Foreword from the National Statistician, Professor Sir Ian Diamond
I am pleased to publish our gender pay gap report for 2020. This year we have made good progress, notably we have eliminated our hourly median gender pay gap and significantly reduced our gender bonus gaps.
At the UK Statistics Authority, our mission is to provide high quality data and analysis to inform the UK, improve lives and build the future. As National Statistician, I have made inclusion and diversity my absolute priority and it is a core principle of our new Strategy and People Plan.
We will be inclusive in our approach to our workforce, talent management, and the design of data, statistics and analysis. This means ensuring our statistics and our workforce reflect the experiences of everyone in our society so that everyone counts, and is counted, and no one is forgotten. To do this we are investing in our people, creating a working environment where all colleagues are equally valued, truly supported and recognised for their contributions.
We continue to offer excellent flexible working arrangements for our people, including options for part-time, job share and home working. We provide regular learning opportunities including leadership development programmes, talent schemes, mentoring, coaching and skills development to help everyone grow and develop the capability they need to succeed. This includes some programmes tailored to specific groups who are under-represented in parts of our organisation, to help us ensure that everyone has the right support to progress their career with us. Our community of employee diversity networks helps us to build an inclusive culture for all within the organisation.
Publishing our gender pay gap report is an important element of our work on inclusivity as we recognise that transparency, monitoring and analysis are critical to tackling any inequality. Whilst we have significantly reduced many of our gender pay gaps over the last few years, we will not be complacent and this remains an ongoing priority and commitment.
We will continue to monitor and take action on our pay gaps where they exist, not only for gender but also for other factors such as ethnicity and disability, as we work together to build a more diverse and inclusive workplace.
Who are the UK Statistics Authority and Office for National Statistics?
The UK Statistics Authority (the Authority) is an independent body at arm’s length from government. We have a statutory objective of promoting and safeguarding the production and publication of official statistics that ‘serve the public good’.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the executive office of the Authority and is the largest producer of official statistics in the UK. A large majority of the Authority’s staff work in ONS.
Definitions
What is a Gender Pay Gap?
The Gender Pay Gap is the difference in average pay between all men and women in an organisation. It is expressed as a difference in percentage (%) between men and women.
What is Equal Pay?
This is about a man and woman receiving equal pay for the same or similar job.
Mean Pay Gap
The mean pay gap is the difference in the arithmetic average hourly pay for women compared to men, within a company.
Median Pay Gap
The median represents the middle point of a population. If you lined up all the women in an organisation and all the men in order of the hourly rate at which they are paid, the median pay gap is the difference between the hourly rate for the middle woman compared to that of the middle man.
The median is generally considered to be the better indicator of ‘average’ earnings because the mean can be skewed by fewer individuals earning more in the upper ranges. The median therefore gives a better indication of typical pay than the mean.
Gender Representation within the UK Statistics Authority (March 2020)
- 56.0% of our workforce are women, this is an increase from 55.6% since 2019
- 37.9% of our Senior Civil Servants are women, this is an increase from 34.4% since 2019
UK Statistics Authority’s Gender Pay Gap 2020
- Our mean hourly pay gap is 8.0%
- The mean pay gap has reduced from 9.6% since 2019
- Our median hourly pay for women is equal to that of men
- The median pay gap has reduced from 3.5% since 2019
Our mean gap is caused by under-representation of women at senior grades, though we have made significant progress in this area in recent years.
UK Statistics Authority’s Gender Bonus Gap 2020
- 73.3% of women were awarded a bonus
- 70.5% of men were awarded a bonus
- The mean bonus pay gap is 5.1%
- The median bonus for women is equal to that of men
- A decrease from 10.6% since 2019
- A decrease from 16.7% since 2019
We introduced changes to our recognition scheme in 2019 to address inclusion outcomes and are pleased to see a significant reduction in our bonus gaps.
Pay by Quartile
The table below shows hourly pay, by quartile for the Authority. It shows that there is a higher proportion of women in all quartiles except the upper pay quartile, compared to men. The proportion of women in the lower quartile has reduced which has resulted in a corresponding increase across all other quartiles, when compared to the previous year.
| Women | Men | |
|---|---|---|
| Upper | 48.5% | 51.5% |
| Upper Middle | 57.3% | 42.7% |
| Lower Middle | 61.9% | 38.1% |
| Lower | 56.0% | 44.0% |
| Total | 56.0% | 44.0% |
Workforce Demographics
Women are under-represented at more senior grades, though representation has improved over recent years. The table below shows the breakdown of women and men across all grades for March 2020.
| Women | Men | |
|---|---|---|
| SCS | 37.9% | 62.1% |
| Grade 6 | 39.3% | 60.7% |
| Grade 7 | 50.5% | 49.5% |
| SEO | 54.3% | 45.7% |
| HEO | 58.2% | 41.8% |
| EO | 64.7% | 35.3% |
| AA/AO | 67.6% | 32.4% |
| Interviewer | 50.8% | 49.2% |
| Total | 56.0% | 44.0% |
We have a Comprehensive Plan to be a more Inclusive Employer
To make progress against our ambitions we need to continue to increase representation of women at senior levels. We will achieve this through our recruitment and talent management strategies, flexible working practices and providing a supportive, inclusive environment for all as well as regularly monitoring our reward outcomes.
We provide a flexible and inclusive working environment for all through:
- Inclusive HR policies, including generous annual leave, special leave and shared parental leave provisions. We further extended our provision in response to Covid-19.
- Having flexible working as the standard for most of our roles.
- Launching a revised Inclusion strategy to underpin our strategic People Plan.
- Benchmarking our policies against the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Practice Expectations and via external memberships to identify any areas for improvement.
- Actively promoting opportunities for flexible working and job sharing through guidance, blogs, events and employee diversity networks.
- Continuing to support our active community of employee diversity networks. Since 2019, we have launched three new networks – these are the Job Share Network, Working Parents Network and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) Network to supplement our pre-existing groups which also include a Women’s Network and a Work Life Balance Network.
- Increasing the diversity of senior decision-making groups and improving the gender balance, through offering employees at all levels, regardless of seniority or background, the opportunity to apply to be volunteer members of core governance forums. This year we will be extending this opportunity to cover all sub-committees of the National Statistician’s Executive Group.
- Launching a Carers’ Charter to clearly outline the support package available from the organisation.
- Continuing the roll out of positive behavioural learning interventions across the organisation, including embedding inclusion and diversity content into all management and leadership development programmes.
- Changes to our recognition (bonus) scheme to make it more inclusive, including clearer criteria to make awards more consistent, benchmarking panels and an increase in value of the team award.
We continue to ensure our recruitment processes are inclusive, through:
- Ensuring all recruitment panels are diverse and contain members of more than one gender.
- Ensuring vacancies are advertised as flexible by default, including options for home-based/ remote working where appropriate
- All but very temporary roles are advertised externally via Civil Service Jobs and all identifiable information is removed as a default from job applications, including: name, age, address and nationality.
- Offering video interviews as standard to offer greater flexibility and accessibility for all.
We nurture career development through:
- Providing a dedicated successful Women into Leadership development and mentoring programme to support progression of women within the Authority.
- Continuing to support women to apply for our High Potential Programme as well as the Civil Service Future Leaders Scheme, Senior Leaders Scheme and Positive Action Pathways.
- Offering a coaching programme for individuals in transitional roles to leadership, focused on building leadership and confidence.
- Rolling out a mutual mentoring programme between senior leaders and apprentices or members of the Authority’s employee diversity networks.
Data included in this Report
- Salary and workforce information for all staff paid via our payroll as at 31 March 2020 including bonus payments made between 1 April 2019 and 31 March 2020
- The calculations follow current legislative requirements, and we confirm the data reported is accurate.