Intersectional Pay Gaps in Higher Education 2023-24 is UCEA’s fifth annual report to provide a detailed analysis of gender, ethnicity, disability and intersectional pay gaps. It showcases the progress that is being made in the sector to reduce pay gaps.
The detailed and sector-specific data that is contained within this new report evidences a continued commitment from 107 UCEA member institutions to address pay gaps. It also supports UCEA’s focus on UCEA’s Employee experience Five Pillar Programme of work (Pillar Three) which is titled 'Promoting inclusion to address equality pay and pension gaps'.
The publication reports on HEIs’ local action planning across four thematic areas: recruitment, promotion, employment policy and organisational culture. The analysis also includes voluntarily data reporting on disability pay gaps from 83 HEIs. Alongside ethnicity pay gaps data, this report shows the sector is well prepared for the Government’s Equality (Race and Disability) Bill, which proposes to extend statutory pay gap reporting to both ethnicity and disability.
Key findings include:
- The median gender pay gap in higher education is 11.5%, which is substantially lower than the median pay gap in the wider economy (13.1% in 2024);
- The median ethnicity pay gap in higher education stands at 4.8% in 2024, which remains considerably lower than the median ethnicity pay gap when the survey was first introduced (5.8% in 2020);
- At the median HEI, the median disability pay gap is 8.2%, which compares favourably with the median disability pay gap in the wider economy (12.7%);
- The intersectional approach shows that gender pay gaps exist within ethnic groups and ethnicity pay gaps exist within genders.
The report can be found via the following link:
