Understanding the Gender Pay Gap

The gender pay gap is the percentage difference of average pay between men and women. This is different to equal pay, which compares the pay of men and women doing the same job.

The gap is calculated in two ways; the mean average is the total of all salaries divided by the number of colleagues; the median average is the middle salary, when ordering them from lowest to highest.

In 2017, a new gender pay gap reporting legislation was introduced to organisations in England. This legislation requires organisations to report on their gender pay gap, in a specific way and to publish their results on the gov.uk website.

Although we aren’t required to report in-line with this legislation, we have chosen to as we want to be transparent and make our results easier to understand and share.

We’ve actually been reporting on our gender pay gap long before 2017, as this was already required under Welsh legislation, but the way in which we report has now evolved.

Our mean average pay gap is 14.4% and our median average is 5.7%.

The main reason for our gap is due to the balance of male and female colleagues working at different levels; more male colleagues than females work in senior roles; more female colleagues than males work at lower graded roles. This chart below shows the proportion of men and women in each quartile of our university pay structure in more detail:

Other universities may also report on their bonus pay gender gap, but we don’t currently have an organisation-wide bonus scheme. However, the exception to this is our clinical staff, whose salaries are determined by the NHS and are beyond our control. Any  payments awarded to individuals in this group have been captured in the overall gender pay calculations, and will therefore have impacted on our pay gap.

Our gender pay gap is decreasing, and has been for some time, but we need to keep working hard to reduce it further.

We aim to build gender equality monitoring into everything we do. We continuously look for ways of making a positive change and strive to learn from each and every opportunity that we identify. Just some of our areas of focus include: 

Supporting our Female Academics

We strive to do everything we can to enable all academic colleagues to work to their full potential. As part of this, we continually review contributing factors, to ensure that our female academics, in particular, feel confident to apply for academic promotion.

We do still have an underrepresentation of females at professor level in particular, which negatively impacts our gender pay gap, but we are working to improve this and have seen some positive improvements.

There’s been a 58% increase in the number of successful female applicants compared to 2015 and 16 new Professors were promoted during the reporting period, 50% of which were female. Our percentage of female Professors has risen from 13% in 2014 to 26% in 2022. This compares to the UK sector benchmark of female professors at 28% (Advance HE Statistical Report 2021).

In addition to investing in our Academic Career Pathways, we continuously benchmark our approach to fairness in pay. As a result, in 2019 we increased our professorial base rate of pay. The increase benefitted 40% of our female professors and 13% of our male professors at the time. This increase continues to benefit academics who join our organisation at, or are promoted to, that level.

Development & Personal Progression

Our sector leading Professional Development Review (PDR) system enables staff to formally have a meaningful conversation regarding their personal development. PDR’s are in addition to our other development initiatives, such as our mentoring program, and for the last 10 years 99% of colleagues have completed their annual PDR.

Since 2012 the number of females working at grade 9 and above, in Professional Services, has more than doubled and represented 53% of this group in 2022.

We also invest in career development and training programs, to specifically assist in closing the gender pay gap. For example, we proudly offer the Aurora Leadership program to our female colleagues. Aurora provides an opportunity for women to influence their institutions and to develop leadership skills, which in turn supports them to progress to higher graded roles.

During this reporting period, the University  continued its programme of change following the start of a significant restructure in 2021 with seven colleges and schools merging to form three faculties. As a result of ensuring positive action during this process, the representation of women across the Faculty Executive Teams is gender balanced.

Athena Swan

We are one of just 27 UK universities, and the only Welsh University, to hold an Athena Swan Silver Institutional Award. The accreditation recognises advancements of gender equality in terms of representation, progression and success for all.

In addition to our silver institutional award we also hold three silver departmental awards (Engineering, Psychology and Health and Social Care and Medicine) and seven bronze departmental awards (Biosciences, Arts and Humanities, Computational Foundry, Geography, Law, Management and Physics).

Our Athena Swan action plans reinforce our commitment to equality in pay, including improving our gender pay gap.

Mentoring, Networking & Events

Alongside our formal development programmes and schemes, the University places great importance on building women's confidence in the workplace. Whether that be through facilitating networking opportunities; providing mentorship; or encouraging staff-led support groups, we encourage everyone to get involved.

Our Academic Mentors continue to provide valuable support to fellow colleagues, and we’ve seen voluntary participation increase from 21 female and 18 male mentors in 2017/18 to a total of 88 female and 78 male mentors in 2021/22.

During the reporting period of 2021/22 a number of exciting virtual and face to face events took place across the University. Of particular note, was a programme of events to mark International Women’s day in March 2021, which included interactive open conversations, mentoring opportunities and engaging workshops with the aim of celebrating the social, economic and cultural achievements of women within the wider Swansea University community.

Work-life balance

We want all colleagues to have the right work-life balance. We invest in our benefits and wellbeing package, which includes our flexible working and family-friendly leave arrangements.

We are proud to be  part of the Employers for Carers membership programme, and we were the first Welsh HEI to join This offers access to a range of resources to help us support our staff who juggle work alongside caring responsibilities.

We introduced an agile working policy  in response to the COVID19 pandemic. At that time, the policy was beneficial to female colleagues in particular, by increasing flexibility to manage work and personal commitments especially during national school closures. We continue to have an agile policy  and have embedded it within the organisation, highlighting our commitment to ensuring colleagues have access to tools and resources to support their work-life balance. In doing this, we hope to remove any barriers that might otherwise prevent people from reaching their full potential, regardless of their gender and life commitments.

Real Living Wage

In June 2020 we proudly became an accredited Real Living Wage employer and implemented the Government’s Real Living Wage salary rate benefiting more than 1000 of our lowest paid employees. This increase benefitted 63% of our female colleagues compared to 37% of male colleagues all of which has contributed to closing the gender pay gap.

Leavers

The University Voluntary Severance Scheme remained open to colleagues that met the criteria throughout the reporting period. Analysis of colleagues who chose to leave the University via this scheme during the reporting period of April 1^st 2020 and 31^st March 2021 shows that the majority of women who left were in lower graded roles and the majority of men who left were in higher graded roles, this therefore had a positive impact on closing the gender pay gap.

Recruitment and Reward

We have taken steps to embed positive action when recruiting and remunerating senior academic and senior professional services colleagues.  Enhancements were made using sector (UCEA) benchmarking guidance to award salary levels in line with industry specific benchmarks. This process has already positively impacted on our gender pay gap and will continue to do so for years to come.

Looking Ahead

Since the reporting period of 2021/22:

The Joint Schools of Psychology and Health and Social Care have been successful in their silver Athena Swan renewal and work has continued on the action plans of our department silver and bronze level awards as well as our Institutional silver award.

Advance HE have recently announced that professional services departments now have the ability to apply for Athena Swan awards and we will therefore be actively encouraging our Professional Services Directorates to take the opportunity to submit for their own awards. We  expect an application to be submitted from Library Services in the next 12 months.

At the close of the reporting period the University appointed Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI)  leads within each School and Faculty. This further reinforces our commitment to providing  colleagues with a supportive environment that’s free from discrimination and enables all staff to fulfil their personal potential. Since the reporting period work has begun to establish a structure of EDI governance that will provide a two-way reporting mechanism to enable us to advance gender equality, including reducing our gender pay gap.

We are encouraged by the continued progress made to reduce our gender pay gap but acknowledge we still have a way to go to achieve gender pay parity. We will continue to be proactive and innovative in pursuing various activities to reduce the gender pay gap further which will include fostering an inclusive environment in which females will not only be encouraged to join our University but empowered to progress and develop.