Levelling the playing field: the Starling story
Women conquering a male-dominated world, challenging the norm and rising up through the ranks is a familiar story at Starling. Our founder, Anne Boden, set up the UK’s first digital-only bank to disrupt an archaic industry and build a business with equality at its heart.
We’ve been fighting the fight since our inception – it’s been a long time coming:
2023
The pay gap remains for women and men, but what about the division of unpaid labour? We launched our Share the Load campaign to truly understand how much more of the mental load women carry at home. Turns out, it’s a lot.
In response, we built our Share the Load tool, which helps couples, families and housemates keep track of and compare all the chores and tasks they do at home. The free-to-use tool sparked conversations nationwide about what fair really looks like.
2023
In partnership with Gift of Kit, we’re growing the women and girls’ football community. Kick On offers clubs and schools across the UK the chance to apply for free Starling branded kit, equipment and FA affiliated coaching vouchers. So far, we’ve helped over 300 Kick On football clubs and school teams get bigger and better.
2023
In our latest gender pay gap figures (2022), the median gender pay gap has decreased from 10.34% to 9.24%, while the mean has narrowed from 16.05% to 12.34%.
These figures don’t mean that women are paid less for equal work than men; they are calculated based on an average of what Starling pays all men and women regardless of their role.
Pay gap reports are published in April, based on figures from the previous April.
2022
From 2022 to 2025, we’re the official Principal Partner of Southampton FC Women. Why? All women’s home games are scheduled to be played at St Mary’s Southampton – the same stadium as the men’s. The women also have access to the same changing and training facilities – only a limited number of Women’s Super League clubs offer this.
2022
When does the gender pay gap start, and why? Working with Professor Tim Jay, an educational psychologist at Loughborough University, we discovered that boys get 20% more pocket money every week, while products marketed at girls cost 5% more.
And it doesn’t stop there. Boys and girls earn – and learn – about pocket money in different ways too, which sets them up with different financial literacy skills.
An unequal start for children leads to an unequal future for us all. Let’s Make Pocket Money Equal.
Discover the campaign.
2022
Summer 2022 was a pivotal time for women’s sport and Starling led the way as the national sponsor of the record breaking UEFA Women’s EURO 2022. Our award-winning ‘Our Time’ campaign championed current and former Lionesses Jill Scott MBE, Lauren Hemp and Rachel Yankey MBE. Finally, the women’s game got the recognition it deserved. According to our research from February 2023, 58% of women players who have picked up a ball say they have done so because of the Lionesses. Mission accomplished.
Even though we’d seen hundreds of Fantasy Football games for men’s tournaments in the past, there has never been one for the UEFA Women’s EURO in the UK. In classic Starling fashion, we decided to do something about it, so we built one!
2021
We know it’s important to practice what we preach by investing in women – and this starts with gender equality in the workplace. In 2017, women made up 27% of our senior management team, so we set ourselves a target to increase this to 30% by 2021. We far surpassed that figure – we’re now at 41% – and it keeps getting better.
2021
We’re partnered with Women in Tech, a recruitment platform that highlights and works with employers who are actively trying to improve their gender equality statistics. Our goal? To encourage more women to apply for roles here – particularly in engineering.
2022
Starling’s latest gender pay gap figures (2021), show that the median gender pay gap has decreased from 15.62% to 10.34%, while the mean has narrowed from 21.27% to 16.05%.
These figures don’t mean that women are paid less for equal work than men; they are calculated based on an average of what Starling pays all men and women regardless of their role.
Pay gap reports are published in April, based on figures from the previous April.
2021
For the second part of our #MakeMoneyEqual campaign, we analysed over 600 photographs within articles about money and finance in media and advertising. We found that men were mostly shown in control and making financial decisions, whilst women were clutching piggy banks and counting pennies. Something had to change, so we created a free image library that better represented women and money.
2019
In commissioning a regular independent audit of our algorithms and technological processes, we made sure Starling was fair and free from gender or race bias – across the board. In other words: we wanted to hold ourselves accountable and learn from where we may have missed the mark.
2018
Through our #MakeMoneyEqual campaign, we highlighted the importance of gender equality in conversations around money and personal finance. By assessing 300 articles, we found that the media often split women and men by language when discussing money: most defined women as ‘splurgers’ whilst men were spoken to like savvy financiers.
2017
As a digital bank, we operate at the axis of two traditionally male-dominated professions: banking and technology. That’s why we signed the Women in Finance Charter: a voluntary commitment created by HM Treasury and signatory firms to work together to make finance a more gender balanced industry.
2014
Following a 30-year career at some of the world’s best-known financial heavyweights, our founder Anne Boden defied the odds, made history and broke barriers by becoming the first – and only – woman to launch a bank in the UK. In 2018 she was awarded an MBE for services to financial technology.
