- Conference
- 2024 National Higher Education Conference
- Date
- 18 September 2023
- Decision
- Carried as Amended
Despite the Equal Pay Act coming into force over 50 years ago, there remains a persistent gender pay gap on university campuses across the United Kingdom. According to the Times Higher Education (THE), the mean pay gap in Higher Education in 2020 – 2021 was 14.8% which was higher than the UK average of 11.3%. Of the 109 institutions reported in THE, 10 had mean hourly pay gaps at or above 20% and an additional 31 reported mean hourly pay gaps between 15% & 20%.
While there had been some progress made in narrowing the gap, that appears to have stalled despite initiatives such as Advance HE’s Athena Swan Charter and Aurora leadership programme. The employers’ body, UCEA (Universities & Colleges Employers Association), have shown little enthusiasm to actively engage in genuine partnership work through the New Joint Negotiating Committee for Higher Education Staff (JNCHES) instead preferring to hide behind an excuse of a limited mandate and focusing instead on producing limited guidance for employers.
It is important that the gender pay gap is not considered in isolation and more must be done to fully understand the impact of multiple pay gaps. While work is at an early stage on ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting, research suggests that the gender pay gaps faced by Black or disabled women are higher. This means that work to close the gender pay gap must also pay attention to the intersectional profile of the workforce.
Conference believes that we need branches who are able and willing to work with their employer on a local level to tackle the gender pay gap and that they need the support from the Service Group Executive to deliver real change for members.
Conference calls on the Higher Education Service Group Committee to:
1)continue to include calls on the employer to end the gender pay gap as part of the annual pay claim;
2)work with the National Women’s Committee to campaign to combat and smash the gender pay gap and consider adapting UNISON’s “Bridge the Gap” campaign for Higher Education;
3)work with the National Women’s Committee to promote negotiating guidelines to support branches to negotiate local action plans to close the gender pay gap;
4)work with the Learning & Organising Services team (LAOS) to develop bitesize training on understanding the gender pay gap and how to develop meaningful action plans to close the pay gap;
5)collate the annual published gender pay gap reports of UK HEIs and publish a short report that outlines the reported gender pay gap and tracks how this has changed at the reporting institution over the years;
6)consider submitting a joint bid with the National Women’s Committee to the Campaign Fund to commission research on the gender pay gap in Higher Education and the impact initiatives such as Athena Swan and Aurora are having on closing the gap;
7)include a session on tackling the gender pay gap at a future Higher Education conference or branch seminar.