We have published our first Gender Pay Gap report
We are committed to supporting all of our colleagues – the people who are behind the critical services the UK relies on every day and who take personal pride in the way we deliver our services to the public.
Our first Gender Pay Gap report as an independent organisation is an important step – in terms of demonstrating transparency and our commitment to achieving equality of opportunity for women in our workplace.
The underlying reason behind the mean gap is predominantly due to the smaller representation of women we have across all levels of roles and a higher representation of males in more senior leadership roles. The utility sector is typically male-dominated, and this is reflected across our workforce. We recognise that we have an under representative group of females in some of our more highly skilled roles which is contributing to our pay gap as we have a predominance of highly qualified males in higher-paid roles.
Summary of the key findings:
- Women make up 18% of our overall workforce and hold 24% of management positions.
- We have a mean Gender Pay Gap of 13.7% favoring males. This is 0.2% below the national mean as reported by the Office of National Statistics, 2022.
- Our median Gender Pay Gap is sitting at 8.7%. The median is the difference between median hourly earnings of males and females. This is well below the national median (14.9%) as reported by the Office of National Statistics, 2022.
What are we doing to reduce the gap? Here are some of our next steps:
- We are committed to increasing greater female representation across the organisation and have a number of initiatives underway, as we strive towards a more gender balanced organisation.
- We are building on our recruitment approaches, ensuring we have a greater gender balance in potential candidates. As part of this, we ensure our recruitment imagery and language is fully inclusive, reflecting the diverse communities within the areas we operate in.
- We will proactively engage different sectors of the job market and creatively maximise different channels to promote our employer brand.
- We are broadening our network to work with different agencies and job boards who are committed to increasing the proportion of female candidates identified for new roles.
- We will establish a Diversity & Inclusion Committee that has Executive Sponsorship and is supported by Diversity & Inclusion Champions from across the organisation to encourage and embrace opening dialogue and building awareness.
- We will begin partnerships with the Women in Engineering Society and Women in Utilities Network.
- We are committed to building an organisation that leverages individuals’ unique talents so that every interaction at Avove is authentic and responsible. We have developed an action plan that supports our objective to bridge the gap.
Our business is all about people. This is why one of our key priorities is to create an inclusive culture that is values driven and makes Avove a great place to work, where everyone feels valued and trusted. Our sector continues to face gender balance challenges and we are committed to address the gap at all levels. To support this, we are focussing on attracting and retaining women across the business in STEM careers
Avove, People & Culture Director, Becky Kimber
We recognise that as a sector we face a number of challenges in achieving true equality of opportunity, and our first Gender Pay Gap report does somewhat reflect this position. Given our progress to date, I am extremely optimistic with the commitment across the entire Avove team, that we will go a long way to ‘correcting’ the balance and we will continue to improve our position at pace. As an Executive Team, we want to lead in this area and become real ‘disrupters’ in the creation and development of our talent pool – a key driver that underpins our progression as a business.
Avove, Executive Chair, Mark Perkins