidence that the government has done the same, and I worry that the first outing for this portal will throw up a lot of issues with data quality that they haven’t anticipated. I also suspect that the comparison features may be limited, but I’ll be delighted to be proven wrong there!

5. Have you noticed any surprising trends or patterns in the data since you began analysing gender pay gap reports from Irish organisations?

In many ways, the data hasn’t been surprising – tech and financial industries have larger pay and bonus gaps, care industries and local governments have pay gaps in favour of women because of the proportion of women employed in those industries, exactly as you might expect.

What has been surprising and interesting to look at is the bonus gaps, because those are more often at direct manager discretion than pay scales. There’s more companies than you’d think who are reporting virtually no pay gap, but still a large bonus gap (e.g. H&M, with a median pay gap of 0%, but a median bonus gap of 32.2%!)

It’s been disappointing to see how few companies have reached pay equity – just 91 out of 771 for 2024, and that’s with being a bit flexible and counting any results up to 1% as effectively zero.

6. How crucial is it for pay gap data to be presented in a consistent and accessible format, and what problems arise when companies report their data inconsistently?

Put simply, if the pay gap data is supposed to benefit all employees, then it has to be accessible to all employees, both in terms of the individual reports and any efforts to combine those reports into one database. At the moment, our reports fall very short of this mark – data being presented in blurry images, in files that would not be readable by a screen reader or formats that would be difficult for anyone with colour vision deficiencies to understand for example.

Employees can’t make informed decisions about who to work for when they can’t access the data about that company, when they can’t see if anything has changed since reporting began. Before PayGap.ie, it was up to individuals to gather and compare this data, and given how hard some of it has been to find, how difficult some of the reports are to read, these companies might as well have been printing the reports and feeding them directly to a shredder.

7. How do quartile breakdowns in pay gap reports help to reveal deeper insights into gender equality within organisations, beyond the headline figures?

I think the quartile breakdowns are my favourite part of the reports, even though they’re not talked about nearly as much as the pay gap figures themselves. To get the quartiles, companies order all their employees by hourly pay, lowest to highest, and then divide them into four groups (lowest, lower middle, upper middle, and upper). For each group, they should then report on what proportion of the group is male and female (e.g. 45% male, 55% female)

Why on earth is this my favourite part? Because leadership roles also tend to be the highest paid roles, so looking at that upper quartile is quite a good way to see whether leadership within an organisation is balanced, and whether underrepresented genders are actually progressing upwards in an organisation. Many of the reports include details about programs that companies run, photos of cheerful female team members, details of their “Women @ company” internal group, etc. but you can’t hide from the figures, and lots of these companies often have upper quartiles that are 90% male, showing me that there’s still a long way to go before we have balance in those key decision-making roles, and greater diversity in boardrooms.

8. What advice would you give to companies that are struggling to accurately report on, or address, their gender pay gap?

I think one of the main things I’d love for companies to embrace is that a report doesn’t need to be overly complex, or to break the mold in its format – simple really can be better. The reports are a great opportunity for companies to talk about their figures, to explain what they’re doing to change, and that’s interesting reading, but ultimately, the key part of the report is the figures themselves – don’t make me work so hard for them! Take a look at what other companies are doing, and follow their lead. Companies like An Post or VHI are a good example to follow, all the figures in one spot, lovely and easy to read.

In terms of addressing gender pay gaps, I don’t think there’s one easy answer, as different industries have different issues to address. That said, companies producing gender pay gap reports should look at it as more than just a box-ticking exercise – it’s an amazing opportunity to deep dive into their employees, see where there are areas for improvement, and target them. Talking to employees themselves can help to understand why, for example, women aren’t progressing through to senior leadership, or why they are leaving more often, and employers have the chance to understand their data alongside those insights from their employees and really improve things.

Again, there are examples out there – Axa Insurance had a median gender pay gap of 8.8% in their 2022 report and they rolled out a number of targeted initiatives to change that. In 2023, their median gap was -0.5% (effectively nothing), and in 2024 it was -3%. The pay gap reports aren’t a burden, they are an incredible resource and insight – a way to really objectively see your workforce and figure out how to make things better for everyone.

9. Looking to the future, what further actions would you like to see from policymakers, businesses, or the tech community to promote gender equality in Irish workplaces?

I’d like to see more accountability. Right now, it’s not clear who should enforce the regulations around reporting, who checks if a report is late or correct. Because of this, there are companies who aren’t meeting those regulations, and with no sanctions or penalties in place, there’s no incentive for them to improve. It feels like the only person who’s monitoring all this is me, like the legislation has been forgotten or wasted.

In an ideal world, the type of data being collected would also be improved and expanded, so that we can report on pay gaps in a more nuanced way – without information on things like ethnicity, whether a person is a parent, educational background, we don’t have a good intersectional picture. We know from other countries that the pay gap is even larger for some people (e.g. women of colour) and it would be great to have richer data in Ireland.

I’d like to see more conversations about the many benefits that having a diverse workforce can bring. Diverse companies perform better, and this isn’t really highlighted enough in the context of this conversation. I think companies can also learn a lot from speaking to their employees here too, and truly understanding the challenges that minorities face on a daily basis.

10. Outside of Gender Pay Gap Reporting are there any companies, people or programmes that you are a big fan of in the area of DEI in Ireland??

I recently discovered the Women’s Collective Ireland. They’ve got Projects all over Ireland and want to “help to develop an Ireland where women in all our diversity are flourishing”. Our Project in Tallaght runs all sorts of events and classes, everything from Women in Leadership (which I’ve just finished myself!) to art classes, as well as providing a safe, supportive physical space for anyone who needs it.

I’ve met so many brilliant women through activities with the group and plan to stay involved.