The Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) has published its gender pay report for 2019/20.
Following a positive improvement in our gender pay gap in 2019, reducing by 8.2%, this year our mean gap increased very slightly by 0.6%, from 27% to 27.6%.
For staff at Director level there is a 15.7% gap in favour of females compared with male equivalents, which reflects a greater gender balance at this level and progress in demonstrating pay equality in the most senior roles in ONR.
Dave Caton, ONR Human Resources Director, said: “The continued pay gap is not unexpected given our workforce profile but we do not want to accept this position. However, we fully expect to see the positive trend of reducing the pay gap return in future years, as the increasing number of newly recruited female staff progress their careers and our gender balance improves across the organisation.
“I know that as an organisation, we’ve worked hard to ensure that we do everything we can to welcome, nurture and develop women, so that we benefit from diversity of perspective and experience. Creating an inclusive workplace is the right thing to do – but we also know that diverse teams make better decisions.”
ONR has continued to focus on improving diversity by promoting and maintaining an inclusive working environment by developing a new leadership programme with a greater focus on emotional intelligence. This will have a larger emphasis on leader’s identity and authentic leadership voice, which will support our female leaders by increasing their understanding and access to a range of key leadership tools and techniques.
Over the last year we have focused our recruitment campaigns on attracting a diverse range of candidates at all levels and specialisms. For example we have developed “YouTube” style video clips on our website which feature female role models including those in senior leadership roles. We also use gender neutral wording throughout our recruitment process, to remove unconscious bias at an early stage.
We have continued to develop our STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) strategy supporting the Nuclear Energy Agency on “Mentoring a Future Generation of Female Leaders in Science and Engineering.” This has allowed ONR to directly impact on young people and girls in particular by inspiring and supporting the next generation of nuclear specialists and positively improve the gender balance.
Dave continued: “I’m 100% committed to making ONR an even better place to work for everyone. So, we must continue to work even harder to reduce the gender pay gap and to address wider inclusion issues, as outlined in our new Strategy for 2020-25.”