Gender Pay Gap 

Our perspective and our actions

Following the universal impact of the Covid 19 pandemic and the delay to the 2019 GPG reporting, we are keen to share our 2020 Gender Pay Gap report. This is such an important subject for us that, despite the optional delay, we want to continue and publish our up to date data. 

We are pleased to report a positive change in our mean gender pay gap. As with many organisations, an improving picture is not a perfect picture and we still have some steps to take on our road to true equality. We are proud of the progress we’ve made in our mean GPG, bringing it down significantly over the last few years however our median, whilst hovering around the same mark, has increased slightly.

Our sector continues to see a gender pay gap and our first aim must be to try and bring our GPG in line with the national mean average of 15.5% (all employees/April 2020). So what have we done and what are we doing:

Appointments and recruitment:

Leadership: Our new (ish!) Deputy Managing Director, Haley Farrell, was appointed via internal promotion in July last year to join our Managing Director, Esther Leach, in leading our business into the future.

We have established a new Corporate and Commercial department which is headed up by the brilliant Charlotte Mills who joins our leadership team and towards the end of last year, Ashlee Doyle was named as our new Financial Controller, also joining the leadership team.

Next generation leadership: Our recent intake of Associate Directors was 20% male/80% female, taking our Associate Director group to an approximate 30%/70% male/female split; we are really excited by our next generation of leaders and can’t wait to see them continue to grow.

Training: For a second year running, our trainee solicitor intake was 100% female. We are really proud that our 2021 trainee intake includes two mums - one very new, just back from maternity leave and another proud mum of a 5 year old girl.

Development, projects and activity:

We continue to strive to give open, equal, fair and transparent access to all of our development opportunities. We are reviewing our maternity/paternity offering and we have an active Working Parents Group, led by a fantastic team.

Our Diversity Team continue to support us in delivering brilliant, comprehensive Unconscious Bias sessions and they work closely with our teams who help us recruit via our MAPD Chats.

MAPD (Making A Positive Difference) is our guiding principle in all things and driving equality across every part of society - be that gender, race, sexuality, disability, neurodiversity or any other minority group - is a fundamental part of MAPD.