There are clear differences in labour market outcomes for different ethnic groups in the HE sector with men and women from black ethnicities showing significant pay penalties relative to white men. According to the report, black and minority ethnic academics earn on average, thousands of pounds less every year than their peers.
Black male academics are paid around 13 per cent less on average than white male academics of a similar age and education, while black female academics were paid around 12 per cent less than white males.
The report concludes that pay penalties for ethnic minorities doing the same jobs as white colleagues with equal qualifications are significant.
They amount to £11,011 for black males and £9,855 for black females respectively, the report concludes.
White female academics were also found to suffer a pay penalty of 6.5 per cent compared to their white colleagues, while female Asian academics had a 9.6 per cent pay penalty, which results in them being paid £3,346 and £4,960 a year less respectively.
Key Findings:
- Pay penalties for ethnic minorities are significant in the sector with Black men and Black women earning the least on average.
- There is no significant gender pay gap between Black men and Black women either among all staff or in each of the main workforce segments (academic and professional services) indicating no compound intersectional effect for these groups.
- Asian men earn significantly less on average than White men but marginally more than White females. Asian women earn significantly less than White women.
- The gender pay gap between Asian men and Asian women is significant indicating the presence of an intersectional effect for these groups.
- Black men and Black women are much more likely to work in lower level grades and much less likely to work in senior and management positions than their White and Asian counterparts. As with the gender pay gap, we see that it is vertical job level segregation rather than differences in pay for like workers that leads to large pay differentials for ethnic minority staff.
- Nationality is a significant factor in the sector pay outcomes but this does not fully explain the pay penalties for Black staff and Asian women. Non-UK ethnic minority staff show larger pay penalties relative to UK White male comparators than UK ethnic minorities. The earnings of UK Asian men are only slightly lower than those of UK White male comparators.
- The pay penalty experienced by ethnic minority women in the sector is much more likely to be due to factors associated with their ethnicity than their gender.
Recommendations:
- Analyses of ethnicity pay gaps should at a minimum be disaggregated by broad ethnic groups and ideally by more granular ethnic groupings, when the data sample size allows.
- The impact of nationality on ethnicity pay gaps merits consideration and the reasons for any differences should be identified where possible.
- HEIs should consider intersectionality as part of their examination of gender and ethnicity on pay outcomes and how their existing gender pay gap interventions may affect women from different ethnic backgrounds.
- Given the findings on ethnic minority staff distribution by contract level, we believe attention should be given to interventions that improve the ethnic diversity of recruitment pools and actively address barriers to progression that are more likely to affect ethnic minorities.
- Care should be taken in communications to avoid ethnic pay gaps being attributed solely to ‘discrimination’ or ‘racism’. In a similar vein, it is unhelpful to conflate gender pay gaps with equal pay problems.
- Further qualitative and quantitative research would be beneficial to better understand the reasons for systematic pay differences between Black and Asian staff and their White counterparts. Such research could consider the impact of household level and individual-level characteristics that were not available in our dataset such as household composition and previous work experience.