Change the Race Ratio has been supporting and encouraging its members to voluntarily report their ethnicity pay gaps since its launch in 2020. The campaign represents one of the largest groups of businesses who are reporting their ethnicity pay gaps, with 79% of our members voluntarily reporting their pay gaps. We represent 80 leading businesses who collectively employ over 600,000 employees in the UK.
Our members have been leading the way and voluntarily reporting their ethnicity pay gaps, for the past 12 months we’ve been working on their behalf to ensure they have a strong voice in the consultation.
In February members had an opportunity to join Equalities Minister Seema Malhotra MP at a private roundtable discussion on pay gap reporting and we have been consulting on a 1:1 basis as well as taking part in the Office for Equality and Opportunity roundtable discussions during the consultation period.
We support the introduction of mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting. The proposals set out in the consultation document largely reflect the approach that Change the Race Ratio members have adopted in voluntary reporting. We support the principle of mirroring the process firms follow for gender pay gap reporting. Businesses understand this process and therefore close alignment minimises the time and additional cost for businesses to implement this measure.
In two important areas – the definition of binary reporting, and the guidance for disaggregated reporting – we feel the recommended approach risks adding confusion and complexity to ethnicity pay gap reporting and could lead to distorting the pay gap data. Our recommendations to simplify the proposed approach are to
- Mandate the binary reporting to compare the White Group against all other categories, (removing non-British white employees from the ethnic minority side of the calculation). Reporting the binary gap using White British as the majority definition should only be used as a last resort if businesses can’t achieve the required threshold of 10.
- Disaggregated reporting should be encouraged to the five ethnic groups. Further disaggregation, whilst desirable, adds undue complexity and should be reviewed at a later date.
- Ensure guidance on disaggregation also presents businesses with the option of reporting a binary gap and a separate gap for a specific group (i.e. a black pay gap) this has proved beneficial for our members and supports a pathway to further disaggregation.
To read our full response to the consultation please download your copy in the link below.
