Our Data
The charts below illustrate the proportions of men and women in the four quartile pay bands, where quartile 1 represents the lowest-paid quarter of the workforce and quartile 4 represents the highest-paid quarter.
The purpose of this assessment is to look at how the levels of gender equality differ from the lowest to the highest-paid roles.
Percentage of men and women in each pay quartile
The highest percentage of women can be seen in the lowest pay quartile (quartile 1), with the percentage decreasing with each increasing quartile. This supports our analysis that it is the under-representation of women in higher-paid roles that is the main source of our gender pay gap.
Looking at how the percentages are changing in each quartile over the last five years, we can see that there are small changes happening in the lower three quartiles that are bringing the gender balance slightly closer together. There do not appear to be any discernible trends in quartile 4, the highest-paid quartile.
Percentage of men and women in each pay quartile over the last five years
At NNL, roles within the professional and support services are (on average) paid less than our technical and operational roles. We have a higher proportion of women in the former roles. Furthermore, many of our lower-paid technical roles have additional allowances for working in high hazard areas, and these are typically our most heavily male-dominated roles.
Previous gender pay gap reports have highlighted difficulties in recruiting diversely in STEM roles. In support of our hypothesis that we pay equally and promote fairly throughout our organisation, we have undertaken some further analysis to understand the gender balance in each area of our business.
The figure below shows the gender split by quartile as number of staff by business areas. These are Technical, Professional Services, Project Management Authority (PMA), Laboratory Operations, Executive (which includes their support staff), and Customer Executive.
Gender split of employees in each business area by pay quartile (Note: Exec entry includes support staff)
For the Technical business area, there are clearly more men across all of the quartiles and the proportion of women decreases with each increasing quartile. Quartile 1 has the closest gender equality which reflects the improving balance in our early career new starters, including apprentices. Professional Services has a similar pattern to Technical, showing more of the senior leadership in this area are men.
The PMA is a smaller business area but appears to have a fairly even gender balance in the lower three quartiles, but again the more senior positions in quartile 4 have more men.
Laboratory Operations, including engineering and craft teams, has the biggest gender imbalance across NNL. There are very few women in total in any quartile and hence this highlights a high-impact area where gender diversity needs to be addressed.
The Executive and Customer Executive teams (including support staff) are very small - most staff sit in the upper quartiles and are men, but importantly these are areas of the business where our most senior leaders are located.
We recognise the enormity of the challenge to increase representation of women across NNL. It is important to acknowledge that the talent pool from which we recruit also has a gender imbalance, particularly in the STEM, operations and craft disciplines. We continue to focus our efforts in supporting organisations and initiatives that help encourage participation of women in STEM activities with the aim of increasing the flow-through of women into our sector in the future.