Gender pay gap

At Motorway, we recognise the challenges and gender bias women continue to face across the tech industry. We’re committed to closing our gender pay gap, reinforcing our inclusive culture, and supporting women’s career growth at every level.

Since our previous results, we have focused on building on the foundational work we did in 2023, continuing to drive progress in balanced gender representation across the business.

  • Following our benefits uplift in 2023, including enhancing our maternity leave policy to six months of full pay and the introduction of a workplace nursery scheme, we focused on actively communicating these benefits as part of our Employee Value Proposition (EVP). We aim to attract more female candidates who value the benefits, culture, and career opportunities we offer.
  • We also launched our Women’s Chapter, creating a safe and supportive space for advocacy, career growth, and professional development, helping women across Motorway build their careers with confidence.
  • To support all of this, we also partnered with Women in Data (WiD), an organisation that provides mentorship, professional development, and networking opportunities. We’ve been attending their quarterly meetups, and members of our team have been speaking at their events, offering their insights, and representing female talent at Motorway. We’re hopeful that this partnership will help attract more women into tech, data, and leadership roles at Motorway.
  • We have remained committed to ensuring a diverse candidate pool for every role and have increased our focus on gender diversity data. This has given us deeper insights into our recruitment pipeline, allowing us to identify where we can improve and ensure an equitable hiring process.

Like many other tech companies, our gender pay gap continues to be influenced by the limited female representation in technical roles across the UK, which affects the number of female candidates applying for roles, particularly in higher-paying technical and leadership positions.

  • Our mean gender pay gap improved, decreasing from 21.4% to 18.7% – a 2.7pp reduction. This change reflects the positive impact of stronger female representation in leadership roles and more balanced hiring across the business.
  • However, our median gender pay gap has increased from 29% to 32.4%. This shift reflects a higher concentration of women in junior roles compared to men, combined with increased hiring into technical Product roles, which currently have lower female representation across the industry.
  • Our overall female representation remained steady at 32% year-over-year. While we’re proud of the strides we’ve made in leadership representation, we recognise the need to keep pushing for better balance across all levels of the business.

Progress we’ve made since April 2024

Since the April 2024 snapshot, we’ve already made measurable progress in key areas, including senior female representation, with growth driven by new hires and internal promotions. From April to December 2024, we’ve seen female representation in leadership roles increase from 33% to 40%, exceeding our internal targets.

Later in 2024, we also achieved a 50:50 gender balance at the C-level for the first time. We’re proud to have welcomed Naomi Walkland as Chief Marketing Officer and Tanya Cordrey as Chief Product Officer, who have both made a significant impact in our leadership team.

While we’re proud of the progress we’ve made, we’re committed to doing much more. We’ll continue to focus on improving female representation at all levels, reviewing our pay gap progress quarterly, and tracking hiring plans monthly at the executive level to stay accountable for lasting change.

About Motorway

Motorway is the UK’s fastest-growing used car marketplace. We connect people selling their car directly with our network of more than 7,500 verified car dealers, matching each seller on our platform with the dealer who most wants to buy their car. We help car owners secure a great price online, in as little as 24 hours, with their car collected from home for free, while supporting our car dealer partners to easily acquire the best used car stock.

Gender pay gap

In 2023, Motorway continued to help thousands of UK car owners to sell their vehicles, quickly, easily and for a great price whilst supporting our network of more than 5,000 dealers to acquire premium, used-car stock.

At the same time, we have continued to focus on cultivating our culture of equality, diversity and inclusion among our teams, and on continuously shaping the company behaviours, processes and policies required to do this.

In 2023, we put in place strategic initiatives to drive more inclusive hiring, in an effort to close our gender pay gap, which included:

  • Conducting a full review of our benefits, with the aim of improving our employee value proposition (EVP) in order to target top female talent. From this review, we  enhanced our maternity offering at the beginning of the year, going even further by expanding the package in October 2023, to six months fully paid maternity leave. Alongside maternity leave, we have introduced a workplace nursery scheme, allowing working parents to pay their nursery fees via salary sacrifice and save on tax. And finally, we have enhanced pension scheme offering. 
  • Job levelling across the business, to ensure clarity of standards and expectations at the ‘Head of’ level and above. This new levelling scheme will support Motorway with an unbiased promotion process moving forward.
  • Launching partnerships with Black Girls in Tech and She Can Code in order to advertise all our engineering roles with their networks, through their careers pages and newsletters. In 2023 we made one hire through our partners at Black Girls in Tech and in 2024 will continue investing in the gender balanced engineering teams of the future. 

However, like many other tech companies, our gender pay gap continues to be impacted by an ongoing shortage of women in the engineering sector. This inevitably limits the number of female candidates applying for open roles and has led to a gender imbalance at Motorway, specifically in our upper quartile, where 18% of the roles are made up of female talent. This unfortunately means that our mean gender pay gap is higher than we would like, at 21.4%. 

What will we do to change this in 2024?

Our purpose at Motorway is to build a better car market for tomorrow, for everyone. This of course means we need to continue to build a pipeline of talented women entering the business, particularly into specialist tech and leadership positions, as well as supporting our existing female employees to develop their careers and progress into more senior roles in the company. 

In 2024, we will:

  • Leverage our EVP by communicating the experience of female talent working at Motorway. This will enable us to attract candidates who are a natural fit and value the benefits they’ll receive in return for their skills and experience. 
  • Introduce a mentorship programme aimed at supporting female talent at Motorway. 
  • Increase our focus on data, which will provide a better understanding of the diversity in our recruitment pipeline. This will allow us to make informed decisions on where to focus our diversity efforts, and ensure an equitable process.
  • Introduce company wide diversity & inclusion training for leaders and managers. Alongside interview training, this training will raise everyone’s awareness of their unconscious biases and this is the starting point to change behaviours. We will then roll out to all our employees.

We will be reviewing our plan to reduce our gender pay gap on a quarterly basis and our hiring plans monthly at executive level, to ensure we remain focussed on taking action and improving over the next 12 months and beyond.

About Motorway

Motorway is the UK’s fastest-growing used car marketplace. We connect people selling their car directly with our network of more than 5,000 verified car dealers, matching each seller on our platform with the dealer who most wants to buy their car. We help car owners sell their cars 100% online for a great price in as little as 24 hours, with their car collected from home for free, while supporting our car dealer partners to easily acquire the best used car stock.