Gender pay gap information

All organisations with more than 250 employees must publish data on their gender pay gap. This includes the mean gap, the median gap and the proportion of female and male employees in each quartile band.

Organisations must also publish data on bonuses, however Victim Support does not pay any employee a bonus, so this is not relevant.

What is a gender pay gap?

The term gender pay gap refers to the difference between what is paid to male and female employees when analysed collectively.

Mean, median and quartile bands

The mean is the average of a set of figures. The median is the middle number of a set of figures when they have been ranked by size.

Quartile bands divide data organised by size into four equal parts, with the first quartile showing 0-25% of the data — the lowest numbers — and so on.

Victim Support data

Victim Support does have a gender pay gap. For the financial year 2019/2020, women’s mean pay is 13.2% lower than men’s, while women’s median pay is 3.3% lower than men’s. As mentioned above, no employee receives a bonus at Victim Support.

The distribution of employees across quartile bands is:

Female Male
Quartile 1 (lowest pay) 88% 12%
Quartile 2 90% 10%
Quartile 3 86% 14%
Quartile 4 (highest pay) 76% 24%

Why does Victim Support have a pay gap?

The Victim Support workforce remains predominantly female, with 847 women (85%) and 153 men (15%). Women have roles which span from the lowest to the highest paid positions.

There is no evidence that our gender pay gap is caused by differences in pay for men and women working in the same role or position.

The gap arises because the ratio of women to men at Victim Support decreases at higher levels of the organisation — meaning there is a higher percentage of men in managerial positions when we compare this to the percentage of men and women in more junior roles. This influences both the mean and median gaps.

What action is Victim Support taking?

Victim Support is committed to eliminating the gender pay gap. It has taken the following actions to achieve that end:

  • Changed application forms to remove current pay so that pay offered by VS is not distorted/impacted by external historical factors and purely focuses on the VS relative value of a role.
  • Developed a new Pay & Reward Policy which sets clear objective criteria for establishing pay on entry and introduces an objective review for Out of Cycle pay reviews (Pay Review Committee). Developed clear objective criteria for receipt of allowances.
  • Reviewed individual Salary Bands to assess and address equality issues arising in terms of gender (this will be extended to BAME as EDI data completion improves)
  • Developed a suite of specific Job Factors objective marking criteria directly related to the VS Competency Framework to support job evaluation analysis and we are looking to introduce an additional step of having a panel review Job Evaluation outcomes to ensure any potential bias is eliminated.
  • Developing a performance management framework to facilitate objective assessment of performance in the event performance related pay is pursued in the future.
  • We continue to benchmark VS jobs against comparable XpertHR salary data to maintain an external objective perspective
  • During 2020 an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion audit of recruitment practices was carried out (covering all protected characteristics, including gender). As a result of this audit we have revised the EDI statement in job packs, shared our staff demographic data so prospective applicants can see who we are and continue to implement further actions to embed equality across our recruitment

The senior management team continues to consider ways to:

  • Encourage talented women to join and build their careers at VS
  • Develop front line managers in our operations and contract management
  • Build an inclusive culture which we know is important for both our female and male colleagues to thrive
  • Work with the Gender Empowerment Network group to explore further steps that can be taken to address the gender pay gap
  • Promote VS’s family-friendly policies such as flexible working, working from home and family leave (including maternity, adoption, shared parental and parental & paternity leave) which outlines the support provided to parents when returning to work after family leave.