Corporate report

SLC Gender Pay Gap Report 2021

Published 30 March 2022

1. What is the legislation?

Under the Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties and Public Authorities) Regulations 2017, all organisations listed at Schedule 2 in the regulations that employ over 250 employees are required to report annually on their gender pay gap. Other organisations with 250 or more employees need to comply with the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017.

2. What does the gender pay gap mean?

The gender pay gap is a high-level overview of pay within an organisation and shows the difference in the average pay between males and females in the workplace. If a workforce has a particularly large gender pay gap, this can indicate that there may be a number of issues within the organisation, the individual calculations can give specific insight into what the key issues are. The existence of a gender pay gap does not equate to the existence of an equal pay problem, albeit a gender pay gap may be a trigger for further investigation about the reasons why the gap exists.

3. Gender profile of SLC

The SLC gender profile is 54.94% of the workforce are female and 45.06% of the workforce are male.

——-	Female	Male
Gender profile %	54.94	45.06

4. Gender pay gap

The mean female hourly rate is 11.46% lower than the mean male hourly rate. The median female hourly rate is 4.63% lower than the median male hourly rate. There has been a slight increase in the gender pay gap in comparison to 2020. The following table details the gender pay gap figures for the last two years and highlights the change between the 2020 and 2021 figures:

	2021 Pay Gap	2020 Pay Gap	Change between 2020 and 2021
Median	4.63%	3.70%	+0.93%
Mean	11.46%	10.69%	+0.77%

5. Performance Related Pay - Bonus

The proportion of females receiving a bonus is 86.90% versus 85.94% of males. The mean female bonus pay is 12.91% lower than the mean male bonus pay. The median female bonus pay is 4.76% lower than the median male bonus pay.

——-	Female	Male
Bonus pay received	86.90%	85.94%

6. Pay by Quartiles

The following chart details the proportion of females and males in each of the four pay quartiles. The four quartile pay bands are created by dividing the total number of full-pay relevant employees into four equal parts from highest paid (upper hourly pay quarter) to lowest paid (lower hourly pay quarter). In SLC, women occupy 44.6% of the highest paid jobs and 59.5% of the lowest paid jobs.

——–	Male	Female
Upper hourly pay quarter (highest paid) – employees earning £16.03 per hour or more	55.39%	44.61%
Upper middle hourly pay quarter – employees earning £11.09 per hour or more	43.42%	56.58%
Lower middle hourly pay quarter – employees earning £9.50 per hour or more	45.32%	54.68%
Lower hourly pay quarter (lowest paid) – employees earning £7.26 per hour or more	40.51%	59.49%

From highest paid to lowest paid, the following table details the percentage of females in each pay quartile for the last two years:

	2021	2020	Change between 2020 and 2021
Upper hourly pay quarter (highest paid) – employees earning £16.03 per hour or more.	44.61%	44.46%	+0.15%
Upper middle hourly pay quarter – employees earning £11.09 per hour or more	56.58%	56.52%	+0.06%
Lower middle hourly pay quarter – employees earning £9.50 per hour or more.	54.68%	53.62%	+1.06%
Lower hourly pay quarter (lowest paid) – employees earning £7.26 per hour or more	59.49%	58.63%	+0.86%

7. What are we doing to close the gender pay gap?

SLC will continue to monitor progress against specific EDI action plans underpinning our three-year Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Strategy spanning 2020-23 which has gender equality as a core element. More information can be found on our equality and diversity page.

Ongoing monitoring and analysis of HR MI utilising high quality data will help SLC to understand our GPG and bonus pay gap data by variables including grade, directorate and region to target actions to deliver the most effective results. SLC also continues to undertake a number of activities aligned to our People Strategy with a focus on closing the Gender Pay Gap. Key projects are as follows:

7.1 Recruiting and Retaining Talent

Renewed focus on attracting, retaining, and recruiting from the widest possible talent pools to ensure a diverse workforce, specifically:

• Efforts are being made in terms of removing bias from processes. SLC is currently transitioning to blind recruitment where personal details are removed during the screening process and are considering other tools available to remove bias in the recruitment and promotion process.
• A commitment to normalising diversity in shortlisting, with a move away from all male shortlists where possible.
• Proactive targeting of areas/job roles where the data shows there is the greatest under-representation, setting of SMART sprint targets for improvement.
• Greater transparency in decisions regarding promotion and remuneration, including new hires.
• Succession planning and sponsorship – more overt with recruitment to encourage female applicants to apply for promotional opportunities. Building on existing mentoring and coaching, training line managers in coaching and consider reverse mentoring to support women and others who wish to progress into senior roles.
• Introduce a requirement on all interview panels to ensure a broad representation across panel members.
• A reliable and valid selection process, including education on the effects of unconscious bias to managers and other employees involved in the recruitment process through training and e-learning.
• Undertaking audits post recruitment to improve selection, for example by surveying successful and unsuccessful candidates around their experience of the application and interviewing process.
• Continued focus on our Emerging Talent programme; building apprenticeship, intern, and graduate programmes to enable better career paths for those starting their working lives.
• Building on the success of our previous returners to work campaigns to identify and deliver more women returners and to align with our focus on multi-generational teams.

7.2 Performance Management

We will introduce greater transparency regarding performance related reward processes to ensure managers understand that their decisions need to be objective, and evidence based:

• An integrated digital talent and performance management platform is currently being developed which aims to incorporate career pathways, competency mapping, the SLC behaviours and performance objectives. This will improve the fairness, consistency, and transparency in how performance and development is managed for all SLC colleagues as well as support better decision-making regarding performance related bonuses to reduce bias.
• Other key aspects of the integrated digital talent and performance management platform are ‘learning on the go’ which allows colleagues to continually engage with learning and increased collaboration which will ensure colleagues are assessed fairly and consistently with performance objectives being equal and aligned to strategic goals. Career coaching, buddying plus training and user guides on talent and performance management will also be provided. In turn, these tools will level the playing field so that all colleagues are treated equally, have increased opportunity for career growth and enjoy job fulfilment.

7.3 Pay and Recognition

Our continued commitment to pay and recognition has seen HM Treasury grant approval to reform our pay and grading framework which will be implemented across the business in February 2022. This will ensure that management decisions around pay are fairer, more transparent, and equitable for all colleagues regardless of gender, enabling a culture of reward and recognition for performance, skills and contribution.

7.4 Performance Related Pay

Work has already begun on the possibility of redesigning and reforming the long standing PRP process. We will continue to engage with Senior Managers and PCS to ensure any changes carefully consider fairness, transparency and any equality impacts as well as recognise best practice in this area.

7.5 Workforce Flexibility

As part of the Blend project, all colleagues who can work from home will have the opportunity to adopt blended working, balancing business needs and colleagues’ personal circumstances. The introduction of our new blended ways of working will have a positive impact on workforce flexibility for women and support working parents and carers as we continue to build on positive strides made in this area during the pandemic. We recognise the importance of providing flexible working for all colleagues and are updating our Flexible Working policy to reflect this. We are also considering other aspects and opportunities for flexible working such as greater access to part-time contracts and annualised hours.

7.6 Career Progression and Development

• Work continues on our newly introduced career pathway programme to bring colleagues the full suite of pathways in early 2022. Career Pathways will enable colleagues to take ownership of their professional development and provide flexible learning opportunities to support our existing and future female leaders and individual contributors at all levels to build a rewarding career at SLC.
• A suite of inclusive leadership development programmes will build the pipeline of senior talent in the organisation, deepening our leaders’ ability to build and develop diverse teams, and to support resilience and wellbeing. The introduction of our Senior Leadership and Executive Leadership development programmes will include a focus on gender equality in the workplace.

7.7 Diversity in STEM Roles

SLC are actively attempting to address the gender imbalance in STEM roles but acknowledge that the following activities have a longer yield time to effect results and the benefits may not be seen in the shorter term:

• Pledging our support to the We Are Tech Women network and participating in various STEM events to increase the number of women in technology roles in SLC.
• Joining a STEM Women Steering group set up by Skills Development Scotland and University partnerships.
• SLC will also be partnering with schools to encourage and support young women who are interested in STEM careers by promoting tech careers from S1-S6. This will also create a feeder pipeline for our Graduate Apprenticeship programme.
• These positive steps have already helped SLC to increase the proportion of women in technology roles.

An overall commitment to share Gender Pay Gap best practice using the SLC cross government and non- departmental public bodies networks and forge strong connections.

8. Staff included in the gender pay gap data

This report sets out The SLC’s gender pay gap based on the snapshot of data taken at 31 March 2021. The SLC data does not include agency workers or contractors as these are not included in the payroll. Agency workers and contractors will be captured in the gender pay gap reports of their employing entity.

9. Declaration

We confirm that data reported by the Student Loans Company is accurate and has been calculated according to the requirements and methodology set out in the Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties and Public Authorities) Regulations 2017.

Chief Executive: Paula Sussex