On the go: Nest has recommitted itself to closing its ethnicity and gender pay gaps, following the publication of data showing more work is needed to achieve parity.
The government-backed master trust compiled and published the figures in accordance with recommendations made in the McGregor-Smith ‘Race in the workplace’ review, a practice Nest hopes will become commonplace throughout the industry.
The pay gap is produced not by differential rates of pay between those doing the same job, which is illegal, but as a result of different levels of representation in higher-paying, higher-status jobs at an organisation.
Nest’s figures show that, while progress has been made, both the ethnicity and gender pay gaps still stand at 8.6 per cent. This represented a fall of 5.7 per cent for the median gender pay gap, down from 14.7 per cent over the year, while the equivalent fall for the ethnicity pay gap was 8.1 per cent, down from 16.7 per cent.
The improvement was achieved by hiring more women into new and existing positions, the figures showed. Women now make up 45 per cent of Nest’s directors, up from 37 per cent in 2019, while parity has been achieved across the whole workforce where previously there had been an imbalance in favour of men.
Meanwhile, people from black, asian and minority ethnic backgrounds are already overrepresented, comprising 28 per cent of the workforce compared with 13 per cent of the general population of England and Wales, as per the last census in 2011.
Nest has set a number of targets for further improvement, among which is a commitment to having at least 30 per cent of its executive team made up of women and at least 13 per cent of black and minority ethnic people by 2025.
It is likewise looking to have two black directors by 2025, while it has changed its recruitment and selection policy to ensure gender-balanced interview panels at every stage.
Other measures include mandatory “diversity training” for all staff and dedicated training for hiring managers, and setting up six working groups to look for various protected characteristics, each of which is setting targets of its own and holding all-staff “talk about race” sessions.
Commenting on the data, Helen Dean, chief executive at Nest, said: “The first step to solving a problem is identifying, quantifying and understanding it. While we are making progress, I want us to do much, much better.
“The data makes it clear we still have a long way to go and we will be digging further into the data to more fully understand in particular how ethnicity impacts on people’s careers at Nest.”
Dean continued: “By ensuring Nest’s workforce is as diverse as its membership, from the executive level down, we will help play a key role in changing the wider industry for the better.”
Richard Lockwood, chief financial officer and diversity and inclusion lead at the master trust, added that Nest’s success in achieving its past goals “shows our commitment to achieving and exceeding a target once we set it”.
“Last year, the Black Lives Matter movement focused global attention on the inequalities faced by black people. At Nest, we took a long, hard look at ourselves and realised that while we had been focusing on improving our gender representation, we needed to work simultaneously on addressing racial inequalities in our organisation and not see these as sequential problems to be tackled,” he said.
“We have work to do to address our ethnicity pay gap and our focus will be on meaningful action. I am confident we will see positive change as a result.”
