Box of delight

It’s been five years since Katty Kay and Claire Shipman published their piece on the “Confidence Gap” in The Atlantic. At the time, researchers were claiming that the wage gap wasn’t entirely due to gender inequalities within the system but also in large part because of women’s lack of assertiveness when it came to wage negotiation. While this still may be the case in some circumstances, the consensus has shifted a bit.

Closing the academic gender pay gap will take 40 years at the current pace, according to research published by the University and College Union.

A new report investigating the pay differences between ethnic minority staff and their white counterparts has been published by the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA).

Inspired by the interest shown in gender pay gap reporting and the prospect of ethnicity pay gap reporting, the key findings include clear evidence that pay ‘penalties’ for ethnic minorities are significant, with black men and black women earning the least on average relative to white men. The research finds that 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.