Gender Pay Gap 2021 and how we are addressing it

We continue to share details of our annual Gender Pay Gap report. This latest report provides a snapshot as at 5 April 2020 and changes largely reflect the pay awards made in 2019.

The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen)’s mean and median gender pay gap continues to favour women, however, the mean and media bonus gap favours men. This is because the proportion of male and female employees receiving a bonus is very low at 1% and largely reflects bonuses paid to the Leadership Team by the Remuneration Committee.

Our 2021 gender pay gap data, including interviewers, nurses and telephone panel, indicates that our overall mean gender pay gap at an organisational level has slightly widened to (-6%) from previous years, resulting in a bigger overall pay gap in favour of women. The overall median gender pay gap remains steady at -18%, in favour of women and similar to previous years.

The pay gaps in the lower three quartiles remains comparable to 2019 and all in favour of females whilst the upper quartile pay gap has reduced significantly from 19% to 7% in favour of males. Addressing this upper quartile pay gap has been a priority for the Leadership Team.

Our workforce data indicates that most social researchers are women (so we have more women in the top two quartiles of our pay distribution) and this means we have traditionally had a negative pay gap in favour of women. The gender pay gap data shows a significant drop in the pay gap in the upper quartile. This is primarily due to an increase in the number and proportion of men in the upper quartile who are at the lower end of the quartile pay scale (including new recruits) which has dropped the male average and median.

Even though we employ more women, we continue to have a pay gap in favour of men within our upper quartile because for historical reasons a higher proportion of those in the most senior grades are men, while there have been more women among newer recruits. We have made significant progress in closing this pay gap over the last three years.

In summary females are earning more than males on average in each staff grade, however, the higher percentage of men in higher grades continues to lift the overall average in their favour. We continue to make progress and the proportion of women in our senior leadership is over 50% without the need for any specific targeted recruitment approaches.

We are committed to taking action to decrease the gap (both the overall gap and the gap in the upper quartile). We promote gender diversity and we are not complacent. A review of our overall recruitment practices, reporting systems and development of mentoring, management training and development is ongoing. In addition, we have a programme of work dedicated to reviewing our policies around flexible working.

While we endeavour for our gender pay gap results to improve year on year, we are mindful that in the short term the change may be in either direction, but in the longer term we are determined that we will see the gender pay gap close at NatCen.