Ethnicity Pay Gap report published
08 Jul 2021
A message from Professor Nalin Thakkar, Vice-President for Social Responsibility and Karen Heaton, Director of Human Resources
Dear colleagues
We have published our 2019 Ethnicity Pay Gap (EPG) analysis as part of our commitment to improving the representation, progression and success of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) colleagues at our University.
Whilst there is currently no legal requirement to carry out or publish EPG findings, we want to be transparent and further understand our position so that we can put into place actions which will make a real difference.
The outcomes of the 2019 analysis show that we have a mean pay gap of 17.9% (10.5% in 2018) and a median pay gap of 12.5% (8.4% in 2018) in favour of white staff. The lack of improvement since the previous 2018 report is disappointing but to understand and address this gap we need to take account of two things.
Firstly, these averages across the whole workforce are largely because of the underrepresentation of BAME staff in higher paid jobs. White and BAME staff are not paid differently for work of equal value. The University’s 2019 Equal Pay Audit reveals that there are no significant pay gaps (i.e. 5% or more) by gender, ethnicity or disability for staff paid within each of grades 1 – 8 on our University’s pay scale.
Secondly, the representation of BAME people in our staff has improved and now accounts for 20.5% of the University’s overall workforce, up from 18.6% in 2018. This has mainly been through BAME colleagues joining our University in lower grades. We have targets to increase the representation of BAME staff in senior academic and Professional Service roles. We want to increase the proportion of Senior Lecturers, Readers and Professors across all Faculties until they are representative of the pool of BAME staff at Lecturer level. Currently 13% of senior academics are BAME against a target of 21%. For Professional Services roles at Grade 6 and above 9% of positions are held by BAME colleagues against a target of 14%.
Achieving ethnicity balance at all levels is an important goal for our University, alongside retaining our commitment to equal pay for work of equal value. Eradicating the Ethnicity Pay Gap will take some time to achieve but we are changing and strengthening how we address EDI issues as outlined in the message on 29 April. We are restructuring the EDI function, have appointed a new Director of EDI, are strengthening the governance and accountability of EDI and are ensuring that EDI is resourced adequately.
We are implementing both our Race Matters action plan and the first part of our revised EDI action plan which launched in February, with additional EDI actions in development for launch later this year. As part of this we are trialling anonymised CVs when recruiting to roles in Professional Services and making it the responsibility of all colleagues who are part of promotion and staff recruitment panels to ensure they have completed two online equality, diversity and inclusion training sessions.
Professor Nalin Thakkar, Vice-President for Social Responsibility
Karen Heaton, Director of Human Resources