slice spearheads Pledge For Equal Pay in India

On this International Women’s Day, India’s leading credit card challenger, slice launched #PayEqualIndia, an initiative to address the gender pay gap in the country. Through this movement, slice aims to bring together companies and startups to create awareness about the gender wage gap in India and pledge to practice ‘Equal Work, Equal Pay, Equal Workplace’.

India currently ranks 140th out of 156 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021, making it the third-worst performer in South Asia, followed by Pakistan at 153rd and Afghanistan at 156th. The earned estimated income of women in India is only one-fifth of men’s, putting the country among the bottom 10 globally on this indicator. Among India’s neighbors, Bangladesh ranked 65th, Nepal 106th, Sri Lanka 116th and Bhutan 130th.

In an attempt to address the gender wage gap issue which goes much deeper than salaries, slice encourages Indian enterprises and start-ups to sign the pledge on http://www.payequalindia.in - the first step towards removing unconscious bias, structural barriers and promoting best practices to continually reduce and eventually close the pay gap.

Speaking about the initiative, Rajan Bajaj, Founder - CEO, slice said, “We believe in a diverse and inclusive workplace that rewards calibre and merit, gender no bar. Research cites that the pandemic has made the effort to bridge the gender wage gap harder. slice has always been an advocate of equal pay with our policies being a reflection of this philosophy. slice currently benefits from the relentless contribution of our women employees who make up 30% of our entire workforce. We aim to radically increase this in the coming months to make our workforce a gender balanced one.”

He added, “Today, Indian companies and startups are increasingly practicing Equal Pay but we have a long way to go. Keeping that in mind, we encourage CXOs and HRs of like minded companies to come together and sign the pledge in an attempt to increase awareness about the issue.” 

slice practices several policies which preserves workplace equality, the core fabric of its culture. The company has in place an additional bonus of 50% for referring women employees which has resulted in a 240% increase in referrals over the last 12 months. With 27% of its leadership and 30% of its entire workforce being women, slice aims to achieve a 50:50 female to male ratio by the end of 2023.