As the issue of women’s pay and representation in the private sector continues to hog the spotlight, Tania Mason takes the temperature of the situation in civil society leadership positions.
The profile of women’s representation in leadership positions has never been higher. It was a year ago that Lord Davies launched his independent review into Women on Boards, recommending that FTSE 100 company boards should aim to have at least 25 per cent women members by 2015. Since then, the actual percentage has crept up from 12.5 per cent to 15.6 per cent, while for FTSE 250 companies, the figure is 9.4 per cent, up from 7.8 per cent. Yet nobody in government has yet dared to grasp the mettle and introduce Scandinavian-style quotas, some of which are as high as 40 per cent.
The issue has not been confined to the private sector. Earlier this year, Clore Social Fellow Rowena Lewis published her research on women leaders in civil society. Her report: Close to parity: challenging the voluntary sector to smash the glass ceiling, showed that while women are “tantalisingly close” to achieving equality with men in our sector, they are not quite there yet. In particular, in a sector where seven in ten employees are women, they are heavily under-represented in the leadership of major charities and are still paid less than their male counterparts in most roles.
But like all big, important issues, the picture is not clear-cut. In fact, our analysis shows that it’s highly nuanced and complex – a real mixed bag. In some jobs, there is no doubt that women in the voluntary sector are getting a raw deal in terms of pay. But in other roles, they are actually paid slightly more – if they can beat a man to the position, that is.
In this report, we have examined the situation in five separate voluntary sector role functions: chief executives, finance, fundraising, trustees, and senior management teams. We have analysed various pieces of research to see how well men and women are represented at leadership and other levels within each function, and how their salaries compare. And we have given each one a score, so that there is a marker in the sand that we can measure future progress against.
As the sector that champions social justice and equality of opportunity, it is vital that we set an example and get own house in order. We hope this report will help to move the debate forward, and assist employers to benchmark how well their own organisation is doing in the area of gender equality. We also want to highlight good practice, and give charities some practical tools to help them adopt models of pay and representation they can be proud of.
Chief executives
Representation
According to the Acevo Pay Survey 201/12, which examined the remuneration of chief executives and senior personnel in the sector and attracted over 600 responses, nearly half (46 per cent) of charity chief executives are women. In this respect the sector is leading the charge – in the civil service just 29 per cent of top managers are female, and among FTSE 100 companies, only 15 per cent of directors are women and just four have female chief executives.
But this encouraging statistic does not hold up among the larger charities. According to a survey of 1,106 randonly-selected charities registered with the Charity Commission, conducted by Rowena Lewis as part of her research, just 27 per cent of charities with incomes of £10m or more have female CEOs. And among the top-100 as defined by the Charity Finance Charity 100 Index, there are just 26 women chief executives.
This is particularly unsettling when we consider that women occupy three in five senior management team posts in the sector, according to Acevo’s research. Surely it is this pool of people that charities and recruitment agencies are fishing in when they come to appoint chief executives? It tends to bear out Rowena’s conclusion that the “reinforced glass ceiling” is as strong as ever.
Score: 3.5 out of 5
Pay
The stark headline finding from Acevo’s pay survey, that there is a gender pay gap of 15.9 per cent among the 603 CEOs that responded to the research, is not so alarming once you unpick it. The figure, which represents the difference between the median pay of males (£63,500) and females (£53,400) in the self-selecting sample, sounds shocking but can largely be explained by the fact that more women tend to be CEOs of smaller charities, while men tend to dominate the top jobs at larger organisations.
And if we compare the median salary for CEOs within three different sizes of organisation (small, medium and large), the gender pay gap narrows dramatically. Then, the widest gap is 3.2 per cent, at charities with income of £1m to £5m, and as little as 0.9 per cent for charities with turnover of more than £5m (see table A).
The situation with pay among chief executives of the biggest charities is also not as bad as it appears at first glance. According to the Charity Finance Leadership Survey published in September 2011, male CEOs at the top 100 charities earned, on average, £174,664, while their female counterparts earned, on average, £143,846. This equates to a gap of nearly £31,000, or 18 per cent – but the picture is actually more nuanced than that. We recall that three-quarters of these CEOs are men, so it is no surprise that the top five earners are men. If we remove these salaries from the picture, then the average top-100 CEO salary falls to £138,949. And the remaining male chief executives, on average, then earn less than women (£137,057 versus £143,846). Only one woman earns less than £100,000, while eight men in the list do.
However, even though the CEO situation is not the worst among all the job functions we analysed, the direction of travel is wrong. Compared with the previous year, pay for male CEOs increased while women’s salaries fell. And the overall pay gap widened from 11.3 per cent to 15.9 per cent, suggesting that men have been receiving pay rises while women haven’t.
Jenny Berry, director of Acevo North, said she knew of a number of female CEOs who turned down a pay rise last year because they couldn’t award one to their staff. “If they weren’t able to implement a pay increase for their team then haven’t taken one themselves,” she said. “I think that accounts for some of the pay differential in this year’s survey.”
Score: 3.5 out of 5