Think, Act, Report: Deloitte
Reporting our gender pay gap; accelerating progress on gender diversity
While the issue of the gender pay gap saw increasing public attention in 2015, at Deloitte we have been focused on this for some time. Gender diversity at leadership levels remains a challenge for many businesses, albeit there is an ever increasing understanding of the issues that hold women back in the workplace and the ways in which to tackle them.
Deloitte support the Prime Minister’s proposals to require larger employers to publish their gender pay gap and published our data in 2015 in our annual Impact Report. We must be open and transparent about the gender issues that face our business; reporting our gender pay gap was a way we could achieve this.
Our gender pay gap results did not surprise us, instead serving to confirm what we knew – that the challenge for us as a business is increasing the number of women we have at senior levels. When we look across our organisation as a whole our gender pay gap stands at 17.8% (around 1.3% below the national figure); however, the pay gap between male and female employees at each grade is significantly lower, at 1.5% on average.
In FY14, we set an ambition that 25% of our partner group would be women by 2020 and 30% by 2030.
We understood achieving this ambition would require sustained and meaningful action and where needed, cultural change.
Since this time we have implemented a range of actions to increase the number of women we recruit (at both an entry and experienced-hire level), ensured that development opportunities for women are clear, relevant and bespoke to the individual, and worked hard to provide a working environment that truly enables all employees, men and women to balance a successful career with family life.
This focus has been critical to the progress we are now making – we have embraced agile working as a business priority, ensuring our people are able to work in a way that suits them and the business, and have introduced our award-winning Time Out scheme, which enables all our people to take a month’s unpaid leave each year, for any reason.
Our relentless focus on respect and inclusion, of which our ”Ask Yourself” film is a part, has also helped to ensure that we provide the working environment needed – one where our people are judged on the value they can bring to our firm. Alongside this, our new return-to-work placement programme for women who have been out of the workforce for more than three years is enabling women who had not previously considered re-starting their career to do so.
In addition, our re-designed Working Parents’ Transition Programme has enabled those returning from maternity, paternity, parental, and adoption leave to do so with the support needed.
We recognise it is only through a combination of culture change and targeted actions that we will achieve greater gender diversity. This change must be meaningful and sustainable over the long term. We are mid-way through our journey, but are absolutely clear that reporting our gender pay gap has played a key role in accelerating progress.