Gender Pay Gap Reporting

Content+Cloud Pay Gap Statistics for April 2020

We welcome the opportunity to publish our gender pay statistics as it allows us the opportunity to share our story, focus us on where we can improve and to make public our commitments to ensure future pay parity.  While there are areas in which we have made improvements, this is not enough, and we are continuing to strive to close the gap but have some way to go.

Firstly, let us look at the gender pay data. In April 2020, the median woman at Content+Cloud was paid 82p for every £1 paid to the median man, a pay gap of 18%.  This calculation was based on a total of 275 full pay relevant employees (as defined by the gender pay gap reporting regulations) consisting of 49 women and 226 men.

Just over 20% of men and women received a bonus in the 12 months to April 2020 and of those receiving a bonus, the median woman was paid 61p in bonuses for every £1 paid in bonuses to the median man, a bonus pay gap of 39%.

As we get behind the data to understand why and where this pay discrepancy exists, we realise that the gap is significantly impacted by the number of females vs males at each level of the business and this disparity is greatest at the most senior level.

Understanding the data helps us focus on what is going to make the biggest impact to closing the gap, which we recognise as hiring and promoting more females in the business.

Content+Cloud - Gender Pay Gap Report April 2020

To further test this we commissioned an additional report for each of the five lines of business to understand pay gap variance across the different teams.

What we learned is that the pay gap was significantly greater in the Commercial teams, where the male to female ratio in the sales teams is significant. The more senior sales roles are predominantly male and whilst this may be a representation of the Market in our sector, we recognise we need to do more to attract and grow female sales talent.

The deeper analysis also taught us that our Product and Services Team was significantly underrepresented in female talent back in April 2020 when the snapshot data is taken. We are pleased to say this already looks significantly more balanced and we look forward to reporting on that in our 2021 report.

Finally, we observed that our two other technical business units (Professional Services & Client Success and Delivery,) have a much more balanced pay distribution, in some cases, we saw female pay as greater than male counterparts in particular quartiles of that business unit. We will, of course, be monitoring any pay disparity, including if average pay is seeming to favour women.

To summarise, our median gender pay gap is the result of there being more women in the lower half of our pay scale compared to the upper half of our pay scale as is evident from the gender breakdown of the 4 pay quarters.

Pay Gaps are in fact Representation Gaps 

It is more relevant to talk about “representation gaps”.  To eliminate the gender “pay gap”, we need the same percentage of women in each pay half to begin with and then eventually the same percentage of women in each pay quarter.  Currently, 23% of our employees in the lower pay quarter are women which falls to 9% in the upper pay quarter.  Assuming for now that we continue to have a workforce that is 18% female, this means our goal should be for each pay quarter to have 18% women.

Our focus needs to be on more female representation to close the gap and specifically in the upper quartile. Since the April report last year, we have already made good progress to balance those ratios and are currently 21% female across the group of businesses an increase of 3% female representation.

Sharing Our Action Plan 

We believe data is our biggest ally which is why we have invested significant time and funds into understanding our position and our variances on pay across the locations, seniorities and locations. It was important for us to take the story much further than the government requirements. Having this level of insight allows us to focus on what we believe is going to make the biggest impact.

Since the April 2020 pay data, here’s a snapshot of actions already taken:

  • Established our first UK Diversity Council where 9 board members set quarterly goals and initiatives to propel us forward in our Inclusion Journey.
  • Published an Inclusion video to make a firm commitment of our desired end state.
  • Commissioned additional gender pay reports for each line of business.
  • Invested in a pay benchmarking tool, Cendex which allows us to real time analyse pay disparity internally within teams, and also versus the external market.
  • Partnered with an analyst to help us understand where we are failing and how we can most effectively close any gaps. This included an investment into an additional tool that can further segment the data allowing up to conduct a root cause analysis.
  • Conducted extensive Hiring Leader and Recruiter training on Inclusive hiring in Q2 this year and built an online Hiring leader training programme including a series of courses around biases in recruitment, selection and leadership.
  • Stopped asking candidates to declare their current salary on application, so that we pay based on the role, not on how much candidates might have been paid or underpaid previously.
  • Reviewed our HR policy to seek further opportunity to support women in the workplace which included a review of the Parental leave policy.
  • Sponsored a Women in Tech event where we took to the virtual stage to talk about Female topics such as juggling the work/life and managing menopause in the workplace.
  • Invested in 3 Female future leader talent MBA programmes, taking affirmative action in our training spend distribution
  • We have focused on supporting working parents and recognise that working mums are more likely to take the lion’s share of the childcare. This meant creating a parents and carers group full of useful resources, running an online Kids programme throughout lockdown to try and take the pressure off our working parents, including fitness, art and coding classes and various competitions and introducing a Core hour concept in response to the need to home school.
  • Reviewed and adapted our appraisal and annual pay review programme to build an additional step in the calibration exercise to ensure that ratings distribution is balanced, as our pay review is linked to our performance ratings.

We’re proud of the journey that we have been on since the April 2020 statistics and we feel confident that the changes and rigour that we have already put in place, together with future plans will ensure pay fairness across our teams. We are pleased to be able to report success metrics such as 75% of our senior leaders recruited in Q2 FY22 were female.

But we know there is so much more to be done and here are a few of the initiatives that we have already identified for the FY22 Roadmap:

  • Set ambitious targets for the Leadership team to tackle the pay disparity with continued focus on at a senior level.
  • Launch of Females at Content+Cloud Talent brand video to inspire future female talent
  • Further review and refresh of our HR policy with an intent to launch our Menopause Policy and further enhancing our Maternity policy.
  • Sponsoring and speaking at further Women in tech events
  • Launch an Early Careers talent programme which we see as an opportunity to take positive recruitment action and continue to grow female representation.
  • Continue with our ‘Let’s Talk’ series where we take a difficult topic and face it head on to build on our Inclusion strategy.

 We’re committed to our focus to reduce the gap by increasing representation, and to continuing to ensure that there is no pay disparity on a role for role basis.

We believe the tools, processes, governance, and leadership we have put in place will put us in the best position to reduce the gap, and also ensure pay equity more broadly across our diverse talent groups.

Yours sincerely,

Pete Sweetbaum
CEO
Content+Cloud Ltd