THE owner of Clydesdale Bank has revealed that the average hourly pay of female employees is nearly 40 per cent less than that of its male staff, with the lender putting the divergence down to having more men than women in senior roles.

CYBG, which spun out of National Australia Bank last year, has highlighted a 37 per cent difference between the average hourly pay of male and female employees in its inaugural Inclusion & Gender Pay Gap Report.

The difference was even more pronounced between males and females when it comes to average bonuses, with the gap reported at 58 per cent.

The CYBG report was published on the same day that SSE, the Perth-based “big six” energy supplier, revealed the mean hourly pay difference between male and female employees was broadly unchanged at 22 per cent in its 2016/17 financial period.

The CYBG report was published as the bank disclosed that chief executive David Duffy received a pay package worth more than £2 million in its most recent financial year.

Debbie Crosbie, the bank’s chief operating officer, was its third-highest-paid executive for the year to September 30, earning a total remuneration package of £929,000. That compared with £921,000 the year before.

Mr Duffy, who led CYBG through its stock market flotation last year after arriving from Allied Irish Banks in 2015, earned a basic salary of £1m, topped up with an annual bonus worth £820,000. His total fixed remuneration, including pension contributions and other benefits and allowances, was £1.24m. Mr Duffy received a total package of £2.05m the year before.

The bank’s three highest-earning executives, including chief financial officer Ian Smith, all saw their bonuses rise as the lender made its first statutory profit in five years.

The CYBG pay gap report is the first of its kind to be released by a major Scottish bank since new rules on gender pay gap reporting came into force.

Under the regulations, companies with more than 250 staff must publish details of the difference between how much male and female employees earn in both mean and median terms. They must also release details on bonus gaps, the proportion of men and women receiving bonuses, and the proportion of males and females in each quartile of the organisation’s pay structure.

CYBG said there is no difference in the amount it pays to male and female members of staff who hold similar roles, adding that it aims to have 40 per cent of senior roles filled by women by 2020.

The bank is now a signatory of the Women in Finance charter, which underpins the UK Government’s commitment to gender balance across all levels of financial services firms.

The lender had 5,813 permanent full-time equivalent employees at September 30, 63 per cent of whom were female and 37 per cent male. Its board at that date was comprised of nine men and three women, while its executive leadership team was made up of three females and seven males.

CYBG said: “We are confident that we do not have equal pay issues, and conduct a biannual equal pay audit in partnership with our trade union, Unite. Through this audit we review the gender distribution of performance, base pay, allowances and bonuses paid to our staff.

“We are confident that performance is not gender-biased and where pay gaps exist they are not driven by gender.”

Meanwhile, SSE said that although its mean hourly pay gap was largely unchanged, its gender pay gap widened in median terms, coming in at 19.3 per cent compared with 18.7 per cent for 2015/16.

The SSE and CYBG reports came as the Equality and Human Rights Commission warned businesses which fail to comply with gender pay gap reporting regulations could face “unlimited fines and convictions”.