Agenda item

Report of the Director of Human Resources

The Committee considered a report of the Director of Human Resources concerning the Corporation’s gender pay gap, data for which was required to be published by 30 March 2018 under the new Gender Pay Gap Regulations.

Members raised a number of questions including how the issue of diversity was being actively addressed, why there was a pay gap and whether any trends had been identified during the recruitment process.

The Director of Human Resources reported that the issue of diversity was something that was being addressed during the recruitment stages when attracting candidates to apply and also post recruitment in terms of developing and retaining staff. Recruitment at the Corporation at senior levels was now anonymised. There were  also various revisions to the recruitment and selection processes as reported to the committee previously.  In relation to Gender Pay Gap it was therefore necessary to determine what other factors needed to be solved having looked in more detail at the data.

The Director of Human Resources advised thatthe Gender Pay Gap measured the differences between the average pay of male and female employees, irrespective of job role or seniority, and was not to be confused with equal pay which concerned pay differences between male and female employees performing the same or similar work, or work of equal value. It was further noted that the GPG data looked at the total pay but did not reflect the numbers of staff. So whilst useful, more detailed analysis was needed to inform any actions arising.   

In response to a question concerning transgender members of staff, the Deputy Chairman advised that this question wasn’t currently asked during the recruitment process, however most transgender people still identified with the gender binary and statistically numbers of non-binery people were very small and unlikely to impact on the wider GPG outcome.

RESOLVED - To note the report and endorse the proposed arrangements for Gender Pay Gap reporting in readiness for external publication.