Gender Pay Gap
What is the gender pay gap?
- Gender pay gap and equal pay legislation deal with the disparity of pay women receive in the workplace
- Equal pay legislation deals with the pay differences between men and women within an organisation who carry out the same jobs, similar jobs or work of equal value
- The gender pay gap is a broader measure of the difference in the average earnings of men and women regardless of the nature of their work across an organisation. It is expressed as a percentage of men’s earnings: where there are more men at the senior level, the average male salary is higher than the average female salary
- Efficio analyses equal pay every six months and does not have unequal pay but we do have a gender pay gap
The mean gender pay gap in Efficio is 25%, which is an improvement of 5 percentage points from 30% in 2021; this pay gap, however, continues to reflect the high representation of men in senior positions.
Our pay structures are linked to seniority and performance, meaning that bonuses have an equal impact on the pay gap as the base salary. Our internal pay analysis shows that we award bonuses to an equal proportion of women and men and pay the same level of bonus to men and women at the same grade. However, at senior levels, bonus accounts for a greater portion of total compensation, so the impact of having a smaller portion of women in our senior team is greater when we look at bonus pay: the mean bonus of female employees is 50% lower than that of their male colleagues (vs 36% in 2021).
The median gender pay gap salary this year is 31% and bonus is 46%. At any employer, half of the staff will earn more than the median salary and half will earn less. As there are generally fewer women in higher paying positions than men, the gender pay gap as measured by mean earnings is often higher than for median earnings. As a result, we use the median as a key measure because it is a more representative when there is a skewed distribution of pay due to a minority of highly paid individuals: the median calculation is closest to the experience of the typical man and typical woman at Efficio.
The gap between the mid-point of the salary ranges between men and women is improving, primarily due to the small but ongoing increase in the number of women we have in middle management (the lower middle quartile below). In 2020, the proportion of women in our lower quartile pay band was 41% which increased to 50% in 2021 – this was the first year we had a fully gender balanced lower quartile, thanks in part to a recruitment strategy of having a more gender balanced candidate pipeline. In 2022, this percentage decreased by 4 percentage points, but our lower middle quartile representation has improved (to 29% in 2022 vs 23% in 2021) indicating a positive increase in promotions of women into the lower middle pay quartile.
Additionally, we have improved the percentage of women in our upper pay quartile which now stands at 20% (vs 13% in 2021).
The proportion of Efficio employees in each quartile pay band is:
Activities and Plans
As a growing business, hiring across all our jurisdictions, we have the opportunity to change the gender composition of our workforce more quickly than would a static business, but we face challenges. Management consulting, like many professional services, has a reputation for not retaining women through various phases of life, which leads to the gender pay gap we see across our industry in the UK and globally.
The recruitment and retention of women in senior roles continues to be the main focus of our core gender diversity plan. We have continued to adapt our recruitment tactics to focus on senior women such as establishing tailored onboarding and training for senior hires, providing an effective peer coaching programme, conducting retention workshops and targeted stay interviews. In addition to the above we have adapted our existing benefits internally and externally, for example enhancing our offerings for maternity and parental leave pay to highlight our market leading approach to cultivating a career in a family-friendly working environment. Throughout our performance reviews, we appoint a gender pay gap representative on our review panels to ensure there is no active bias on ratings, promotions and salary decisions. As we establish new customs in the flexible world of work, this will progress our capability to attract and retain women who wish to reach their personal and professional goals.
Our business leadership continues to develop and maintain company-wide focus on this important issue and to get input into initiatives to become a more gender-balanced organisation.
To drive an inclusive culture requires inclusive leaders and therefore we have asked our leadership team to commit to diversity and inclusion goals to highlight that this is a key business priority. Currently, women comprise of 14% of our global leadership and one of our goals is to improve the balance of women and other diverse constituents in our Principal, Director and Vice President groups.
We have identified several collective priorities to continue to improve our gender balance:
- Attracting diverse talent: continually evolving our approach and opening recruitment channels to a wide range of universities, whilst ensuring that our hiring process is cognizant of diversity and inclusion
- Developing and retaining diverse talent – by intentionally embedding D&I into Efficio’s HR strategy and regional development plans
- Building D&I into our working practices – examining regional employee value propositions regarding relevant employee benefits, e.g. parental leave, and supporting our staffing team and project leadership to normalise working practices that support people at different stages of life and career
We will continue to focus on addressing the activities which are vital to bring about the stable, applicable, and continuous transformation that is necessary to close our gender pay gap. This is an ongoing commitment actively supported by the Board.