Acas gender pay gap report 2020

The figures show:

• 58% of our workforce are women
• 20% of our senior civil servants are women

The figures show:

• our 'mean' (average) hourly pay gap is 6.8%
• the mean pay gap has reduced from 7.4% since 2019
• our 'median' hourly pay gap is 12.2%
• the median pay gap has decreased from 12.3% since 2019

The figures show:

• 15% of women were awarded a bonus
• 14% of men were awarded a bonus
• the mean bonus pay gap is 2.2%
• the median bonus pay gap is 11.1%

The table below shows hourly pay by quartile (dividing the workforce equally into 4 sections) for Acas. It shows that there is a higher proportion of women in all quartiles compared to men, except the upper pay quartile.

The Acas senior leadership team are committed to fair pay irrespective of gender.

We will continue to build on actions and initiatives aimed at eradicating the gender pay gap, including:

• support for women returning to work through shared parental leave, job sharing, compressed hours, part time, remote working (including working from home) and term-time only opportunities – we have updated our guidance on supporting staff returning from maternity or adoption leave
• Acas has signed up to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) Working Forward initiative, which looks at how we can better support new parents, pregnant women and parents on leave within the workplace
• we are helping women progress in their careers through our new clear conversations approach towards performance management, which encourages line managers to have an open ongoing dialogue with staff on career development and progression
• Acas was the first agency to join the Civil Service Jobshare website (outside of the main Whitehall departments), which will enable more people to find potential roles across the wider Civil Service
• we continue to encourage men to take advantage of flexible working arrangements which enable them to fulfil their caring responsibilities, such as shared parental leave, part time working and compressed hours, for example by publishing case studies in our internal communication channels
• we continue to monitor pay to identify pay differences and take targeted action where appropriate, within Civil Service pay controls
• we are currently reviewing our recruitment process – Acas has anonymised the application process to reduce the potential for unconscious bias and ensures that all interviewers have undergone unconscious bias training
• the organisation is developing a more flexible approach towards recruitment and selection through success profiles, which the Civil Service launched in April 2019
• Acas aims to have a ‘diverse by default’ approach towards recruitment, for example, by having recruitment panels which are diverse in terms of gender and ethnicity

We will take a more proactive approach towards monitoring our bonus pay in the future, through doing a live time analysis of the gender breakdown during national reward and recognition panels.

Mean (average) gender pay gap

• The mean hourly rate is the average hourly wage across the entire organisation.
• The mean gender pay gap measures the difference between the women’s mean hourly wage and the men’s mean hourly wage.

Median gender pay gap

• The median hourly rate is calculated by ranking all employees from the highest paid to the lowest paid, and taking the hourly wage of the person in the middle.
• The median gender pay gap is the difference between the women’s median hourly wage (the middle paid woman) and the men’s median hourly wage (the middle paid man).