Progress so far
We continue to make progress towards a more gender balanced and equitable workplace
Although the Nuclear Skills Strategy Group (NSSG) Nuclear Sector Deal targets are no longer officially in place, we still feel it is useful to report our progress against them.
Target 1
To attract, develop and retain a diverse workforce
This will be maintained, and improved, continuously at NNL.
- We have included our people at the heart of NNL’s published Strategic Plan because we recognise the importance of fairness, diversity and inclusion in welcoming, supporting, developing and empowering our people
- This, in turn, enables our organisation to deliver on our technical aspirations and wider societal value by providing a solid, healthy, vibrant platform to continue to grow from. We believe that openness will be instrumental in attracting and developing a diverse workforce, so we have published the details of our ED&I approach in our ED&I strategy, providing updates via this report
- We continue to make progress against our 2020 ED&I strategy and are progressing our NES recommendation delivery plan
- We are advertising our vacancies more diversely with the majority of our roles advertised through FindYourFlex to highlight that we welcome applications for those wishing to work flexibly
- We have a successful range of early careers provision that we are building upon, constantly seeking to diversify our reach and pipeline
- We have launched Careers Lab to make career progression and development opportunities more visible to all
- We are improving our Employee Value Proposition by feeding in suggestions for improvements in our provision during the period covered by this report and beyond
- We have mandated the collection of ED&I demographic data for all applicants to NNL as part of the application process and ask our employees to share their ED&I data on a voluntary basis - the former set of data related to gender parity has been presented in this report, the wider demographic data is assessed, and insights fed back into our programme
Target 2
40% of the UK nuclear workforce to be women by 2030
NNL recognises that at the current pace of change, this is a challenging target for us to achieve, but we remain committed to making progress towards it.
- We continue to see a slow linear increase in the percentage of women in the business year on year. We are currently at 30% women across the whole business but have reached gender balance (53%) in our non-STEM roles
- If this current trend continues, it would mean we would reach 40% women in our business in 10 years’ time - however, as the percentage of women recruited is below the target in for STEM roles, reaching 40% women on average across our business by 2030 remains a challenge as most of our roles are in STEM
- Nonetheless, we remain committed to increasing the gender balance across NNL in an organic and sustainable way which means ensuring we attract a diverse pool of applicants and that all our staff feel valued enough to stay and progress their careers with NNL
- This means that, long term, we will continue to move towards a more gender-balanced workforce
Target 3
The proportion of women in senior management to be 30% by 2030
The more in-depth analysis of promotion, recruitment and percentage of women per quartile presented in this report shows this target to be a challenge for NNL.
- We worked with the Women in Nuclear MAP (Measure, Analyse, Plan) tool to understand how our gender pay gap might change in future based on scenario modelling by considering a number of possible changes NNL might see in future, e.g. recruitment, promotion, etc
- We have done further analysis this financial year to understand in more detail how the situation that MAP predicted using the preceding 5-years of data is playing out
- The data presented in this report shows that one of the key areas for focus for NNL is promotion
- we have a well-established job evaluation process which is overseen by our HR expert and trade union representatives to ensure confidence in the process and we enable our own staff to have their jobs re-evaluated upon request if they feel the remit of their role has change significantly
- the behavioural element of our new leadership programme has been piloted and will be rolled out across the business in FY22/23
- our career pathway tool has been launched for the most challenging subject areas (i.e. technical and engineering roles) for gender diversity and is now being socialised through the business
- career pathways for other professions are under development
- a new career hub has been created to promote fair access to opportunities
Target 4
50% of all apprenticeships to be held by women
NNL aims to achieve this target by 2025.
- We have enhanced our apprentice offering, recruiting a record number of apprentices in September 2021
- Of all apprentices on our programme at NNL, 42% are women.