Corporate guidance and advice organisation Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) has reported a mean gender pay gap of 7.1% for hourly fixed pay at 31 March 2017.
The organisation has recorded its snapshot data for 31 March 2017 in compliance with gender pay gap reporting regulations. The data has been published on the government’s gender pay gap viewing service.
The median gender pay gap for hourly fixed pay is 0% at 31 March 2017.
The mean gender pay gap for bonus pay, which is awarded based on performance, is -4.5% in the year up to 31 March 2017, and the median gender pay gap for bonuses is 0%. Over this period, 44% of men received bonus pay, compared to 43% of women.
Just under half (48%) of employees in the highest pay quartile at Acas are women, compared to 59% in the second quartile, 64% in the third quartile, and 62% in the lowest pay quartile.
The organisation reports that 58% of its employees overall are women, and 83% of staff at executive board level are women.
Acas has committed to continuing to action and support initiatives designed to help deliver fair pay, irrespective of gender. This includes support measures for women returning to work, such as shared parental leave, the opportunity for job sharing, compressed hours, part-time and term-time work, and updated guidance for staff returning from maternity or adoption leave. The organisation will also continue to help its female staff with career progression, using development conversations with line managers, talent management schemes, and a Developing Future Leaders programme.
The civil service organisation will also encourage men to fulfil caring responsibilities and make use of shared parental leave arrangements and compressed or part-time working hours, monitor pay across the workforce, and maintain a focus on gender equality by featuring it in the organisation’s equality objectives. Acas will also look to further improve its recruitment process to remove unconscious bias, for example ensuring that all interviewers have undergone unconscious bias training. Acas has already anonymised its application process.
The gender pay gap reporting regulations require organisations with 250 or more employees to publish the difference between both the mean and median hourly rate of pay for male and female full-time employees; the difference between both the mean bonus pay and median bonus pay for male and female employees; the proportions of male and female employees who were awarded bonus pay; and the proportions of male and female full-time employees in the lower, lower middle, upper middle and upper quartile pay bands.
The Government Equalities Office launched the online gender pay gap viewing service in April 2017 to allow the public to see the data that employers have published so far to fulfil their gender pay gap reporting obligations.