THE UNIVERSITY of Worcester has been revealed as the best performing university in England and the most genuinely equal when it comes to gender pay, according to the latest published data.
Out of the first 95 universities to publish their gender pay data to date, Worcester has the smallest average pay gap and is also best for the percentage of women employed at the top, compared to the total number of women employed.
Women make up 65 per cent of Worcester’s overall staff and are represented at this level throughout the University.
In the top quartile, 64.14 per cent of staff are women, while in the lowest quartile, 65.6 per cent of staff are women.
This contrasts strongly with the vast majority of universities where women are significantly under-represented amongst higher paid staff and over-represented amongst the lower-paid. At Worcester, women are neither under-represented at the top nor over-represented at the bottom.
Worcester has the smallest average pay gap of any university to publish so far, at 3.16 per cent At Cambridge the average gap is six times higher than at Worcester at 19.5 per cent, whilst at Oxford it is eight times higher, at 24.5 per cent and at the University of Birmingham it is 19.9 per cent.
Worcester’s average pay gap would disappear if just four jobs of the top 435 were filled by women instead of men.
As for ‘bonus pay’, which is particularly unequal in such organisations as City law firms and consultancies with gender pay gaps at 80 per cent and more, at Worcester women received 11.5 per cent more in bonus pay than men.
Professor David Green, the University’s Vice Chancellor and Chief Executive said: “At the University of Worcester we are passionately committed to inclusion and the promotion of gender equality. Our whole University approach includes supporting centres of academic study such as our long running the Centre for Violence Prevention as well as practical initiatives such as carefully monitoring the University’s promotion schemes for the past dozen years to ensure that they operate fairly.”
“Women have been 50 per cent or more of the executive leadership group at the University for more than 20 years.
In the 1990s, outstanding work was done by my predecessor, Dorma Urwin OBE, in promoting equality and diversity in general. This work has been strongly carried forward by women and men at the University ever since.
“It is this hard work and commitment right through the University which has led to the situation where the University is widely regarded as one of Britain’s fairest, most inclusive and most welcoming.
“The University is an outstanding educator of nurses, teachers, midwives and early years educators. These professions are very largely female. Each of these professions is grossly discriminated against when it comes to pay.
“Early Years graduates, who have earned a specific graduate qualification to work professionally with young children, are still not classified as working in a graduate profession by the Office for National Statistics.
