Ethnicity Pay Gap

Pay Gaps #32 – My Response to the Ethnicity & Disability Pay Gap Reporting Consultation

June 9, 2025 By Nigel

The government’s consultation on whether ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting should be made mandatory for large employers has now closed. I submitted a response in my capacity as a professional statistician with 7 years experience of helping employers to get to grips with pay gap reporting. My response was in two parts, a briefing note of the 9 statistical challenges that have to be confronted for a workable reporting system to be introduced and my answers to the 33 questions posed by the government in their consultation.

*** This post was updated on 9th June 2025 with links to my final response. Links to my draft response can be found at the end of this post. ***

Pay Gaps #30 – Why Disability Confident is the Template for Mandatory Ethnicity Pay Gap Reporting

February 3, 2024 By Nigel

In July 2023, the UK government’s finally published its response to its 2018 consultation on whether #ethnicity #paygap #reporting should be made mandatory for UK employers. A number of paragraphs from this response were quoted in an article published at the time in The Voice newspaper.

I want to go through two of those paragraphs because they highlight what is wrong with the current debate. I think the debate can be reset in a more productive direction if campaigners and the government were to focus on Action 71 of the Inclusive Britain action plan instead of Action 16. In short, those who wish to implement mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting should use existing Disability Confident reporting scheme as a template to build on and not copy and paste Gender Pay Gap Reporting.

Pay Gap Trends #7 – UK Ethnicity Pay Gap 2012 to 2022

January 3, 2024 By Nigel

In November 2023, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) resumed publishing estimates of the UK Ethnicity Pay Gap after a 3 year hiatus for the Covid19 pandemic. I have organised this data into a user-friendly (hopefully!) Microsoft Excel spreadsheet which allows you to see how the median hourly pay has changed between 2012 & 2022 for a variety of ethnicities & other categories. This article explains how you can use this spreadsheet and why you must look at ethnicity pay gap data in a different way than you would for gender pay gap data.

Pay Gaps #29 – Government Guidance on Ethnicity Pay Gap Reporting – My thoughts

June 14, 2023 By Nigel

Two months ago, the Department for Business & Trade (DfB&T) in collaboration with the Equality Hub (EqHub) and Race Disparity Unit (RDU) published Ethnicity pay reporting: guidance for employers. This is “guidance for employers on how to measure, report on and address any ethnicity pay differences within their workforce” and fulfills Action 16 of the government’s Inclusive Britain action plan. I was asked to write the draft version of this guidance and I have to confess to being disappointed with the final version published. I will explain why I am disappointed and why I have decided to publish an edited version of my draft as well.

Pay Gap Case Study #6 – How Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister

November 11, 2022 By Nigel

Rishi Sunak is the UK’s first Prime Minister from a non-white ethnic minority. Did this happen by accident or were the Tories working towards this day over the last 20 years?

A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald by an Australian journalist Latika Burke argues it was the latter. This is well worth reading because it goes into some depth about what the Conservatives did to get to this position. When I combine this article with what I have said before about closing pay and representation gaps, I consider the Conservative party to be a valuable case study for any employer who wishes to close their gaps.

Pay Gaps #25B – House of Lords’s debate on Ethnicity Pay Gaps – My thoughts

November 9, 2021 By Nigel

Is pay gap reporting about transparency or accountability? This was the main theme of the House of Lords debate on Ethnicity Pay Gap Reporting (EPGR) on 25th October 2021, unlike the Commons debate that preceded it in September. The 9 peers who spoke could be split between those who see EPGR as an exercise in employer transparency and those who see EPGR as an exercise in employer accountability and I consider this to be a fundamental question that has not yet been answered. In this article, I will discuss the implications of both answers to this question for any future EPGR legislation.

Pay Gaps #25A – House of Common’s debate on Ethnicity Pay Gaps – My thoughts

September 27, 2021 By Nigel

The UK Parliament debated Ethnicity Pay Gap Reporting (EPGR) on 20th September 2021 in Westminster Hall. Seven MPs spoke in the hour long debate and, as debates go, I thought it was actually quite good. There was cross party consensus on the merits of EPGR but I saw a divide between those who recognise EPGR is complex and requires trade offs and those who think the complexities of EPGR can be solved with government guidance.

Pay Gaps #24 – Briefing Note for Parliament’s debate on Ethnicity Pay Gaps

September 14, 2021 By Nigel

The UK Parliament is about to debate whether or not ethnicity pay gap reporting (EPGR) by UK employers should be made mandatory. The debate will start at 4.30pm on Monday 20th September 2021 and is a result of an e-petition reaching the threshold to require a parliamentary debate. To assist MPs, journalists, campaigners and anyone else interested in this debate, I have written a briefing note which lists 9 key points that need to be addressed during the debate.

Update 20th September – The Parliament TV link is here and my live-tweet thread is here.

Pay Gaps #22 – My 7 + 5 recommendations for amending UK pay gap legislation

June 30, 2021 By Nigel

When gender pay gap reporting was introduced by the government for the 2017 snapshot date for all employers with a headcount of 250 or more, it was made clear they would evaluate how the legislation had worked after 5 years. We are now in the 5th year of pay gap reporting and I would like to submit to the government 7 recommendations to improve the way employers’ data is reported and 5 recommendations to improve the data used in the calculations and to reduce various distortions.

Pay Gaps #21 – No employer has a gender & ethnicity pay gap! Let’s celebrate!

April 19, 2021 By Nigel

It’s April 2029 and the government is trumpeting the fact that no employer in the UK has a gender pay gap or ethnicity pay gap. All employers say that their median woman’s hourly pay is the same as the median man’s hourly pay and their median white employee’s hourly pay is the same as their median non-white employee’s hourly pay. Would you be joining in the celebrations?