The government defines how the Gender Pay Gap must be reported. Northumbria University Services Limited (NUSL) is a subsidiary company of Northumbria University and reporting the NUSL Gender Pay Gap separately is a statutory requirement. The guidance for employers was last updated on 9 January 2024 and this guidance was reviewed before the pay gaps for Northumbria University and NUSL were calculated.
Headcounts given in this Pay Gap report are for staff who meet the government’s inclusion criteria. As the numbers include hourly paid and other infrequent staff, they will not match the overall headcount of salaried employees on the snapshot date. The snapshot date for this report is 31 March 2023.
How pay gaps are calculated
Government guidance for preparing data and carrying out the calculations is checked for amendments and updates as the first step in the reporting process every year. The government requires mean and median pay gaps, bonuses, and pay quartile breakdowns to be reported for gender. The same methodology is used to calculate the ethnicity, disability and intersectional pay gaps and the same metrics are reported.
From a ‘snapshot’ of employees on a specific date and their pay over a defined period, pay gaps are calculated by comparing average hourly rates of pay. Only 'full-pay relevant employees' are included. This excludes those receiving reduced pay due to leave (such as maternity leave). Hourly pay calculations consider differences in working hours by using a full-time equivalent measure for salaried employees and a twelve-week average for employees who work variable hours. Using hourly rate calculations allows for an accurate comparison between part-time and full-time roles, ensuring fair measurement by standardising pay across different work schedules. There are additional calculations for bonus pay gaps which include relevant and full-pay relevant employees.
Summary of Pay Gap Terms
- Full-pay relevant employee: an employee who is paid their usual, full pay during the pay period. Employees who receive reduced pay during the period, for example because they are on reduced pay sick leave, are relevant employees but not full-pay relevant employees.
- Mean: Mean is what is usually meant by average. Mean pay is calculated by adding up the pay of all employees and dividing by the number of employees. The mean can be skewed by very high or very low pay and may be more changeable from year to year than the median.
- Median: This is the middle value when hourly equivalent pay is ranked from lowest to highest. Half of employees earn more than the median and half earn less. It’s generally considered a better or truer measure of average pay than the mean, partly because it’s not distorted by very high or low values.
- Pay Quartiles: To create the pay quartiles, pay is split into four equal parts, each with the same number of employees, from the lowest to highest earners at the university. People in the lower and lower middle quartiles earn below the median and people in the upper middle and upper quartiles earn above the median. Imbalances within the quartiles lead to pay gaps.
- Equal Pay: Pay gaps are aggregate measures that can be influenced by a variety of factors, including the type of work. At Northumbria University, everyone is paid the same for doing the same work. The existence of pay gaps does not mean that pay is unequal for the same or similar jobs.
- Pay Gap: Pay gaps are the difference in average pay between groups of people at the university. It's not about individual positions but about how pay is distributed across all employees. The gender pay gap measures the difference in average pay between men and women. The ethnicity pay gap measures the difference between employees from minority ethnic backgrounds and white employees, and the disability pay gap measures the difference between Disabled employees and non-Disabled employees.
- Horizontal Segregation: This refers the clustering of groups of people into different types of jobs, which leads to pay disparities due different rates of average pay. For example, average pay for Professional Support roles is lower than average pay for Academic roles, and the proportion of women who work in Professional Support roles at Northumbria is greater than the proportion of women who work in Academic roles.
- Vertical Segregation: This term refers to how men and women are represented at different grades in the University pay structure, with more women than men in the lowest grades and more men than women in the higher grades, affecting the overall pay gap.
