Transparency data

Coal Authority gender pay gap report 2019

Published 2 July 2019

1. Foreword

I’m pleased to introduce the first gender pay gap report for the Coal Authority.

Diversity and inclusion is a key focus for us at the Coal Authority and is at the heart of our people plan. Gender balance is a particular area of focus and we are committed to reducing our gender pay gap which, as we were originally populated by individuals from the coal industry, has been particularly challenging for us.

I’m pleased to say that we have seen an increase in the amount of women joining us in more senior roles this year, including my appointment as the Coal Authority’s first female Chief Executive Officer.

It will be great to get to the point where we don’t have to talk about “firsts” anymore, but in the meantime it’s important to be a visible role model for future generations. I’m a Cornish girl who went to the local comprehensive, who talks openly about being lesbian and honestly about the opportunities, and challenges I’ve faced in my career to date as well as the things I’ve done well and mistakes I’ve made. I was once told I wasn’t successful in getting a job because they didn’t have a women’s toilet in the building. That was wrong – and the world needed to change. There are still many other aspects where it still does.

Here at the Coal Authority we are on a journey to improve female representation across all aspects of our work and at all grades. We have made progress on the former - our organisation is now 39% female with women represented at all grades compared with 1994 when there were only a handful of women working here, nearly all were in admin or more junior grades.

We still want to develop more women into senior roles and will recruit talent directly when senior vacancies arise which we hope will make real inroads into our gender pay gap.

A few of the practical steps we have taken this year are:

• establishing a Women’s Network and a Women in STEM group and held a number of inspirational female role model talks
• changing our recruitment policy – all middle ranking and senior roles now have to be advertised externally and recruiting managers need to demonstrate how they have encouraged female and diverse representation on short lists
• ensuring female representation on all recruitment panels
• recognising that gender isn’t binary and ensuring that non-binary individuals can feel included here too

Although we have not published any statistics on wider diversity this year we have created an EDI Action Plan to help us progress in the areas of Age, LGBT+, Disability, BAME and Religion and belief. Although we have already set up focus groups and publish a quarterly newsletter on wider diversity, we will over the next year build on our existing relationships with other government organisations and will report on this data in our 2020 report.

We are not complacent. Our gender pay gap is far too high and we want to see significant and sustained improvement – and across the spectrum of diversity and inclusion. To achieve this we need to work harder, learn from others and listen to staff, customers and partners. We are in this for the long term so we recognise that doing what is right may not give us clear improvements in short term statistics but neither will we allow this to be an excuse.

We will now publish our gender pay gap report annually, and seek to include other characteristics from 2019/20. I invite you to help, to share best practice, to hold us to account and to challenge where you think we can do better.

Lisa Pinney MBE, Chief Executive and EDI Champion

2. Introduction

The gender pay gap shows the difference in the average pay between all men and women in the organisation, expressed relative to men’s earnings. The gender pay gap is different to equal pay. Equal pay deals with pay differences between men and women who carry out the same jobs, similar jobs or work of equal value.

We support the fair treatment and reward of all colleagues irrespective of gender. This report analyses the findings in more detail and sets out what we are doing to close our gender pay gap. We also recognise that gender is not a binary concept and we support transgender, non-binary and intersex colleagues alongside those who identify as male or female.

3. Gender pay gap data

Gender split at 31 March 2019 was: Male 151 (61%) Female 96 (39%)

Gender split at 31 March 2018 was: Male 141 (61%) Female 90 (39%)

3.1 Ordinary pay

The comparison of mean and median pay within the organisation shows a gap in favour of men. We employ a large number of female staff in our administrative grades which impacts on the gender pay gap as these roles pay less than our technical professional roles. The distribution of our workforce drives our mean and median figures.

Mean hourly rate 2019
Male	£22.06
Female	£17.23
Mean gender pay gap	21.91%

Mean hourly rate 2018
Male	£22.74
Female	£16.31
Mean gender pay gap	28.28%

Median hourly rate 2019
Male	£21.21
Female	£14.53
Median gender pay gap	31.49%

Median hourly rate 2018
Male	£20.93
Female	£14.31
Median gender pay gap	31.63%

3.2 Bonus pay

The Coal Authority does not pay bonuses. We operate performance related pay that is designed to grow and develop our organisation and the people in it. It aims to drive a performance culture aligned to our brand values where we strive to do our best for our customers and is calculated on a percentage of pay linked to a performance review score. However, for the purposes of this report we will be using the term bonus. The figures below show that more females than males received a bonus. However there is still a bonus pay gap due to the fact our female staff earn less.

Gender split of staff receiving a bonus in 2018-19 was: Male 48.76% Female 51.24%

Mean bonus payment 2019
Percentage difference	33.90%

Mean bonus payment 2018
Percentage difference	33.61%

Median bonus payment 2019
Percentage difference	34.31%

Median bonus payment 2018
Percentage difference	46.72%

4. Pay by quartiles

We are continuing to increase diversity in our workforce. Currently we have a higher proportion of female staff within the lower quartile and a higher proportion of male staff in the upper quartile. We recognise that we still have more to do to attract and develop talented women into more senior roles and technical professional roles.

The pay by quartiles at 31 March 2019 was:

Quartile	Male	Female
Lower quartile	22.95%	77.05%
Lower middle quartile	66.13%	33.87%
Upper middle quartile	75.38%	24.62%
Upper quartile	79.66%	20.34%

The pay by quartiles at 31 March 2018 was:

Quartile	Male	Female
Lower quartile	24.56%	75.44%
Lower middle quartile	62.71%	37.29%
Upper middle quartile	74.14%	25.86%
Upper quartile	82.46%	17.54%

5. Closing the gender pay gap

We’re very committed to reducing the gender pay gap, and have introduced a range of measures to address this including:

• applying gender neutral language in all our job adverts
• publishing in all job adverts ‘happy to talk flexible working’
• anonymous job application sifting
• providing training in interviewing skills to help staff applying for promotion
• training all recruiters in unconscious bias to provide fair recruitment decisions
• understanding the reasons why women leave the organisation and embedding learning from that
• building links at careers events to promote inclusivity and opportunities for all genders
• taking part in Women in Leadership events encouraging coaching and mentoring opportunities and greater visibility of female role models
• introducing more family friendly policies including shared parental leave

These initiatives have already attracted more female professionals in a variety of roles including engineers, project managers and scientists and are pleased to report that we have seen a 16% increase in the number of women in professional roles over the past year.

As well as making changes to our recruitment approaches, we have also taken a number of practical steps by investing in and supporting the talented women already in our organisation with tailored development opportunities, role model talks and enabling a new Women’s Network and Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) group.

Our gender balance around the board table has also increased with 57% of board members being female.

6. Action plan

We’re committed to making diversity and inclusivity part of everything we do – how we recruit, how we promote and retain staff and how we treat the people around us. We need to work harder at recruiting more Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) and disabled staff to join us. We are a member of ‘Inclusive Employers’, an organisation for employers looking to build inclusive workplaces and also registered with Disability Confident that helps us improve how we attract and retain disabled staff.

We are on a journey in promoting our organisation as a great place to work to attract talented staff from these groups and, as we develop in this area, be able to report progress on ethnicity and disability pay gaps in future reports.

Our next steps are to put our words into action and this includes:

• use more inclusive and enabling language and approaches to advert, assessment and interview to attract all diverse groups
• proactively encourage flexible working and engage more with communities and online networks to enable more parents/carers and others to see us as a flexible employer of choice
• undertake another equal pay audit to ensure that our gender pay gap is never an equal pay issue
• continuously develop and build on the proactive work undertaken to increase gender diversity and support women back into the workplace
• work with our women in STEM action group to raise the profile of the Coal Authority and to inspire the next generation of young women and girls to take up a STEM career
• encourage managers to consider job design when new vacancies occur and have an open mind set on flexible working options to break the mould of traditional full-time working
• seek feedback from employees for new ideas and to keep developing