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Leadership announcements
Gender Pay Gap data 2019 and what it is telling us
Our annual gender pay gap data is published below.
We reported our annual Gender Pay Gap for the first time in 2018. It showed a “negative” pay gap, in favour of women, for structural reasons (there are fewer men in the top two quartiles of the pay distribution, including among researchers and our nurses’ field force). It reflected a snapshot date of 5th April 2017 and any year-on-year change related primarily to our summer 2016 pay award.
Our 2019 data shows the overall mean and median pay gaps remain currently in favour of women because of the higher proportion of females in the upper two quartiles. The data presented are inclusive of our interviewers, nurse and telephone panels who make up approximately 99% of the first three quartiles.
The latest data show that we have a small overall mean pay gap (-2%) but a larger median pay gap (-18%) in favour of women. In the upper quartile, we have a pay gap in favour of men (23%) because we currently have more men in our most senior office-based positions, something we expect to change over time with churn and growth.
As the upper quartile pay gap closes, the overall pay gap is likely to increase further in favour of women unless there are compensating changes, like us being able to recruit more junior male researchers and more men into our nurses’ field force.
The data snapshot date for 2019 is the 5th April 2018 (and therefore year-on-year changes relate mainly to the summer 2017 pay award). There is little difference between this year’s gender pay gap and last year’s and this should be expected - because of the time lag in reporting and we had not commenced implementing our action plan to address our Gender Pay Gap at that point.
We made small, one-off bonus payments to all staff in 2017. The data has been included in the mean and median gender bonus gaps and these favour men. We are not expecting the reported bonus gaps (63% and 31% respectively) to be replicated in future years.
Some actions we have taken to improve our pay gap include: pro-actively encouraging men to apply for early career researcher and nurse interviewer posts; welcoming, especially at senior staff level, part-time applications to encourage women and promoting flexible working; and embedding our performance management to support improved constructive feedback and setting stretching objectives.
We will, over the next three years, continue to pursue the actions identified.
We will be monitoring our gender pay gap in the coming years and modifying our approach accordingly.
