As you may have seen in the news recently, all companies with more than 250 employees have to publish their gender pay data for 2017. This looks at the average or ‘Mean’ hourly rate of all female employees (regardless of grade) and all male employees, as well as looking at the mid-point or ‘Median’ hourly rate, when you list all female employees’ salaries and all male employees’ salaries in rows.

Our ‘Mean’ or average gender pay gap is 13.8%. This means that the average hourly pay of female staff is 13.8% less than male staff. The median is 12.9%, which means that the mid-point of the pay range for women is 12.9% less than the mid-point for male staff. This is based on our pay data on 5 April 2017 (this is the week every year which every company must use). The main reason for these gaps is that we employ a lot of females in roles which traditionally attract a lower rate of pay (for example Care, Administration etc) and a lot of men in roles which traditionally attract higher rates of pay (Professional, Technical and trade roles). We are not unlike most of our competitors.

It is important to explain that our Gender pay differential is not a measure of ‘Equal Pay’, which is where male and female employees within the same or similar roles must be paid within the same grade range. We have equal pay through our pay bands. 

Further analysis of the gender pay differential shows that grade by grade, male and female pay is much closer and in several grades, female staff earn more than male staff.

The Group recognise the value of a diverse workforce for the delivery of the variety of services we provide to all our customers and we already have a number of initiatives in place that help us to overcome any gender bias in roles. We are going to set up a working group to help improve this further to meet our aim of reducing our gender pay gap. You can see the full gender pay gap report on our website:

https://www.communityhg.com/uploads/Gender_Pay_Gap_Report_2017.pdf