3FF’s gender pay gap – putting this feminist in her place

Hannah Taylor, 3FF Head of Operations

At 3FF we pride ourselves on being a diverse and inclusive employer.  As Head of Operations, I’m responsible not for the interfaith programmes we deliver externally, but for the interfaith project that is 3FF itself.  I’ve made it my mission to create an office culture where everyone can bring their whole selves to work, and an organisation which models internally the world we want to see externally.

So earlier this month when the media was blowing up about the gender pay gap, I thought it would be fun to calculate ours.  I opened up an Excel spreadsheet feeling smug, confident that at 3FF we have policies and processes to ensure equal pay is in place, and there was no way we’d have a gender pay gap.

Turns out I was wrong. 3FF’s gender pay gap as of 5 April 2018 is 21%.

Not terrible – but definitely more than 0, and twice the UK average. So, to understand this figure and how to fix it, we have some work to do.

The first thing to understand is that the pay gap isn’t the same as equal pay.  Equal pay – that men and women doing the same job should be paid the same – has been a legal requirement for 47 years.  By contrast, the pay gap shows the difference in what men and women are paid on average.  So, an organisation might have a gender pay gap if a majority of men are in senior roles, despite paying male and female employees the same amount for similar roles.

Eight in ten UK companies and public sector bodies pay men more than women.  Ryanair’s pay gap is a whopping 67%.  In the charity sector, the UK’s largest charity CRUK has a gender pay gap of 19%, and the sector body NCVO’s is 14%. But then there are employers with no gender pay gap (such as the British Museum), and firms which pay women more (such as mattress retailer Sweet Dreams with a gender pay gap of 46% in favour of women.)

So, with equal pay a legal requirement, and as a sector that prides itself on its progressive values, why are we paying women less?

The gender pay gap in the charity sector is likely to be explained by the disproportionate number of men in leadership roles – even though the sector is generally female dominated with around two thirds of those working in charities and voluntary organisations being women.  47% of senior managers in the charity sector are female, but only 32% of CEOs.[1]

Research on this topic has suggested that many women feel that family and caring responsibilities fall largely to them, and women are more often in part time roles, and this has an impact on their career progression within the sector.[2] Hence in a sector overrepresented by women, there are fewer women in senior roles.

Turning this lens inwards, we see a similar pattern at 3FF, where our team is made up of twice as many women as men, but with more men than women in senior roles.  80% of our ‘upper quartile’ (the highest paid quarter of our workforce) are men.  But 12 months ago, I calculated, our gender pay gap was only 5%.  Just a few small differences in our staff team meant we had a more even split between men and women at all levels of the organisation.  Due to our relatively small size, minor changes can make a big difference, and this gives us greater potential to make a significant impact on our gender pay gap going forward.

So, now that we understand a bit more about the problem – what’s the solution?

Firstly – 3FF is committed to being open and transparent about our gender pay gap.  That’s why we’re publishing this blog, and why we will submit our gender pay gap data to the gender pay gap service although not legally required to do so, being under the threshold of 250 employees.

Secondly – we’re committed to becoming a more diverse and inclusive organisation over the coming months and years.  We’re working to develop a new diversity and inclusion strategy which, when published this summer, will establish clear targets for us to work towards – one of which will be to eliminate our gender pay gap – as well as an action plan around how to get us there.

If you have ideas about how we can do this, or would like to feed in your own experiences around diversity and inclusion, I would love to hear from you.  Drop me a line at hannah@3ff.org.uk

And in the meantime – I’ll be making an extra effort to model the world I want to see, supporting other women at 3FF and advocating for diversity whenever I get the opportunity.  I invite you to do the same.

[1] https://www.charityjob.co.uk/careeradvice/article/gender-equality-in-the-charity-sector-is-there-strength-in-numbers/

[2] Ibid