Gender Pay Gap Report 2017
Introduction
At Your Homes Newcastle, we value, celebrate and embrace Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. We believe this approach makes us stronger and more effective. Having an inclusive workforce, which reflects our customers, is critical to delivering excellent services.
The government has introduced compulsory gender pay gap analysis for organisations with 250 or more employees, by April 2018. Gender pay gap data shows the distribution of male and female earners across an organisation and can help show employers if there are parts of their organisation where men and women don’t have the same opportunities.
The ‘gender pay gap’ is not the same as ‘equal pay’. The ‘gender pay gap’ measures the difference in average hourly earnings between men and women whilst equal pay means that men and women in the same employment performing equal work must receive equal pay, as set out in the Equality Act (2010).
How is the gender pay gap calculated?
Mean pay gap: By adding up the hourly pay for all women at YHN and dividing the total by the total number of women and then repeating for men at YHN, you can see the difference in the average hourly pay rate for women compared to men. It’s useful because it gives a good overall indication of the gender pay gap, but very large or small pay rates can skew the answer.
Median pay gap: If you separately line up all the women and all the men at YHN, the median pay gap is the difference between the hourly pay rate for the middle woman compared to that of the middle man. Median averages show the ‘typical’ situation because they are not distorted by very large or very small pay rates.
Looking at YHN
Our workforce
We have just over 800 colleagues. Women 50%, men 50%
Our gender pay gap
The mean pay: mean pay for women is 4.6% higher than that of men
The median pay: median pay for women is 16.5% higher
Here, our results are very different from the picture nationwide, where woman earn 18.4% less than men, according to Median gender pay gap, full-time and part- time employees, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings: 2017 provisional and 2016 revised results, ONS.
Bonus gender pay gap information
Our pay structure does not include bonuses.
The proportion of men and women in each quartile:
- Upper - 51.2% men, 48.8% women
- Middle - 35.1% men, 64.9% women
- Lower Middle - 41.1% men, 58.9% women
- Lower - 69.3% men, 30.7% women
By analysing our workforce into four equal groups or quartiles, based on hourly pay rate, we can see how men and women are distributed across the organisation. The top quartile has the highest 25% of earners, the middle quartile the next 25% earners and so on.
This shows that:
- At the most senior levels of the organisation, our gender balance is close to the workforce as a whole
- There are more women than men in the middle and lower middle quartiles
- Men are over-represented in the lower pay quartile. This is because this quartile includes roles which have, to date, largely been undertaken by men.
Understanding our results
Our results show that we are doing well at attracting and retaining women at the most senior levels of the organisation. Half of our roles at Assistant Director level and above, including our Managing Director, are undertaken by women.
This is also indicative of our commitment to building a culture of total inclusivity in the work place. We:
- have a job evaluation process that ensures we have a fair and transparent means of paying staff regardless of gender
- use a competency framework in the recruitment and selection processes • provide diversity training for all staff
- have a wide range of flexible working options to enable our employees to achieve a balance between their home and working lives
- support well-developed and active staff diversity network groups – Proud @ YHN, the Multi-Cultural Staff Network Group and VisABLE
- are a Stonewall Diversity Champion. We have been a Stonewall top 100 employer for the last nine years and this year we were also included in the top ten employers who had demonstrated a significant commitment to trans equality in the workplace
- we are also a ‘disability confident’ employer (the successor to the ‘two ticks scheme’) and a signatory to a signatory to the ‘Mindful Employer’ charter
- actively recruit people living in the homes we manage through our ‘Your Homes Your Jobs’ and apprenticeships.
We have adopted the Newcastle Living Wage as part of its pay structure. Newcastle City Council first introduced the Newcastle Living Wage five years ago to give people and families a better chance to succeed, providing a wage to help achieve a higher standard of living and we have always supported this. The Newcastle Living Wage rate increased from £8.25 per year to £8.45 per hour in October 2017, which resulted in an increase in salary for all YHN employees on the lowest two pay grades and nearly all those on the third lowest pay grade.
We are pleased with our record so far on equality, diversity and inclusion in the workplace but know there is more to do. As an organisation, we will continue to explore how we can take action to support and increase under-represented groups in our workforce.