Oxford City Council releases annual statistics on gender pay gap

This is the first year that the City Council report has not included the ODS workforce (formerly Oxford Direct Services), and this is reflected in a change in the figures. This wholly owned subsidiary of the Council includes parks maintenance, refuse and recycling, and construction. ODS is now a separate company from the City Council and reports its gender pay gap data independently, under the terms of the Equalities Act.

In this first year that the workforces have been separated the gender pay gap shows that, averaged across the whole workforce ,women earn 10.2% less than men. In the previous two reporting years, which included the ODS workforce, the gender pay gap has shown that overall women earned slightly more than men (see Appendix 2 of the Gender Pay Gap report).

The Council’s workforce is predominantly female, i.e. 401 staff or 58% of the workforce, many at lower grades. The ODS workforce is overwhelmingly male at all levels of the organisation, i.e. 570 staff or 88% of the workforce, as at 31 March 2019.

Staff on the same salary point within each grade receive the same hourly pay, irrespective of gender.

The data shows that:

• mean gender pay gap (basic pay) is 10.2%
• median gender pay gap (basic pay) is 12.1%
• mean gender bonus gap for 11.6%
• median gender bonus gap is 9.26%
• proportion of male employees receiving a bonus is 83.7%
• proportion of female employees receiving a bonus is 84.2% .

Pay quartiles by gender - Oxford City Council

Addressing the gender pay gap

Success in closing the Council’s gender pay gap will be achieved through its employment policies and practices, including:

• training and organisational development initiatives to encourage and support greater levels of participation by female colleagues within higher graded roles in the Council
• employment policy and enabling technologies that facilitate greater flexibility in the time, place and manner by which work is performed to enable staff to achieve an effective balance between work and their home commitments
• and recruitment approaches and methods that promote the Council as an employer of choice and place to build a great career, with access to a range of flexible working arrangements.

These issues form an integral part of the revised Equalities Action Plan recently approved by Cabinet.

“This year’s report reflects the change in the balance of the way women and men are employed within the City Council’s workforce after you have removed the ODS workforce data. Most importantly, it also shows that women are still not reaching the highest levels of the organisation in equal numbers as men. We have strong policies to support flexible working, parental leave and career development, which are shown to support women’s career progress. We are actively addressing the barriers through a planned programme to support more women and BAME candidates to progress internally, and to attract more diverse external candidates.”

Councillor Nigel Chapman, Cabinet Member for Safer Communities and Customer Focused Services