It’s time for UK higher education to close the ethnicity pay gap

Rachel Reeves’ pre-election promise to use primary legislation to end the UK’s gender pay gap “once and for all” is the latest manifestation of a long-overdue push in recent years to do just that.

The new chancellor’s pledge won’t be easily fulfilled, however. At the last count, in April 2023, the UK still had a gender pay gap of 14.3 per cent (that is, hourly median pay was 14.3 per cent less for women than for men, as a proportion of men’s pay, without adjusting for factors such as seniority, sector, location or whether work is full- or part-time).

Nor is the picture much prettier in the academy. A report by the Higher Education Policy Institute, published earlier this year, showed that women continue to earn, on average, 11.9 per cent less than men across all roles at universities. Moreover, on current trajectories, some institutions will never close their pay gaps, the report found.

More must evidently be done, and swiftly. There are encouraging signs, nevertheless. The same report stated that universities have reduced their gender pay gaps by 4.4 percentage points since gender pay gap reporting became a mandatory requirement for all large employers in 2017 – that’s faster than the average fall of 4 percentage points across sectors nationwide.

Progress has been made wherever universities have shown determination. Since 2015, the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (Ucea) has published an annual report examining the gender pay gap in higher education and providing advice on the best approaches. And most – if not all – higher education institutions have a gender pay gap strategy.

But what of the ethnicity pay gap? In a recent interview, Nancy Rothwell, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester, acknowledged that the gap between the earnings of Black and white staff at universities is bigger than the gap between the earnings of women and men.

This issue is not academic for us. As co-chairs of the Black Leaders in Higher Education group (on behalf of all of whose members we are writing), we have personal experience of the many reasons for the ethnicity pay gap. We have witnessed the dearth of opportunities available to promising colleagues from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds: the low rates of progression to professorial level; the constant leakage from the pipeline of potential leaders as Black and other minority ethnic staff leave the sector because of racism; the failure even to pay Black academics the same wage for the same work as white colleagues because of the range of pay bands within the same grade.

The result is that until 2020, for instance, there was not a single Black vice-chancellor of a UK university. Today, there are two. Progress? Perhaps. But Black leadership of 1.3 per cent of the UK’s 150 universities is not progress enough when you consider that 4 per cent of the UK population and 9.5 per cent of UK home undergraduates (2022-23) are Black (and 33 per cent are BAME).

In 2022, one of our group’s members was integral to the creation of the annual Ethnic Representation Index. This ranks all universities according to progress made against areas of belonging and representation, including student attainment and experience, the progress of anti-racism initiatives, and the representation of BAME staff relative to the student population.

The report was first compiled with a sense of urgency, in the wake of a 2020 Universities UK report that identified “institutional racism” across the sector. Last year, for the first time, it looked at ethnicity pay gaps among university staff. The results, although hardly surprising, were in many cases inexcusable, with gaps as high as 26.2 per cent.

The ethnicity pay gap is not higher education’s problem alone, of course. According to recent analysis by the Trades Union Congress, BAME workers have “borne the brunt” of the rise in insecure work that followed the financial crisis, with the numbers in such employment more than doubling between 2011 and 2023. In 2022, meanwhile, the Office for National Statistics found that, among UK-born workers, Black employees earn 5.6 per cent less than their white counterparts when the figure is adjusted for personal and work characteristics, such as sector and location.

The reasons are complex and deep-rooted. But that is true of gender inequality too, and early progress there is proof enough of what the sector can do when it pulls together. We believe it is time for universities to work with Ucea to provide annual statistics on ethnicity pay and guidance on where the sector can do better. There is no reason why this should conflict with the push on gender pay equality.

After years of government inaction, the Labour Party pledged in its New Deal for Working People to make ethnicity pay gap reporting a legal requirement for companies with more than 250 employees. We welcome this and urge the party to fulfil this promise now that it is in government. But we must be careful not to place all our faith in legislation. Problems such as these can only be solved with universities’ steadfast commitment.

We call on all vice-chancellors to commit to publishing and sharing information on their ethnicity pay gap. Let’s work together to eliminate pay gaps for good.

David Mba is vice-chancellor of Birmingham City University and Robert Mokaya is provost and deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Sheffield. They are writing on behalf of the Black Leaders in Higher Education (blhe@bcu.ac.uk), of which they are co-chairs.