Transparency data

HM Land Registry: gender pay gap report 2019

Published 30 January 2020

In 2017, the government introduced legislation that made it statutory for all organisations with 250 or more employees to report annually on their gender pay gap.

Government departments are covered by the Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties and Public Authorities) Regulations 2017 that came into force on 31 March 2017. These regulations underpin the Public Sector Equality Duty and require the relevant organisations to publish their gender pay gap data annually, including:

• mean and median gender pay gaps
• mean and median gender bonus gaps
• the proportion of men and women who received bonuses
• the proportion of men and women in each pay quartile (we create 4 quartiles, dividing our workforce by the hourly rate of pay)

The gender pay gap shows the difference in the average pay between all men and women in a workforce. If a workforce has a particularly high gender pay gap, this can indicate there may be a number of issues to deal with, and the individual calculations may help to identify what those issues are.

The gender pay gap is different to equal pay. Equal pay deals with the pay differences between men and women who carry out the same jobs, similar jobs or work of equal value. It is unlawful to pay people unequally because they are a man or a woman.

Analysis

Analysis of our 2019 gender pay gap data suggests the actions we have taken continue to have a positive effect, but that our progress to close the gap has slowed over the last 12 months. Our median pay gap is 14.6%, which means our pay gap has improved by 1% on last year’s result.

We pay women the same rate as men for doing the same job. Our gender pay gap figures relate primarily to the distribution of women in our workforce.

On 31 March 2019, 61% of our employees were women. Proportionately, women are more highly represented in our junior and casework roles and currently make up 69% of our largest grade by headcount, Executive Officer (EO).

Because of the volume of people in administrative and EO grades, our lowest three quartiles consist almost exclusively of these grades. This means that, despite women making up 48.6% of our highest quartile, our grade composition has a significant impact on our gender pay gap.

For many years we have encouraged and supported women by offering a wide range of employment opportunities, including a range of part-time working patterns. This approach has been successful and currently 33% of our people work part-time, 83% of whom are women. This accounts for our mean bonus (paid) gap of 7.8%, which is calculated on a pro-rata basis.

Our part-time employees make a highly valued contribution to our success. We are committed to continuing to provide our people with working options that meet their work-life requirements, but this will continue to affect our gender pay gap figures.

The actions we have taken this year, including actions to remove barriers to progression, have successfully contributed to an increase in the representation of women in more senior roles, however, we have also continued to attract more women than men into our entry level positions.

Women made 55.5% of our total job applications, and made up 59% of successful applicants. Broken down by quartile, we recruited 388 women (235 men) into the lowest three quartiles, compared with 32 women (28 men) in the highest quartile.

Our actions

A corporate diversity and inclusion key performance indicator (KPI) underpins our ambition to support and encourage women seeking to move into more senior management roles. Key actions we have taken include showcasing our women leaders using their personal stories and diverse recruitment campaigns. We have also targeted areas of the organisation where women are under-represented, supporting women to access development through programmes such as Women in Tech, BAME into Leadership and Women in Leadership.

In the past year, we have worked closely with our staff networks (in particular our Women’s Network) and our HR Resourcing Team to embed further the 17 actions we committed to undertake in our 2017 Gender Pay Gap Action Plan.

Our external actions included:

• using inclusive language in job adverts that it is not subtly biased toward one gender (gender decoding)
• adding new wording to job descriptions that are suitable for flexible working ‘Success in this role is not defined by the hours worked, so we can consider a range of working hours and patterns’
• broader advertising of all flexible vacancies, including Timewise Jobs and Mumsnet
• monitoring representation on recruitment panels, to make sure there is a diverse mix
• developing insight sessions on our application and interview processes

Our internal actions included:

• helping recruiting managers to attract diverse applicants by asking them to consider flexibility in their person specification, such as minimum hours, suitable working patterns and only using essential criteria (studies show that women are more likely to hesitate in applying for a job if they do not meet all the listed requirements)
• HR resourcing specialists delivering sessions at our internal development programme ‘Pathways’ about the top tips for making an application
• promoting job-share opportunities and our job-share policy with refreshed guidance on our corporate intranet
• setting up a cross-directorate working group, aligned with our diversity and inclusion KPI, working collaboratively across functions to drive action
• challenging common misconceptions around part-time working

While our employment opportunities, working practices and inclusive culture continue to attract women into our workforce at all levels, a significant reduction in our gender pay gap will remain a challenge.

We recognise the opportunities that pay gap analysis and reporting provide to make sure our policies and practices are fair and equitable. We understand that change of this nature will take time to effect and we reaffirm our commitment to minimising our gender pay gap through longer-term legacy actions, which support and encourage women in our workforce and create and maintain a culture in which they can thrive.

In the coming year, we will develop a new gender pay gap action plan to drive further improvement, which we will publish in due course.

Data

Hourly rate of ordinary pay for full pay relevant employees

Type of employee	Women	Men	Total
Full pay	3,309	2,176	5,485
Not full pay	94	40	134
Total	3,403	2,216	5,619

Full pay employees	Women	Men	Difference %
Mean	£19.02	£20.76	8.40% difference
Median	£16.25	£19.03	14.60% difference

Quartile based on hourly rate of ordinary pay for full pay relevant employees

Quartile	Women	Men	Total
Fourth (upper)	48.60%	51.40%	1,371
Third	59.40%	40.60%	1,371
Second	71.20%	28.80%	1,371
First (lower)	62.10%	37.90%	1,372
Total	3,309	2,176	5,485

Employees paid a bonus during the 12 months (ending 31 March 2019)

Type of employee

Type of employee	Women	Men	Total
Paid bonus	2,934	1,907	4,841
Not paid bonus	469	309	778

86.2% of women received a bonus.

86.1% of men received a bonus.

Employees paid bonus

Employees paid bonus	Women	Men	Difference
Mean	£1,166.85	£1,265.53	7.80% difference
Median	£1,008.00	£1,008.00	0% difference