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In-Depth Gender Pay Gap Reporting and Legal Compliance Support
We have voluntarily published our gender pay gap report for January 2024, confirming that we have a negative gender pay gap. We believe that we are one of the only legal services business in the UK to achieve this. You can find below our report from April 2020, prior to the significant progress that we have made.
OUR 2024 GENDER PAY GAP REPORT
At Wright Hassall, we’re committed to building an exceptional place to work, and to ensuring that diversity and inclusion is built into everything that we do and that we are seen to be leading the way in our practices.
We aim to be a diverse and inclusive business where our people feel empowered, supported and, above all, treated fairly, and in line with our FAIR values.
As part of our commitment to Equality, Diversity & Inclusion, we are actively working towards ensuring equity of pay and no gender pay gap.
As a business, Wright Hassall has not been legally required to publish our gender pay gap results since April 2020. Organisations of over 250 employees are required to publish their gender pay gap every 12 months providing a snapshot of the gender balance within their business.
What is the gender pay gap?
The gender pay gap measures the difference between the median and mean average earnings of all male and female employees, irrespective of their role or seniority. It is not based on ‘equal pay’, which looks at the salaries of men and women doing the same or similar jobs within an organisation. The Equal Pay Act, which prohibits any less favourable treatment between men and women in terms of pay and conditions of employment, has been in place since 1970.
Why are Wright Hassall publishing their gender pay gap voluntarily?
As part of our commitment to diversity, Wright Hassall has decided to voluntarily publish our employees’ gender pay gap to increase both transparency and equality. We are committed to sharing this data each year. As we are voluntarily reporting this information, we are able to provide data based on almost real-time information rather than on information from the previous year.
We therefore wanted to share our progress on reducing our gender pay gap since we last published the results in April 2020. We reported at that time, there was a 33.6% mean hourly pay gap and a 40.3% median hourly pay gap. This represented an increase from our results in 2018 when the mean gender pay gap was 34% and the median gender pay gap was 37%.
What changes have Wright Hassall made since the 2020 gender pay gap survey?
Since 2020, we have been actively focusing on reducing our gender pay gap. We have undertaken the following actions since then:
• Implemented a company wide career structure
• Introduced unconscious bias training to all of our employees
• Introduced new bonus schemes which provide the same opportunities for men and women to achieve a bonus
• Developed our approach to family friendly and hybrid working enabling our employees to better balance home and work life
• Introduced clear and objective promotion structures and opportunities
• Continued improve our recruitment processes in line with our Diversity Charter
• Achieved an overall Partner male/female ratio of 50:50
• Considered the impact of the gender pay gap when recruiting new colleagues, especially for senior level positions and when promoting colleagues.
We have also continued to enhance and embed our family friendly policies whilst embracing flexible and hybrid working.
By applying these principles, we have been able to significantly improve Wright Hassall’s gender pay gap. As of January 2024, we have reduced our mean gender pay gap from 33.6% to 2.2% and our median gender pay gap from 40.3% to -22% (minus 22%). In comparison, the UK average Median pay gap in 2023 was 14.3% and the legal sector average median pay gap in 2022/23 was 22.7%. Our significant reduction in the gender pay gap has been accelerated by a number of our colleagues transferring from Wright Hassall to Williams Lea although we had already achieved a significant reduction in July 2023's figures prior to the transfer.
We are proud of the significant reduction that we have have made over the last 3 years and that we have moved to a position where we have removed the median gender pay gap within Wright Hassall. We are committed to maintaining our position in the future and we will continue to monitor and publish our gender pay gap information voluntarily.
We are not aware of many other legal firms who have reported a negative gender pay gap and we are committed to continuing to lead the way in this are.
How are Wright Hassall going to maintain our gender pay gap?
Our Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Charter is focused on ensuring that we have clear commitments regarding recruitment, nurturing our talent, training and development and our culture as well as continuing to raise awareness amongst our colleagues and it’s through these changes and continuing our focus that we will continue to maintain our gender pay gap ratio.
Quartiles are calculated by ranking the pay for each employee from lowest to highest. The list is then divided into four equally sized quartiles, each containing approximately 45 colleagues at Wright Hassall.
The number of women in the Upper Quartile has increased significantly since January 2023. This followed both our promotion process in May 2023 and the changes in our workforce. This has led to a decrease in the other quartiles as our female colleagues were promoted and our profile of employees changed.
This shows a 1.5% difference between the percentage of men and women being paid a bonus for their performance in 2022-23. This represents an improvement on our 2020 figures which showed that 7% of females received a bonus and 10% of males received a bonus.
Since the introduction of our EPIC and Success bonus schemes, we are confident that all of of our employees have the same opportunity to be awarded a bonus. Our EPIC fee-earning scheme is based on clear and consistent targets whilst our non fee earning scheme is based on individual performance against objectives. In 2022-23, our non fee earning scheme provided a bonus to more females than males.
I confirm the data reported is accurate.