It won’t come as a shock to those working to improve their equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) practice, but progress is not always straightforward.
We recently reviewed the EDI goals we set ourselves in 2023 and in this blog share insights on two specific goals.
- Undertaking an independent diversity audit looking at the makeup of the Access board, staff team, and relevant committees, identifying areas for development and the actions needed to address this.
- Being transparent about our gender and ethnicity pay gap data in order to identify inequalities and address any disparities.
We have just published the results from both, which can be found here. This is the second time we have conducted a diversity audit and the first time we have analysed the gender and ethnicity pay gap at Access. This blog focuses on what we have learned during this process. We hope that sharing this is valuable – offering some practical solutions and encouraging others when things haven’t quite gone as expected. We also want to reinforce the point that improving organisational EDI is a long-term process in which progress will sometimes be slow.
We encountered several challenges in conducting this work:
Balancing confidentiality with transparency as a small organisation
We’re a small organisation (currently with 12 staff members), and this means that the results of any diversity audit are very likely to be identifiable. When thinking about how to share the results of the audit, we spoke to a few different partners to understand how they managed the tension between being transparent about the diversity of the team and maintaining the privacy of their staff members. We solved this problem by deciding not to share certain more sensitive data points (such as sexual orientation, long-term health conditions, etc.). All the data has now been deleted, but our senior leadership retains access to the report and can use this to help us think about how to improve diversity and equity in the team. However, we are not publishing this potentially sensitive and identifiable data about our staff on our website.
The size of staff team also created a problem when we interpreted the results of the pay gap analysis. This kind of analysis usually occurs in much larger organisations, with those over 250 employees legally required to do so. We decided to carry out this analysis because we believe that being transparent about our own data can help encourage others in the sector to do so and contribute to a better collective understanding of how diverse and equitable the social investment sector is in the UK. However, this exercise did come with challenges. Because it is designed for much larger organisations, the departure of any one individual in a small organisation such as ours would significantly alter the results. We decided it was still worth going ahead, and as anticipated there are gender and ethnicity pay gaps within the organisation (but for the avoidance of doubt there are no issues with equal pay – in other words all staff are paid the same for doing the same role regardless of their protected characteristics). The presence of pay gaps is not a surprise and we will continue to work on it in our next set of EDI goals. It reflects the composition of the staff team – with less diversity (notably in terms of ethnicity) in more senior positions in the organisation. While there are no quick fixes here – this underlines the importance of other work we have undertaken in the past two years such as moving to recruitment processes that are as non-biased and as inclusive as possible.
We are hopeful that as more organisations in our sector conduct pay gap analyses enabling us to look across the social investment sector as the picture will be more meaningful with a bigger sample, we will be able to work together to improve diversity and equity in the UK.
It may take longer than you expect to make progress
Conducting a diversity audit and pay gap analysis had been on our list of EDI goals for quite some time before we were able to achieve both, and this is mostly due to a lack of internal capacity. We don’t have a dedicated team member focused on EDI, and although this helps ensure that each team member sees EDI as part of their job, it can also delay progress. We made progress on these two EDI goals by first bringing in an external consulting organisation (to conduct the first diversity audit) and then by bringing in a human resources consultant for six months to support us on this work and other HR priorities. The extra capacity that this consultant has brought to the team over the last six months has been instrumental in completing the diversity audit and pay gap analysis, and brought a valuable external viewpoint and expertise to the work.
This is the first blog in our EDI series, we will publish a second blog later in the year that will look at how we have made progress in measuring the reach of our investment.
