Gender pay gap report

We are an equal opportunities employer, committed to the health and wellbeing of all our people. We believe that it is our people that make our hospital successful and everyone should have the opportunity to work in a motivated team, free from discrimination on any grounds.

We are committed to ensuring that we operate a pay and reward scheme that is competitive, transparent and fair. We aim to ensure we eliminate discrimination and reward the skills, experience and potential of all our employees.

“Gender Pay not Equal Pay”

A gender pay gap is a measure of the difference in the pay of men and women in an organisation, regardless of the nature or level of their work.

It is different from an equal pay comparison, which involves a direct comparison of people or groups carrying out the same work or work of equal value.

Our intention is to close any gap where it exists. To support us in doing this, it is important to understand where we sit in our industry as a starting point.

Our Industry

As with most health organisations, we employee more women than men. 80.8% of our population is female, and 66.7% of our team leaders through to our senior management team are female.  In comparison, we do not receive many applications from men for the lower quartile roles and is therefore an areas of focus in our action plan.

The working population of England is split nearly 50/50 between men and women. However, this is not reflected in the healthcare industry which is broadly 77% female and 23% male. We can see from this data that there is a challenge across the sector on how to attract more men into lower quartile type roles (e.g health care assistant and support roles). We are not immune from these sector wide challenges, and these trends can be reflected in elements of our data.

We are committed to closing the gender pay gap, and set out in this report the steps we have already taken in relation to this, in addition to the steps we will be taking over the next 5 years.

Gender Pay Quartiles

If we look at the split of females in each quartile, we can see that this is fairly evenly split over the four quartiles, however we can see a slight increase in the lower quartile.

We typically receive much greater numbers of female applicants for our lower quartile roles such as housekeeping assistants, customer services administrators and ward clerks, and therefore employ a majority of females in these roles.

Conversely, we employ a much smaller number of men in comparison to women. However, with the exception of Porters who are typically male, the majority of our male employees sit in management positions or are clinically trained and therefore earn a higher salary. This accounts for the apparent skew in gender pay quartiles in favour of the male upper quartile.

 

 

How can we improve our gender pay gap? Our commitment

Attraction

• As certain roles tend to attract certain genders, we will focus on our recruitment advertising campaign for these roles so that we can make the role appeal to both genders.
• We will be reviewing the language used in our adverts and the photography used to ensure to appeal to all demographics.

Work life balance

• Our flexible working policy is open to all colleagues, we need to highlight and reinforce to our teams our flexible working policy as well as shared parental leave. We have identified that the majority of our part time employees are female and therefore we need to raise awareness that flexible working is available to both genders.
• Hybrid working.
• We are trialling flexible working practices for senior women to ensure we retain our female talent.
• Continue to promote our annualised hours and ‘bank’ work options.

Company Policies

• We regularly review our policies and look for opportunities to further support colleagues balance their work and home commitments.
• We have implemented an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy and have champions across the business.
• We have recently launched our Menopause policy and have established Menopause champions across the hospital.

Training & Development

• Implement unconscious bias training to all team leaders to ensure our recruitment and hiring processes are free from bias.
• We have implemented Imposter training for female employees who wish to develop their career.
• We will continue to invest in our Leadership and Coaching culture to support and develop our leaders within KIMS Hospital including a Women’s Leadership Development Programme.
• We continue to build on our apprenticeship pathways, which will help, encourage and promote internal progression.
• We are rolling out equality and diversity training led by an industry expert to employees which raises the issues and challenges of gender and diversity.

Reward & Recognition

• Continue to develop our reward and recognition packages that attract the best people regardless of gender.

Review

• We monitor all Equality data at our monthly committee meetings and are starting to monitor gender pay. This data is also shared with the Hospital Board.