The gender pay gap in 2022: how it affects your ESG score

Conduct an intersectional view of your data. Different groups of women can experience progression in the workplace differently. 

Know how you benchmark against competitors and your sector, to win the war for talent and safeguard your women from the “Great Resignation”. 

Overlay quantitative pay gap data with qualitative employee insight. Do women in your workforce agree that they have the opportunity to progress at the same pace as men? 

Take a statistical significance test to assess whether gender alone is a significant determinant of pay in your organisation. 

Having a gender pay gap doesn’t automatically mean discrimination is occurring or that an organisation is not supporting the progression of its women. However, this is the simple judgement many third parties may conclude if you report a pay gap. It is therefore critical to have sufficient data insights and to include these within your narrative, to avoid the perception that you don’t “walk the walk."

Think about your audience. Just under one third of both men and women in our 2021 UK employee survey didn’t believe their employer had an action plan to deal with any gender pay gap and an additional 30-40% of both genders were unsure. The overwhelming take away is that, whilst this is an important workplace issue, communication is not getting through to employees. Ensure your communications are accessible to all and reflective of the diverse nature of your target audience. 

Government guidance states that, in cases where the employee does not self-identify as either gender, an employer may omit the individual from the gender pay gap calculations. How will you assess the opportunity for progression for this increasing pool of employees?

We are now seeing ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting becoming mainstream, even though it is not yet regulatory, often within more holistic DE&I statements. Don’t get left behind. Plan how to capture this data and conduct initial assessments to keep pace with competitors and improve your ESG score. 

Not everyone may buy in to your vision or some may not be sure if they want to learn R; it is very different to Excel. We have actuaries who had not coded anything prior to joining us but are now proficient in coding. We encourage our team to have a growth mindset, which fits very well into one of actuaries’ natural elements.

Many actuaries are curious to learn, so we instil a mindset that any skill can be learned as long as you put your mind to it. You probably couldn’t build a cashflow model in Excel straight out of school, but you learned. You might not be able to automate some data checking in R now, but if you put the time in you will learn. Upskilling takes time, effort and a willingness to continually learn.