What Causes Our Gender Pay Gap?
We’re in a strong position in terms of attracting, developing, and retaining women and have a female-dominated workforce. In 2022, we were named by thelawyer.com as the only top 50 UK law firm where more than half the Partnership is female.
For the third year running, we were also recognised as one of the best firms in the UK for women to work for by the Great Place to Work Institute, ranking 19th. This ranking is based on the views of women about their workplace experiences.
The gender pay gap is a simple measure, calculating the difference between men and women's average pay, irrespective of their role and seniority. This means that when calculating the gender pay gap, any pay differences between men and women are much broader than when looking at Equal pay. Equal pay relates to the Equality Act 2010, which requires employers to give men and women equal pay if they are employed to do like-for-like work.
The demographics of our colleague population are the main contributing factors for our gender pay gap and gender bonus gap:
- A higher proportion of women work in certain sectors of our workforce, for example in less senior, high-volume roles, including paralegal, document production and contact centre roles, impacting the overall mean pay gap.
- A few high earners have an impact on our overall mean pay gap (if we remove the Top 10 Earners from the number (six males and four Females) the mean gap reduces).
- 19% of our colleagues across the business are part-time. 93.5% of our part-time colleagues are women, and, across our Associate and Senior Associate population (where bonus percentages are higher due to the construct of the bonus scheme), 91% of our part timers are women compared to 9% of men. These factors impact our bonus gap because our bonuses are based on a percentage of an employee’s actual salary, which will be lower for part time workers due to fewer hours worked in comparison to full time employees.
What do we have in place to ensure that our pay gap remains as low as possible?
Diversity and inclusion are key pillars of both the Responsible Business strategy and our People Plan. We are committed to providing an equitable platform for all our colleagues to thrive, and have several policies and procedures in place in order to support this:
We use gender-neutral language and consider the images and branding used in advertising roles and careers within the organisation. We also partner with organisations like Evenbreak and PRIME, which provide opportunities and access to people with disabilities and of lower socio-economic backgrounds respectively, so that we are recruiting people from a range of diverse backgrounds.
Our Hiring Manager guidance supports inclusive recruitment to give every candidate a level platform to showcase their potential. We provide advice, templates, and tips for avoiding unconscious bias and to give all candidates equal opportunities throughout the hiring process.
Our Flexible by Choice policy supports colleagues to work at a time, location, and in a way that is right for their circumstances. This was recognised as a key reason that women stay at Irwin Mitchell in the ‘Why Women Leave’ report (2023) by Encompass Equality Ltd.
As well as Maternity and Paternity, our Family Leave policy includes Adoption, Fostering, Surrogacy, and Shared Parental Leave, as we recognise that everyone’s situation is personal. This policy provides greater freedom for colleagues to do what is best for them.
We use our D&I dashboard to monitor the outcomes of colleagues from different backgrounds and use this to inform strategy and initiatives.
We ask about inclusion, wellbeing, and culture in our exit interview questionnaire to identify potential issues, which is used to inform people policy and strategy development.
Our reciprocal mentoring programme, which pairs senior leaders with junior colleagues from diverse backgrounds, was piloted with our diversity network IM Respect and will be relaunched with additional structure and guidance in FY25.
Our network groups play a vital role in shaping initiatives by harnessing the lived experiences of individuals within the business.
Further details on our commitment to inclusion and responsible business can be found in our Responsible Business Report 2023.