Today’s 10 great gender pay gap narratives

10th August 2023

Samantha Gee

Way back in 2017/18, when gender pay gap reporting was new, we wrote a couple of blogs sharing some of the best voluntary narratives.

Those blogs are still amongst our most popular articles, and we’ve written quite a few since then! It’s clear an update is well overdue so I’m sharing some ‘top tips’ and a selection of good examples.

First off, what makes a good voluntary narrative?

Setting out the business benefits of an inclusive organisation, including that it is simply the right thing to do.
Clear and straightforward layout and language, with visuals that add value and bring your ‘story’ to life.
An authentic explanation of the situation with insights into underlying causes rather than spin or excuses.
Additional voluntary data and insights to give a fuller picture e.g. total cash gaps that include partners in partnerships, firms with more than one legal entity providing a combined picture.
Data from previous years – so that trends can be established.
A commitment to action with measurable goals – including an update on the progress made towards goals set last year.
Going further than gender – by including pay gaps in additional characteristics and inter-sectional reporting (e.g. white boys from lower socio economic status, black women). This enables the issue of pay gaps to be explored more fully.

And now for some examples.

It hasn’t been so easy to choose this time. There were a few hundred companies with narratives back then. For April 2022, over 14,000 organisations have published pay gap data and nearly half of these also provide a narrative.

Here’s ten that have caught my eye (in alphabetical order):

I realise there are many more organisations out there that are also doing this brilliantly and I apologies for not including them all!

In looking for good narratives, I’ve also seen some not so good examples. Here’s some suggestions of what not to do:

Repeat the published figures – the narrative provides an opportunity to ‘share your story’ and put the figures into context.
Provide a broken or incorrect link – there’s far too many rogue links from the gov.uk site taking you to home pages, annual reports, home pages and random website content.
Confuse equal pay and gender pay – ensure your data, messaging and actions go further than equal pay.
Defend the numbers – it’s more authentic to explain honesty what is happening and what you intend to do about it than to polish the message into a sales pitch.
Use the issue itself as a justification for the pay gap – I’ve seen pay gaps being ‘justified’ on the basis that there is a greater proportion of men in senior roles than women, or due to the gender mix of applicants.
Celebrate small year on year changes in figures – be cautious, small year on year changes may well be due to structural or people changes. It’s the trend, and the story behind the figures, that’s important.
Over-complicate your story – some of the bigger narratives have just become unwieldy and the reader is left none the wiser.
Publish a narrative just before the deadline – the figures will be a year out of date, and you won’t be leaving time to progress the any actions.

As at the date of this blog, 264 have published their April 2023 figures, and less than half of these have provided a voluntary narrative.

So there’s still time to create an authentic and informative narrative. We’d love to help!

Thank you to Jane Richards and Duncan Brown for your suggestions.

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At Verditer, we make reward more effective. Do get in touch if you’d like help with your pay gap calculations or narrative.

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