Our Ongoing Work to Reduce (and Ultimately Eliminate) Pay Gaps at Sheffield

Trade unions most often make big wins when we are willing to take collective action over issues that are important to our members. But we also do make incremental progress on a day to day level, sometimes in ways that aren’t fully obvious until some time has passed. This report shows how long-term behind-the-scenes work by your UCU reps is resulting in real change in policy and practice, and the ambition of the university to address inequality.

At Sheffield, relationships between recognised campus trade unions and management are structured by a recognition agreement [PDF], which sets out the normal frameworks for industrial relations locally and commits both us and university management to “an organisational system of employee relations that will be founded upon the key principles of; collaboration, team working, equal opportunities, transparency and mutual respect.” The agreement sets out systems for consultation and negotiation and resolving disputes, if they arise.

In March 2017, UCU joined with our fellow recognised campus trade unions UNISON and Unite to submit a joint claim to the university about its gender pay gap, which we noted then was unacceptable: “This pay discrimination is fundamentally unjust, and it can be bad for reputation, bad for staff morale; it could also mean that our University is potentially liable to equal pay and discrimination claims at employment tribunals/in the courts.” Our claim coincided with the introduction of mandatory statutory gender pay gap reporting – our view then was that simple reporting was not enough; action was also needed. That view has not changed in the four years since.

We acknowledged then that the University had made some progress on reducing the pay gap and that the reasons for continued disparity were complex. But we also called for an equal pay audit or review, joint analysis of the results and the development of an action plan to meaningfully tackle discrimination and inequality. To the university’s credit, senior staff engaged productively with this claim in line with the principles of our recognition agreement.

Over the interim four years, UCU reps have been working with colleagues from HR and from across the university on a Gender Pay Gap Working Group that has been analysing the gender pay gap and its complexities and reporting to the University Executive Board and Council, through its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee. This has involved both the production of data to align with legislation, but also the creation of additional data aimed at understanding where there are particular issues around equal pay at Sheffield, along the lines of what we asked for in 2017.

What is now several years of data has revealed – perhaps unsurprisingly – that the overall pay gap persists because we have a disproportionate number of women working at lower grades and a disproportionate number of men at higher grades. Overall our pay gap has declined marginally since 2017.

The additional data we requested has also revealed particular issues at different pay grades, which aren’t always visible in the headline figures that government reporting requires. The data also backs up concerns our members regularly raise, including inequalities around academic, and particularly professorial, promotion processes; gendered differences in the levels that people are appointed to; access to and impact of maternity and other parental leave; the lack of a promotions pathway for professional services colleagues; and other factors.

Throughout the last four years, we have consistently argued that data reporting was insufficient without a concrete plan of action. We have also argued that a plan of action was pointless if it did not identify targets and develop mechanisms for progress towards those targets to be measured. This position was also supported by other members of the working group.

We are pleased that after four years of meetings and negotiation, at last December’s University Executive Board the university’s senior management agreed with the working group’s recommendations to commit to the eradication of the gender pay gap and to develop interim progress markers towards that end goal, against which we can hold the institution to account. The first of these is a 5% reduction in the gap by 2025, with annual reviews that will aim to accelerate movement towards that reduction target if possible. At UCU, we believe the university can move faster and will continue to push for the change necessary to do so.

The gender pay gap working group also had its work extended last year to address the ethnicity pay gap. We know that there are real issues of racial inequality at this university – the BAME staff network has been leading the charge on this to great effect and the establishment of a Race Equality Strategy and Action Plan in 2019 is a welcome development.

The pay gap working group has a role to play within this wider strategy, particularly through the interrogation of data and the development of similarly ambitious plans for addressing pay inequality on the basis of race and ethnicity. The group is currently asking similar questions we asked of the gender-related data. UCU reps on this working group are also conscious that there are different factors that influence this pay gap – for example, the university has a persistently low recruitment of Black British staff, particularly at higher grades. There are also complex ways in which race, ethnicity, nationality and migration status intersect.

We are proud that our branch led the fight for and won reimbursement of visa and ILR fees for international staff at Sheffield in 2017 and 2018, therefore reducing some of the additional costs borne by non-UK colleagues, but are conscious that there is much more work to be done to address racism, xenophobia and pay inequalities.

UCU will continue to work with our fellow campus trade unions and others across the university, to push senior management to take bold steps to set and enforce goals for combatting inequality and to make the University of Sheffield a fairer place to work. We very much welcome member involvement in this work – please do drop us an email at ucu@sheffield.ac.uk if you’d like to get involved. You can also read more about UCU’s UK-wide work on eradicating the gender pay gap here and in our 2021-22 pay claim, which retains pay inequality as a key part of our demands for UK-wide action across the sector.