Gender pay gap reduces, as targeted action planned

As the University publishes its latest gender pay gap figure, Professor Elizabeth McCrum, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and University Executive Board (UEB) Champion for Sex Equality, outlines ongoing work to help address the gap.

I am pleased to say that our gender pay gap reduced again in 2024 to a mean of 14.5% (from 17% in 2023), although the median increased slightly to 16.1% (from 15.7% in 2023).

As ever we are not complacent and there is more work to do to reduce that gap further.

You may remember me letting you know in last year’s update that we had put in place some actions aimed at delivering a positive impact over two to three years.

These included focus groups with Professional Services colleagues to discuss career progression, refreshing our recruitment and selection training and progressing towards our target of equal numbers of female and male professors.

We believe this activity has had a positive impact, which is reflected in the mean figure for 2024 and which we hope continues to show an improvement when calculating our figures for 2025.

The ratio of female professors at Reading was 36.1% (down 0.9% from the previous year) and associate professors 57.3% (up by just over 2%), based on our 2024 snapshot. Despite the slight drop in our percentage of female professors, we remain above the sector average of 32%, and we will continue to proactively pursue our target of a sex-balanced professoriate with at least 45% of professors of either sex.

We will review progress following the  this year.

We have also seen the continuation of collaborative work with the Women@Reading and Parent & Family networks offering a range of opportunities for women at the University to support them in the workplace.

Most recently, the Women@Reading network hosted a Women in Leadership panel discussion by the Women in Business Society and joined with the BAME network to support a Professional Services Career Conversation with a panel of women leaders sharing their stories, insights and advice on personal development and career progression.

What’s next?

As previously, we took some time last summer to review progress made and consider how else we could proactively approach reducing our pay gap. This has helped us to identify some activities for the current year.

I am looking forward in particular to working with HR and Women@Reading to bring together a group of colleagues we know are more adversely affected by the pay gap to discuss their thoughts about progression opportunities and hear about any challenges they face.

We will then use their feedback to inform activities and consider how best to support them to progress.

Ongoing activity

We continue to support women in their careers here at Reading such as by offering a range of development opportunities for women. These include a range of online and e-learning modules as well as face-to-face development opportunities, such as Advance HE’s Aurora leadership programme and the Springboard development programme.

We are working towards submitting a renewal application for our Athena Swan Silver award in July 2025, which includes demonstrating support for women in their careers in both academic and professional services roles.

Context

For background, as a large public sector organisation we are required to calculate and report on our gender pay gap every year based on a snapshot on 31 March. This is a complex, manual process and the figures must be reported to the UK Government within 12 months.

As ever, our gender pay gap numbers should not be confused with equal pay. We have robust processes in place to ensure we pay men and women equally for doing the same work.

Gender pay gaps instead represent the difference in average pay across all male and all female staff at an institution. The figures are often reflective of occupational segregation – where certain roles usually contain higher numbers of women or men regardless of any action we take.

Our numbers reflect the fact that, unlike other universities, we directly employ the majority of our staff, including those in many lower-paid roles. We also include students working through Campus Jobs, with the majority of these being female in recent years. By nature, Campus Jobs roles are lower-paid, which increases our mean and median figures by 1-2%.

This makes it difficult to directly compare our statistics with those of other universities. It is important to explain this to put our figures in context, however we accept that our pay gap is still significant without these factors, and it is therefore no excuse for us not to continue to take action.

There is a lot we can do to improve, and a lot we are doing. I hope to share some further positive progress in the year ahead.

Professor Elizabeth McCrum, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and UEB Champion for Sex Equality