Gender Pay Gap Report

In the interest of transparency the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (the Trust) has voluntarily published its gender pay gap and bonus pay gap data on its website on 5 April 2024.

Please note that the last time that the Trust published its gender pay gap and bonus pay gap data was for the 2022/23 tax year based on a snapshot date of 5 April 2022, and we will be using this as our comparator throughout this supporting narrative.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s Position

On 5 April 2023, the Trust employed 172 people (110 full-time equivalent employees), and 71% of those employees were female.

Our Gender Pay Gap

On 5 April 2023, the 2023 mean gender pay gap at the Trust, based on hourly rates, was 21.5% in favour of male employees, which is a decrease on its mean gender pay gap of 25.2% in 2022.

The UK’s average gender pay gap based on 5 April 2023 data is not available yet. However, the national mean male bias average on 5 April 2022 data was 8.3%, and we will compare the Trust’s 21.5% gap when UK wide 2023 data is available following the 5 April 2024 deadline.

Comparison of the median data for 2023 shows a 9.8% gap in favour of male employees, which is a decrease on 16.6% in 2022.

Pay quartiles are listed below:

Bonus Pay

No bonuses were paid in the 2022/23 tax year.

Pay by Quartiles

The pay grades are listed below with a male/female split.

Work to reduce the Gender Pay Gap

The Trust is committed to reducing our gender pay gap, encouraging equality, diversity, inclusion and belonging amongst its workforce, volunteers and within its Board of Trustees, and to preventing discrimination. The Trust has a fixed salary band structure, with 16 pay grades, which is designed around externally recognised benchmarking. Males and females are paid the same amount for carrying out the same work. We are committed to supporting women across different roles in their career development as well as attracting more women into management roles.

We have an annual pay review process, and a 5% pay award was made in April 2023 for the majority of staff. Planning for the pay award in April 2024 is underway and due care and consideration is being given to those colleagues in the job mapping level above the National Minimum Wage (NMW) who are due to be given a 9.8% increase due to the Government increasing the NMW from £10.42 to £11.44.

What does the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust currently do to ensure that it is an Equal Opportunities Employer?

The Trust already places significant focus on ensuring we are an equal opportunities employer.

We employ people in a wide variety of roles covering administration, collections, communications, content and programme, development, estates, farming, finance, gardens, HR, ICT, learning, marketing, research, retail, sales and visitor engagement. We offer flexible working, weekend working, part-time roles, job shares and hybrid working opportunities.

We advertise job vacancies across a wide variety of media and our rigorous recruitment process ensures that we recruit on merit and qualification using competency-based and values scored interviews. In addition, whilst turnover is fluid in seasonal roles, core permanent and fixed-term roles have high retention so there is not significant movement in the workforce. For 6 April 2022 to 5 April 2023 the Trust’s average monthly turnover is 6.3% against the UK average of 13.8%.

Our commitment to Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging

The Trust has a continuing commitment to Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (EDIB) and already places significant focus on ensuring a diverse workforce. However we recognise that we need to better understand the diversity of all of our peoples’ perspectives and their day-to-day experiences of working with the Trust.

We are passionate about becoming a truly inclusive organisation with the people who work with us and our audiences as diverse as the communities we serve. This is fundamental to our belief that Shakespeare is for anyone and that the range of experience diversity brings is a huge asset to the Trust. We are determined to do our utmost to ensure an inclusive, welcoming environment for our people and audiences.

We are working with an independent specialist consultancy, to build upon the feedback we received from our recent organisation-wide “Everyone Counts” EDIB survey, the results of which we recently shared with our team. This is helping us to further improve our ability to welcome people from all places and backgrounds and ensure that the experience of working and volunteering with the Trust resonates with everyone.

Anne Doughty (she/her)

Head of HR