Mean and median salaries by gender at the Bank of England - March 2015 and March 2016

Date released: 13 September 2016

Disclosure:

Table below of mean and median salaries by gender at the Bank of England (the ‘Bank’) plus the number of male and female employees at each quartile band:

The ‘pay gap’ has been defined here as a measure of the difference between men’s and women’s average earnings across the organisation. It is expressed as a percentage of men’s earnings and based on full-time equivalent (‘FTE’) salaries post the Bank’s Annual Salary Review (‘ASR’).

This excludes staff on our graduate and school leavers programmes who are on a structured pay framework and not part of the ASR.

At the Bank we have set clear targets and made good progress in promoting gender diversity. The direction of travel is encouraging with female representation at senior management level increasing from 25% in 2015 to 28% in 2016. The Bank still has much to do to ensure we have a sufficient pipeline of female staff in our senior management team. Diversity remains a key pillar of the Bank’s strategy. Our goal is to attract and inspire the best people to public service.  We want people with diverse ideas, willing to challenge and debate, and we want them to feel empowered at all levels, to take the initiative. 

To support these objectives, we have introduced diversity targets that for the first time are reviewed and challenged regularly by the Bank’s Court of Directors. We have two Bank-wide targets for gender. The first is for 35% of our senior management staff to be female by 2020 (from our current 28%). The second is to have an equal split of men and women in the organisation at all levels below senior management by 2020 (from our current 44%).

The pay gap based on mean FTE salaries post the 2015/16 ASR (March 2016) was 18.7%, down from 19.7% at March 2015.  The equivalent figure for median salary was 26.4%, down from 27.6%. The main reason for the gap is the lower proportion of females in senior roles relative to males.  The organisation is comprised of 44% female employees and 60% of females are in the lowest two quartiles (55% of Q1 and 49% of Q2 are female). In the highest paid quartile, 32% of staff are female.  

The Bank has eleven salary scales encompassing all of the different roles undertaken at the Bank, with the Executive Directors across the Bank at Scale A.  The table below shows the pay gap at each of these Scales. What is clear from this is there is a much narrower pay gap for men and women within the same Scale.

Equal pay is about ensuring men and women in the same employment, performing equal work receive equal pay.  Although looking at the gap by Scale is a better measure than looking across the whole Bank, even within Scale there are a variety of different roles which can help to explain these gaps as different roles will command different salaries. 

The Bank is currently undertaking work to improve data capture on role types, to ensure we have the best data available to be able to monitor, and develop strategies to continue to address pay differentials. However, it is also important to view this in the wider context of education and employment in the UK and for the majority of roles we recruit for, the pool of candidates is predominantly male. In 2013 UCAS reported that only 27% of UK economics students were female. 

The Bank is committed to publishing its gender pay data as part of the new reporting requirements in April 2018 (based on April 2017 data).