Our commitment to pay equality

Ensuring that we reward employees fairly, based on their contribution to our community and regardless of their protected characteristics, is at the core of our values. We have been taking long-term action to improve pay equality at Essex and the Government’s requirement for UK employers to publish their gender pay gap data gives us a chance to assess how we’re performing.

Our plan

We continue to make progress in closing our gender pay gaps and we are pleased that our mean gender pay gap reduced to 14.07 at of 31 March 2024. Our mean bonus GPG reduced significantly and is 4.47%. Our median GPG has however returned to 18.62% but it should be noted that one minor change to our staff population can cause the median to fluctuate by 2-3%. There continues to be no significant evidence that women overall are paid less than men for work of equal value with most gaps by grade being within the +/- 5% tolerance range. Our strategies to increase the proportion of women in grades 9-11 has had impact with the proportion of women in grade 9 being above 50% and those in grade 11 exceeding 40% which is an encouraging trend. We know the work is not yet done and continuing to reduce our GPG remains a priority and is one of our equality objectives.

Our 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 and 2024 and 2025gender pay gap reports outline our strategy to close our gender pay gaps.