Lundgren, who took over running the airline on December 1 was initially given an annual salary of £740,000 – 5% more than McCall, who spent almost eight years as chief executive of the budget airline. He has now opted to reduce his salary to £706,000.

Lundgren’s bonus and other elements of his remuneration package are identical to McCall’s at the time of her departure, the Guardian confirmed.

EasyJet has a significant gender pay gap, with its average male salary 52% higher than the average female salary.

However the airline has attributed this to the imbalance in male and female pilots across the sector, with some 94% of easyJet’s pilots male.

The company insisted this was “better than the industry as a whole”, but conceded “we need to do better”, adding that it had a target for 20 per cent of new pilots to be women by 2020, the Financial Times reported.

Lundgren said he had requested the pay cut to show his “personal commitment” to equal pay, and added that he also wanted “to affirm my own commitment to address the gender imbalance in our pilot community which drives our overall gender pay gap”.

“I want us not just to hit our target that 20 per cent of our new pilots should be female by 2020 but to go further than this in the future”, he added.