Ethnicity pay gap reporting will become a requirement

With ethnicity pay gap reporting likely to become law within the next couple of years, employers still have a number of challenges to overcome before they will be prepared to publish their data. Many employers do not hold staff ethnicity data, so they first need to encourage employees to disclose this information. Last year, in a survey of 80 organisations, three-quarters of businesses lacked the data needed to analyse their ethnicity pay gap!

Companies who are already reporting their ethnicity pay gap understand what long-term, meaningful action they need to take to tackle race inequality at work. They are leading from the front – improving how they attract, hire and promote employees from ethnic minority backgrounds.

But many companies have so much more they can and should be doing. Firms have to get better at speaking about race at work; developing campaigns to encourage employees to share their ethnicity; and creating strategies to improve representation all the way up to the boardroom.