Royal College of Physicians gender pay gap 2022

On 5 April 2022 the RCP employed a total of 396 staff, comprising 273 women and 123 men. This includes people working for the Federation of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of the UK as they are employed by the RCP. The national rules for calculating the gender pay gap require this total to include the people we normally term staff, plus anyone else on the payroll system on that date. This includes people who work a few hours for the RCP intermittently, such as exam invigilators and consultants employed to provide specialised expertise needed by the RCP.

Following the national rules, on the pay period our data cover, 13 women and one man were excluded from the pay gap and pay quartile sections of the report because they received less than their normal pay (due to maternity, paternity and sick leave). Our gender pay gap was therefore calculated based on 382 full-pay relevant employees, comprising 260 (68.1%) women and 122 (31.9%) men. Our employee headcount has increased this year due to additional workers being included on our payroll as a result of IR35 regulation changes.

The 2022 median gender pay gap for the RCP was 19.0%. The mean gender pay gap was 17.0%.

Further analysis

The graph below shows the proportion of women and men in each pay quartile. The quartile pay bands are calculated by dividing the workforce into four equal bands ranging from the highest to the lowest hourly rate.

The deviation from the distribution of staff that we would expect to see in each quartile, based on the gender split of the RCP’s workforce, is shown in red and grey (red representing a larger deviation and grey a smaller).

Our analysis shows that an overall reduction in the proportion of men making up our lower pay bands as well as an increase in men in the upper quartile has contributed to the increase in our gender pay gap.

The RCP has a higher proportion of men employed in senior posts and more women in administrative and coordination roles.  This reflects much of the wider UK workforce.  The RCP, in common with many UK employers, needs to work towards closer gender balance in higher and lower pay quartiles. 

Although overall our gender pay gap has unfortunately increased, analysis within each of our quartiles and pay bands shows that there are areas where we have a pay gap in favour of women. Our executive leadership team, the most senior staff roles at the RCP, was made up of five women and three men during the snapshot period, in April 2022.

Actions and next steps

We are very disappointed to have made little progress in this area and are committed to reducing our gender pay gap. 2023 will be the year that we ensure that we set the foundation for longer-term improvements.

We will continue to build on the actions we committed to undertaking in 2021:

• We know that a significant number of our workforce take time away from their roles for family leave, such as maternity. We want to ensure that we provide the best support for these staff members. We are developing guidance to improve the experience of women taking maternity leave with the aim of helping them to return to work and continue their career journeys.  
   
• We also want to ensure that we raise awareness of flexible working options available to men, enabling men and women to have an equal role in family life.
   
• We have committed to a hybrid working model for most job roles. This model provides staff with the flexibility to work around family commitments and supports work–life balance. Hybrid working ensures that we remain competitive as an employer; it reflects our ambition to be a modern workplace attractive at all levels of the organisation.
   
• Women into leadership – we supported 12 female staff members to attend a series of Women into Leadership conferences in the autumn of 2022. We recognise that women often experience disadvantage at work and in many aspects of their lives and want to invest in our talent so that our women employees have the confidence and skills to progress. As part of the programme, participants will receive hands-on advice and coaching on how to develop their careers and be encouraged to share learning from these events. We plan to identify action to support RCP business areas, such as addressing barriers to development/progression and establishing a women’s network.
   
• We are currently engaging with providers and stakeholders to trial an unconscious biases course with a view to integrating this with our internal recruitment process in early 2023. We are conscious of ensuring a gender and ethnic mix on all our recruitment panels and monitoring of panel composition is planned. We’ve invested significant efforts in establishing reliable data on RCP employees and now have diversity and inclusion data for 74% of our staff.

Previous RCP gender pay gap summaries:

RCP gender pay gap 2021
RCP gender pay gap 2020
RCP gender pay gap 2019
RCP gender pay gap 2018
RCP gender pay gap 2017