Sitting in the mud | Post 6

James Watson-O’Neill: Welcome back to my blog series! This is where I talk about the work we are doing at SignHealth on equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI). I’m aiming to share some of the stuff that I’m wrestling with and to “sit in the mud” of how difficult this work can sometimes be.

This time I’m talking about pay gap reporting.

We have recently published SignHealth’s annual report and accounts. I am really proud of how quickly SignHealth is growing. And proud to see Sabina’s introduction as our new chair of the board, even though she’s now been in her role for almost a year!

Although we’re not legally required to publish data on our pay gap we choose to do it. It helps us pay attention to what’s happening at SignHealth.

You can read the detail for yourselves in our report if you’d like to. We have looked at whether there is a pay gap from several different perspectives, including gender, race and ethnicity, deafness and disability.

One of the first challenges we have had has been to encourage colleagues to tell us how they identify. Lots of us have learned not to feel safe when people ask us questions about our sexuality, whether or not we’re disabled, or what our backgrounds are. So I can’t expect everyone who works at SignHealth to easily answer these questions. We do give everyone the option to choose “prefer not to say” so that we know they’ve completed the form. We probably need to pay a bit more attention to the proportion of people who answer in this way.

Our next challenge was to look at the results and try to understand what it’s telling us. Even though we’ve done this for several years, there is always a little bit of getting used to what the difference between mean and median is and remembering how to understand the data properly.

Gender

At SignHealth our pay gap is in women’s favour – we have more women employed at SignHealth at every level of our organisation. The median, which is arguably a clearer middle point when everyone’s wages are lined up from smallest to largest, shows that women earn 15% more than men. This feels good and it also feels like it’s real and truly represents SignHealth when you spend time with colleagues in different teams and jobs within the organisation.

Race and ethnicity

Looking at race and ethnicity, 27% of our staff are from the global majority but the median pay gap shows that they earn 7% less than white staff. Last year, this result was quite different, with global majority staff earning 10% more. So there is definitely more for us to understand here about the results. How has staff turnover has affected who works at SignHealth and in what roles and at what levels?

Deaf-led

We are proud to be a deaf-led charity and more than 70% of our staff identify as deaf – looking at the median pay gap, deaf staff and hearing staff earn the same, which feels good. We’ll need to look at how to maintain this parity though and make sure we understand it.

Disability

For the first time we’ve also looked more broadly at our disability pay gap. (We understand to include deaf staff but also other disabled colleagues, as we use a social model of disability.)  The median pay gap shows that there isn’t a difference between disabled and non-disabled staff.

Looking ahead

But there’s lots of work for us to do, some of which is highlighted by these results. We’ve still got to make progress on developing an overarching People strategy and we have Sarah Daniels, our new Director of People just joining us – this will be her top priority.

This focus on pay gaps has also helped us recommit to some of our other plans – we are going to be rolling out anti-racism training to another wave of staff this autumn and also to our board of trustees and we’re going to be recruiting a new Head of EDI role too – watch this space!

As always, it feels like we are making progress but there’s still lots to do. I am proud that we’re sharing this information publicly and that we are holding ourselves accountable. We need to do more to feel like we are actively steering the charity towards greater equity too.

As always, if you have any comments or questions about what I’ve talked about here please do get in touch, particularly if you’ve got ideas or questions about pay gap reporting!

Email communications@signhealth.org.uk