Gender pay gap

We want all our staff to fulfil their roles and access opportunities equally – and gender pay reporting helps us towards this goal. Reporting on the gender pay gap is also a legal requirement, and uses gender-based terminology like women, men, male and female to show pay information calculated by gender. 

This is not to overlook our colleagues who do not identify as men or women, and we recognise that not all our colleagues identify using gender-based terminology. 

What's gender pay gap?

A gender pay gap is the difference between a man's and a woman's average pay, calculated using all roles across the organisation, expressed as a percentage. This means our gender pay gap shows the difference between average earnings for men and women across the whole charity, regardless of role. This can be confused with equal pay, which shows pay differences between men and women who carry out the same or similar roles or work of equal value.

In a gender pay gap calculation all earnings for men, and all for women are averaged out, and the difference is used to calculate our gender pay gap. 

 Having a pay gap doesn’t necessarily indicate unfair pay scales or rates, and it’s a common misconception that a gender pay gap means there is an equal pay issue or pay disparity within an organisation. What it can help to identify is the rates of pay averaged across all roles in the charity, comparing male average to female average earnings. But our pay gap cannot help us identify or address pay disparities without further analysis.  

Equal pay audits or reviewing pay bands, promotion and pay progressions, starting salaries, bonus and performance pay awards, retention data and flexible work and part time pay are all examples of things an organisation can consider whilst looking at a pay review in this way. 

What's our gender pay gap?

Data is taken from all employees on pay which has not been reduced by sickness, maternity, paternity, adoption, or other absence on the snapshot date (April 2024). 

Mean gender pay gap

The average of the figures for men and the average of the figures for women - calculated by adding up the hourly pay rates and dividing by the number of people. 

• From our mean gender pay gap on average women earn 16% less than men (up from 15.4% last year) 

• *This is above the Office of National Statistics (ONS) estimated national mean pay gap of 13.10% (ONS data from 2024) 

Median gender pay gap

The midpoint salary, or the salary right in the middle on a list of all the hourly pay rates of men and women from the highest to the lowest. 

• This is 23.5% which means that the median female employee is paid 23.5% less than the median male employee (up from 22.2% last year) 

Quartile pay bands

The quartile information is calculated by listing all salaries from highest to lowest and then splitting that information into four equal quarters to determine the percentage of male and female employees in each quartile. 

Upper pay quartile

Includes all employees whose standard hourly rate places them in the highest 25% of earners. 

• The proportion was 55.2% female to 44.8% male. 

Upper middle pay quartile

Includes all employees whose standard hourly rate places them above the median but below the upper quartile. 

•  The proportion was 82.1% female to 17.9% male 

Lower middle pay quartile

Includes all employees whose standard hourly rate places them below the median but above the lower quartile. 

• The proportion was 86.6% female to 13.4% male 

Lower pay quartile

Includes all employees whose standard hourly rate places them at or below the lower quartile. 

• The proportion was 82.1% female to 17.9% male 

Understanding more about the underlying causes for the gender pay gap

It can get complicated quickly when looking at data, and if we look at gaps for full-time vs part-time colleagues this further complicates the statistics2. Some differences that might be contributing to our gender pay gap include: 

• A higher proportion of male employees on London contracts, which attracts higher salaries, compared to females. 

• IT and Tech roles, which can also attract higher salaries, tend to attract more male candidates than female. 

• Many of our service provision, or advocacy and campaigning roles, which tend to be on lower pay bands have greater proportions of female candidates compared to male. 

• Colleagues on reduced or nil pay on 5 April 2024, are not included in the pay gap report, including anyone on maternity, sick, shared parental, paternity and work breaks, which tends to include more female staff than male. 

• **Sessional workers working on an ad hoc basis included in these calculations tend to be in lower paid roles, and in NDCS sessional worker roles are predominately filled by female workers. 

Learning from our data

We’re committed to gender pay equality and already have many effective measures in place to ensure fair payment at NDCS (like our agile organisation and pay structure, family friendly policies, flexible smarter working arrangements and wellbeing initiatives.). Although our mean gender pay gap is greater than the national average, we’re committed to understanding the gap, and any trends and reasons that might be contributing to it. 

• We introduced an agile organisational design in May 2023 which is focused on upskilling, coaching and developing our staff. 

• In March 2024, we appointed a full time Diversity, Equality and Inclusion post, and have an EDI Guild established in November 2024. 

• We’ll continue to review our recruitment processes to remove barriers and unconscious bias and encourage the internal promotion of our staff, including opportunities to work on squads. 

• We’ll widen our pool of possible candidates by encouraging applicants from genders not typical to the role, such as more women in IT and more men in our service provision, by continuing to advertise on diverse advertising platforms, using gender neutral language in our job adverts and highlighting our family friendly policies, flexible smarter working arrangements and wellbeing initiatives. 

• Through our learning and development programmes we will continue our commitment to developing the skills of our people, so they maximise their potential. We’ll encourage their take up of a broad range of e-learning options and keep a focus on coaching, mentoring, experiential workshops and a comprehensive evaluation framework. 

• We’ll continue to develop a more comprehensive data set to help understand the causes of our gender pay gap and work to address them. 

• We’ll learn from other organisations which have zero or smaller gender pay gaps. 

I confirm that the information contained in this report is accurate.

Maria Chambers
Chief Operations Officer

*Gender pay gap in the UK: 2024 online from the ONS 

** Decoding the gender pay gap online from the ONS