The Pension Protection Fund (PPF) has today announced in its Diversity Pay Gap Report 2021 that efforts to increase ethnic minority representation across the business have resulted in a positive drop in their ethnicity pay gap.
At 31 March 2021, the PPF’s second ever ethnicity pay gap decreased from 23.15 per cent in 2020 to 15.6 per cent.
Katherine Easter, PPF’s Chief People Officer said: “We’re absolutely committed to making the PPF a fair and inclusive place to work, and an important part of this is monitoring our pay gaps to ensure we understand what is preventing our pay gaps being zero. This is why we continue to go above and beyond our statutory obligations and report our ethnicity pay gap.
“We’re pleased to report our efforts to improve representation across the business have reduced our ethnicity pay gap by 7 per cent, and the proportion of ethnic minority employees who receive bonus pay has increased by 21 per cent too in line with our increase in recruiting a more diverse workforce.”
The PPF has reported that an underrepresentation of ethnic minority employees in senior management roles and in business areas which command higher pay and bonuses, such as investment, risk and IT, are the driving factors for their current ethnicity pay gap.
To address this, the fund has set ambitious targets which will increase ethnic minority representation across the organisation to 30 per cent and within senior management roles to 25 per cent by December 2023.
Katherine Easter continued: “While we’re confident we’re doing all we can to increase ethnic minority representation across the business, our high retention rate, while positive, means we don’t have vacancies at every level that can create real change. To address this, we continue to invest in our people, and provide specialist training and flexible working so all groups, regardless of background, are fully represented at all levels across the PPF. We’re also working to change industry perceptions through the Diversity Project which is an initiative that champions a more inclusive culture in the savings and investment profession.”
The PPF has reported in its Diversity Pay Gap Report 2021 that they now have equal female representation and increased ethnic minority representation on their Board and Executive Committee.
Their gender median bonus pay gap significantly decreased from 31.02 per cent in 2020 16.21 per cent, and their gender median hourly rate of pay remained stable with a marginal increase of 0.15 per cent to 15.86 per cent.
Katherine Easter continued: “The marginal increase in our gender median hourly rate of pay is frustrating because our efforts to achieve gender parity have seen it narrow annually since we first started to report on it in 2017.
“We hope that by continuing to support initiatives that drive societal change like the Women in Finance Charter, and through nurturing our own female talent to become future leaders, we can remove our gender pay gap for good.
“While our gender pay gap hasn’t narrowed nearly enough, it is unfortunately a reflection of the gender imbalances in our sector and wider society.
“Pay gaps keep us focused on what we, as a society, value, and shines a light on the barriers some people face when they enter the workforce. While they don’t always highlight the work organisations are doing to achieve pay equality which might take years to realise, reporting them makes us all accountable for driving positive organisational, sector and societal change.”
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