2023 Gender Pay Gap report

Reducing our gender pay gap is one of our institutional priorities and we remain committed in our efforts to do so. We monitor our gender pay gap annually as a way of continuing to monitor our progress.

Our latest gender pay gap report shows that our performance on “equal pay for work of equal value” is positive and based on our data there is no significant evidence that overall female staff are paid less than male colleagues for work of the same value, all gaps are below 5% and most below 1%. 

Our statutory mean gender pay gap continues to reduce from 15.9% on 31 March 2021 to 15.1% on 31 March 2022. A slight increase in the proportion of women at grades 9-11 contributed to decreasing the mean gender pay gap. However, the proportion of women at these grades is still below 50%. Our median gender pay gap has not changed and has remained at 18.6% for the last three years. Our bonus pay gap, whilst still too high, has decreased to 19.46%.

This year the mean ethnicity pay gap was 8.34% in favour of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnicity staff as at 31 March 2022. This positive gap arises because the majority of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnicity staff are academic and hence would sit on the upper end of the pay scale (Grades 7-11). The mean disability pay gap was 1.25% in favour of employees who have disclosed a disability. High non-disclosure rates of both ethnicity (15%) and disability (58%) means these figures are likely to be skewed. The importance of increasing our disclosure rates thus remains a priority for us.

The measures we have taken to date have had a small impact on the mean gender pay gap and we recognise that more impactful actions are needed in particular to the median gender pay gap to achieve a real step change in this area and also to achieve our ambitions for all pay gaps to be less than 5%.

In addition to actions we already have in place, we are doing additional work including working with faculties that have gender pay gaps greater than 5% in favour of men within individual grades to identify what we need to do to reduce these gaps. We are, for example, reinstating career progression coaching sessions and workshops in the centrally managed professional development programme from academic year 2023-24, for both academic and professional services roles and have set up an Equality Pay Gap Working Group with a broad membership, to delve deeper into the data so that we can understand what additional measures will help us make more significant shifts in our current performance and especially on the median gender pay gap. 

We recognise that a new approach is needed to understand why the University is not attracting enough women applicants at grades 9-10 and to identify and develop what actions need to be taken to increase the number of women applying to roles where they are under-represented. Furthermore, we will also be considering how we can enable the professional development and progression of women in grades 1-4 as well as finding ways of attracting more men at these grades.

As the Inclusion Champion for Sex, gender, pregnancy and maternity and marriage and civil partnership, and a member of the University Steering Group, I will be providing senior leadership for this work, fostering a collaborative approach to understanding what we need to change and overseeing and ensuring the completion of the actions and recommendations emerging from the different workstreams in place to reduce the gender pay gap. 

Take a look at full details of our Gender Pay Gap and recommendations.

If you have any ideas on what you would like us to consider to reduce the gender pay gap, please contact us on inclusion@essex.ac.uk.