Commentary on the data
For gender pay, we’ve seen an increase of 1.94 percentage points in our mean pay gap, from 12.38% in 2023 to 14.32% in 2024.
The overall average hourly pay rate for females has increased by 4% since last year. However, the average hourly pay rate for males has increased by 6%. There are a few factors that have contributed to this:
- The top 10 earners this year are made up of three females and seven males, whereas last year it was four females and six males. The top five earners are all male this year – last year the top five earners were made up of four males and one female.
- A much lower proportion of males work in certain sectors of our workforce, such as less-senior, high-volume roles. This year, the proportion of males in an Administrator roles has decreased by a further 2% to just 15%.
- We’ve seen the proportion of females in Senior Associate positions decrease by 2% since last year – these generally command a higher hourly rate. This is partly due to female promotions to Partner level this year, a positive action that impacts our pay gap due to Partners being excluded from the statutory number.
Our mean and median gender pay gap figures are based on hourly pay.
The mean gender pay gap figure shows the difference between the average hourly pay of men and the average hourly pay of women.
The median figure is the difference between the middle man and middle woman in a list of hourly pay ordered from highest to lowest.
Our mean gender pay gap for 2024 is 14.32%
Our median gender pay gap for 2024 is 24.28%
Our ongoing commitment to implementing a robust diversity and inclusion plan means we have a solid understanding of the underlying business drivers behind the gender pay gap and the measures we can continue to drive forward to ensure we make positive progress.
Due to new guidance published by the government in 2023, we’re changing how we calculate our ethnicity pay and bonus gaps, bringing us in line with best practice and making our data more comparable with other organisations. As a result, the ethnicity pay gap in this report may look significantly different to previous years. To aid accurate comparison in this transitional year, we’ve included the pay gap figures using both methodologies, as well as rerunning last year’s numbers using the previous methodology.
For ethnicity pay, using the new, best-practice methodology and applying that to last year’s data too, we’ve seen an increase of 2.14 percentage points in our mean pay gap, from the 2023 reporting of -2.60% to -0.46% in 2024.
Using the previous methodology, we’ve seen an increase of 0.81 percentage points in our mean pay gap, from –5.54% in 2023 to –4.73% in 2024.
Our ethnicity pay gaps remain positive to those from minority ethnic backgrounds[1]. It should be noted that our ethnicity pay gap data is based on 70% of our colleagues who have voluntarily shared their ethnicity information, in contrast to our gender pay gap which is based on almost all colleagues’ data. We’ll continue to encourage more of our colleagues to share this information to improve our understanding of race and ethnicity in our workplace and future reporting.
The ethnicity pay gap data excludes our partners (Full Equity Members and Fixed Share Members), consistent with statutory gender pay gap reporting.
We recognise that we still need to do more to understand the make-up of our workforce by ethnicity, and to increase the overall proportion of colleagues from minority ethnic backgrounds, including at Partner level. Our new People Platform will support with collecting this data, and we’re actively progressing initiatives aimed at recruiting and retaining more diverse colleagues.
Our mean ethnicity pay gap for 2024 is
Our mean ethnicity pay gap for 2023 was
[1] For the purposes of this report, we’ve compared all colleagues who have selected a minority ethnic background with those who have selected a White background. This has been reviewed and updated this year to reflect all our other D&I reporting.