Is it enough to publish just one statistic, or should you break it down further? What responses should companies expect from employees, stakeholders and customers when they present their pay structures? And will this lead to greater pay transparency in the future?
Emma Codd, managing partner for talent at Deloitte UK, says:
"Deloitte is clear that we must be open and transparent about the gender issues facing our business; reporting our gender pay gap is one way in which we can achieve this.
Being able to easily access information about a company’s gender pay gap will enable people to make more informed decisions about their potential employers, while companies could also consider gender pay when selecting suppliers.
However, I don’t believe that just identifying and publishing their gap – that is, the difference between the average pay of all male and female employees – enables firms to paint, or see, the full picture. So in addition to reporting our gap as a firm we also looked at our gap by each of our employee grades. This enabled us to really highlight where the issues lie.
When we look across Deloitte as a whole our gender pay gap stands at 17.8% (around 1.3% below the national figure). However, within each grade the pay gap is significantly lower, at 1.5% on average. This confirmed what we believed – that for Deloitte the issue is far less about how we pay our people and more about the number of women employed at more senior grades.
It enabled us to gain comfort that we were focusing on the right things – such as increasing the number of women we recruit at all levels of seniority – ensuring we identify and harness women’s potential and providing a working environment where they can balance a successful career with life outside work.
Reporting our gender pay gap has been a positive experience for us. Stakeholders have welcomed the transparency and it has ensured that we really focused on the right things from a gender diversity perspective.
I am hopeful that those companies that are really focused on actions to achieve greater gender diversity will meet with the same positive response that we have had."
Check back tomorrow for part two of this Hot Topic, where the CMI's chief executive Ann Francke has her say
