Pay gap report

We have a legal duty to report our gender pay gap information every year. We have decided to also publish our disability and ethnicity pay gaps.

Our gender pay gap

Scope’s gender pay gap, as of 5 April 2023, is 13.2%.

Although there is still a gap, we are committed to addressing it. This represents a further improvement since 2019 when the mean gender pay gap was 29.7%.

How gender pay gap is calculated

The gender pay gap is the difference between the average earnings of men and women across the organisation on a given date. Which is determined by the government (5 April each year).

There are 2 ways that the average hourly pay is calculated to give the percentage pay gap.

• The mean: we add together all the hourly pay rates that women receive and divide by the number of women in the workforce. This is repeated for men. The difference between these figures is the mean.
• The median: we sort all the hourly rates of pay for women from lowest to highest and take the hourly rate in the middle of the list. This is repeated for men. The difference between these figures is the median.

How gender pay gap is reported

The pay gaps are reported as a percentage. This percentage is the difference between the earnings of men and women across the organisation.

The larger the percentage the greater the gap. If the percentage is negative, it means that the gap is in favour of women.

The law requires the calculations to be based on our payroll data. We are legally required to use the gender that we report to HMRC. The HMRC system will only allow people to be registered by their legal gender, with the options "male" and "female". For other purposes, we monitor people’s gender identity. 

The table below shows our gender pay gap from 2019 onwards.

Bonus pay gap

We stopped giving bonuses in 2021, so we no longer have a bonus pay gap.

The table below shows our bonus pay gap from 2019 to 2020.

Actions we have taken

Last year, we committed to improve our gender pay gap by making sure we continued to offer fair pay no matter someone’s gender.

When hiring new roles, we carefully reviewed the pay to line up with our new Reward principles.

In January 23, we launched a new 3 year Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) strategy.

We are already taking actions, such as:

• training
• monitoring diversity
• assessing projects’ impact on equality

We have updated our hiring strategy to reflect our diversity principles. We reviewed how we recruited and started improvements, such as:

• diversifying our interview panels
• writing more inclusive job ads that highlight our generous family leave, pay, flexibility and hybrid work options

Our review of our pay structure in 2022 is likely to have had the biggest impact on decreasing the gender pay gap this year. But we remain committed to closing the gap further.

We want employees’ input on additional actions and will discuss with our colleague forum. 

Actions going forward

The new Colleague Forum. This recently launched and one of the first agenda items for discussion with the Executive Leadership Team (ELT) is the Gender Pay Gap. We will be asking representatives to seek the views from their colleagues on initiatives we can take to improve the gap.

A discussion with our Network Groups on initiatives we can take to reduce the pay gap.

A full review of our Reward approach. Benchmarking all roles against other charities to ensure our pay remains:

• fair
• consistent
• competitive
• and attractive

Monitor the introduction of anonymous applications and the simplified application form, which started 1 June 2023.

Finalise our internal promotion processes (Quarter 3) ensuring EDI principles are followed.

Implement actions following the outcome from our Leavers and Retention Project.

Focus on management development. Ensuring our managers are fully trained in management practices.

Review the make-up of our apprenticeships, currently men make up the majority.

Increase the number of men in our lower quartiles through our recruitment approach encouraging more male applicants.

Our disability pay gap

Our disability pay gap is: -3.87%

The disability pay gap is the difference between the average earnings of non-disabled colleagues and disabled colleagues across the organisation on a given date.

Colleagues who marked “prefer not to say” or “not known” were not counted in the calculation. 

Our pay gap remains in favour of disabled colleagues.

Our ethnicity pay gap

Our ethnicity pay gap is: 0.04%

The ethnicity pay gap is the difference between the average earnings of White colleagues and Black, Asian and Ethnic minority colleagues across the organisation on a given date.

Colleagues who marked “prefer not to say” or “not known” were not counted in the calculation.

Our pay gap has moved to be very slightly in favour of white colleagues. We will monitor closely. We expect our new ELT recruit to positively impact these figures next year.

Signed: Mark Hodgkinson, Chief Executive