At Wesleyan, we are committed to building an inclusive and diverse organisation as we recognise that genuine diversity of thought leads to better decision-making and makes us more reflective of our customers.
This is the eighth year where we have reported our gender pay gap which measures the difference between the earnings of men and women across the organisation.
Our gender pay gap has decreased slightly, which is due to our ongoing commitment to better understand the factors driving our pay gap and continuing to review and introduce new initiatives to address the gap.
Wesleyan gender pay gap results
As of April 2024, Wesleyan's average mean gender pay gap was 21.72% (2023: 26.61%) and the median gender pay gap was 27.38% (2023: 32.00%). This is a Group position that includes our subsidiary companies.
Wesleyan bonus pay gap results
As of April 2024, the mean bonus pay gap was 46.06% (2023: 42.11%).
Over 94% of colleagues received a bonus payment. The bonus pay gap is larger than the gender pay gap because we have a significantly higher percentage of women employed on a part-time basis compared with men.
Most bonus payments at Wesleyan are calculated as a percentage of annual salary. Therefore, even though the basis for awarding a bonus is the same, the bonus pay gap is larger because we have more women working part-time than men and we have more men in senior positions earning a higher salary.
Our data in detail
Two factors that contributed to the decrease in our pay gap are the continuous changes that we are making when allocating pay, either as part of the annual salary review or during the year as part of employee changes (such as promotions and secondments and our focus on pay equity).
We also spend a proportion of our salary budget to increase our minimum salary along with moving employees to a higher percentage of our Market Anchor Pay Points. As part of our 2025 salary review process, we have increased our minimum salary that we offer to £24,175. During the pay review process women received a slightly higher median pay increase particularly impacting our more junior grades.
The Market Anchor Points for our job families are set using external salary benchmarking data and our analysis has identified that we have a higher proportion of men in job families with higher Market Anchor Points for example Investments and Actuarial compared to job families with slightly lower MAPs for example HR and Customer Services where there are more women.
Women in Senior Leadership
Another reason we attribute to reducing our gap is that we are increasing the proportion of women employed in senior positions.
Over the past few years, we have put several initiatives in place to address this imbalance. By the end of 2024, we had increased our representation of women at senior leadership level to 43.68%. This meant we exceeded our target of 40% for 2024.
We will aim to continue this trajectory to meet our target gender equity within our business over the forthcoming years.
The initiatives used to address our senior leadership imbalance are also reflected at all job grades. We aim for diverse shortlists for all our vacancies and use diverse panels at interviews. In addition to our work within recruitment, we also include a gender lens in our pay review process to ensure that no pay inequalities are introduced at this stage.
We offer a range of accessible career development programmes to encourage the career progression of our colleagues. Our award-winning Bounce Forward career development programme focuses on developing the mindset, skills and strengths to navigate career pathways, as well as removing some of the perceived barriers to progression.
We also have career development programmes specifically aimed at developing underrepresented groups which include apprenticeships, leadership qualifications and internal/external mentoring programmes.
How are we working to close the gap?
2025 sees the start of our new two-year Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) strategy. It’s well-known that businesses with diverse decision makers consider the widest possible range of perspectives when developing their products and servicing their customers.
DEI at Wesleyan is not about political correctness or ticking a box - it’s about our growth. Wesleyan’s growth is dependent on attracting and nurturing diverse talent, treating colleagues equitably and creating an inclusive culture where everyone can speak out and make a difference in delivering good customer outcomes.
We've designed our priorities based on a comprehensive review of our current data insights so that we focus on the following areas for improvement:
- Greater senior leadership accountability for resolving current disparities in DEI.
- All Senior Leaders have meaningful objectives to improve diverse representation and create more equity. To support them we have developed DEI dashboards which provides them with their data and where to take action.
- Increasing our diverse representation at Team Leader and above career grades.
- All hiring managers to have diverse interview panels to challenge any unconscious bias during recruitment and promotion decisions, and to utilise apprenticeships and inspiring Individuality programme (minority ethnic aspiring leadership).
- Flex working to be advertised for all roles, de-biased job adverts and inclusive recruitment training for all hiring managers and those involved in interviews. Diverse long and short lists expected from recruitment agencies.
- Focus on pay equity through all remuneration decisions, both in-year and during the annual pay review.
- Managers to apply the guidance on pay equity principles for all recruitment and reward decisions, and include transparent reporting of gender and ethnicity pay gaps.
- Regular communications to increase disclosure rates so we can set meaningful targets and actions for all protected characteristics.
- Introduce regular communications to ask colleagues to disclose their data and for leaders to take action based on their DEI dashboard.
- Launch new DEI innovation workshops to continually challenge the design of DEI infrastructure and the value of external partnerships.
Our commitment
Although it is positive that we have seen a decrease in our pay gap, we remain committed to continue to analyse our data and have effective measures in place to close the gap.
We are committed to fostering a workplace where every individual feels valued, respected, and empowered to succeed. Together, we are building a brighter, more inclusive future for all.