Gender Pay Gap
Gender Pay Gap 2024
Ashtons Legal, along with all other UK employers with over 250 employees, is required to analyse and report on its gender pay gap.
The gender pay gap is the difference between men’s and women’s average hourly wage within a business, regardless of their role and seniority. This is not the same as equal pay, which is about men and women being paid the same for equal work. We are required to report to the government the following annually on the following:
- mean and median gender pay gap
- mean and median bonus pay gap
- proportion of men and women receiving a bonus
- distribution of men and women across the business divided into four quartiles from lowest to highest pay.
The information is based on data on the snapshot date of 5 April 2024 and bonuses paid in the 12 months to this date.
You can view Ashtons Gender Pay Gap Report 2024 by clicking here: Ashtons Legal Gender Pay Gap Report 2024.
On 5 April 2024, Ashtons Legal had 381 relevant employees.
Review of our data
This year, our median gender pay gap decreased by 9.4%, and the mean decreased by 17.3%.
We are pleased to see a decrease in both our median and mean gender pay gaps this year, which continues to follow the movement in the graph below, showing the overall trend that the gap is closing. We are continuing our initiatives to close our gender pay gap and encourage more women to take on senior roles at the firm.
We have again undertaken a more detailed analysis of our data, looking at the mean and median gender pay gaps for some of our lawyers and partners. The figure in brackets is from the previous year 2023. This analysis shows a much smaller pay gap at each level, with a negative number showing a gap in favour of women.
Our Bonus Gender Pay Gap graph looks very different to the gender pay gap graph, with the median gender bonus gap from 2018 to 2023 consistently being 0%. This was -2% in favour of women in 2024. This shows that men and women have equal access to a bonus. The median bonuses awarded was slightly higher in favour of women.
We have seen a slight increase in our mean bonus gender pay gap, which was 16.2% in favour of men in 2023 and 22.8% in 2024. The snapshot date was 5 April 2024, and therefore, bonuses paid out in May 2023 were used to calculate the Gender Bonus Pay Gap for this period. These bonuses were reflective of the 2022/2023 financial year when all eligible employees received a 5% of their actual salary bonus. We believe the reason for this slight increase is because bonuses are paid out as a percentage of actual salary rather than full time equivalent and we have more women in part time roles, therefore the amount paid out in a bonus is smaller, although the full time equivalent salary may be the same.
We have a higher proportion of women than men at the Firm, and this is shown across each of the quartile ranges. The proportion of women in our upper quartile salary range is increasing and is more reflective of the overall percentage of women employed with Ashtons. Having a higher percentage of women in our lower pay quartiles, who may be undertaking some of our important support positions and a higher proportion of males in our upper quartile range. This is because we currently have more males in our senior, higher paid, business services roles.
Diversity and Inclusion form a key part of our strategy, and our Diversity and Inclusion Committee has the full support and buy-in from all areas of our business. We already have a number of initiatives and working practices that support our diversity and inclusion agenda, including:
- Family-friendly policies – Enhanced maternity, paternity and adoption leave pay.
- Paid Time Off – empowering employees to take the time off they feel they need rather than imposing limits.
- Working Policy – empowering our employees to get the work life blend that works for them, not specifying how many days employees need to work from the office.
- Leadership Programmes – Applications are accepted from all employees for each of our three leadership programmes.
- Career conversation and support.
- Coaching and mentoring.
We rolled out Imposter Thinking Workshops, available to all our employees in April 2024, which we hope helped to get people thinking about promotions and progressing and the reasons why they may not be doing this. We have also run mental health training for line managers across the firm to equip them with a better understanding of an issue that affects both men and women in the workplace.
We have launched the Parents of Ashtons buddy scheme and we have recently run our menopause coffee mornings and hope to continue these as well as setting up resources for menopause and signposting on Teams.
Our Leadership courses for the period were attended by 90.5% in favour of women. Our partnership is continuing to grow, with the proportion of women in our partnership now 42.8%. In April 2024, we welcomed another woman onto our management board.
We will shortly be rolling out Equality and Diversity training to everyone at the firm and additional training to line managers.
We are always open to suggestions from our employees on how we can improve and will be working with our Diversity, Equity Inclusion and Belonging Committee to put an action plan together to help us achieve our aims.