Our continued work to reduce the gender pay gap

At Essex we wish to create and sustain an inclusive environment where all members of our community feel they can achieve their full potential. Reducing our gender pay gap continues to be a priority for us. Our statutory mean gender pay gap has continued to reduce from 16.1% to 15.9%. However our median gender pay gap has remained the same as last year at 18.6%.

The main reason for our pay gap is due to the uneven distribution of male and female academic staff, with a greater concentration of women in roles at the lower end of our pay scales and men in roles at the higher end. It is however worth noting that representation of females at Grade 11 continues to rise year on year from 24.1% in 2013 to 37.3% in March 2021, which is positive.

In our continued work to reduce the pay gap, we will continue with a number of actions and initiatives including, continuing to work with Departments to achieve a 60/40 gender distribution between men and women in every grade by 2025, increasing emphasis on improving attraction strategies (for both women in higher grades and men in lower grades). We will also continue to support the development of women through our Athena Swan work, as well as career development training programmes and ensuring that participation in our Future and Strategic Leaders internal programmes is inclusive. We will also continue to support family friendly initiatives such as our Career Development Fund for Carers, our Body at work policy approach and the promoting of flexible working.

It is important to remember that whilst the gender pay gap is a useful tool when measuring our progress towards an inclusive and fair workplace, it also requires us to consider gender as a binary concept. We know that many members of our community identify outside the gender binary and/or as trans, and we remain committed to creating a welcoming and enabling environment for all members of our community, regardless of any characteristic.

For more information on our gender pay gap and the work we are doing please see the report.