Real estate and construction have long been bastions of male dominance. In 2024, we took a bold step by launching CREW – Collective of Real Estate Women – to empower women professionals in the sector. What began as a spark has grown into a national movement with local chapters across the four metros.
At GPL, we remain committed to ensuring that traditional gender norms in the sector do not shape our organisational practices. Over the past three years, we’ve maintained fairness in performance ratings, promotions, and increments across both male and female employees. However, we continue to inherit the gender pay gap from the sector, especially through new hiring.
The gender pay gap has multiple anchors of divergence. At the organizational level, it is shaped by factors such as inequitable pay for equal roles, inconsistent assessment practices, and imbalanced representation across levels. At an individual level, it is often influenced by life-career tradeoff phases for women such as childbirth, elder care.
In 2024, a World Bank report highlighted that globally, women earn just 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. In India, this gap stood at 28% as per the 2018–19 labour force survey data from the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO).
At GPL, our gender pay index currently stands at 66%. This translates to a comparison of average earnings between males and females at GPL, not accounting for factors that may influence pay such as experience, education, role. Representation has a significant influence on this figure – while women make up 33% of our workforce, their share declines at higher levels: 33% at Level 1, 22% at Level 2, 15% at Level 3, and 8% at Level 4.
Our tracking has also revealed that pay gaps tend to widen among women 30 years of age and above. We’ve found this to be linked to life events like marriage and caregiving responsibilities.
When adjusted for level – which brings in representative variables of role, education and experience – the gender pay index improves to:
85% at Level 1
92% at Level 2
87% at Level 3
94% at Level 4
Our Focus Areas
We want to bridge the gap for our existing employee base by giving correctional hikes for low pay equity cohorts where women are paid lower than the male median for a comparable job. This has been built into our annual compensation review exercise in April 2025. The recommendations aim to close the gap for our high performers in one year and for our steady performers over 2-3 years. This will be supplemented by ensuring womens’ incoming pay aligns with the market standards for equivalent roles, so we can inherit a lower pay gap year on year. However, even with absolute pay parity, the gender pay index can only be 100% if representation was increased proportionately. We want to target greater representation in leadership and core functions.Strengthening our return-to-work policies as well as caregiving policies will help us support women life transition periods, enabling them to stay in the workforce.
Text by GPL's DEI team.