62: Bridging the ethnicity pay gap divide in the UK: Dianne Greyson, Founder, #Ethnicity Pay Gap Campaign

ShownotesTheresa May’s 2017 general election manifesto had a pledge to require all large employers to publish their ethnicity pay gaps. And then Boris Johnsons election manifesto did not contain anything on the ethnicity pay gap reporting. In February this year the House of Comms women and equalities committee (WEC) said in a report that ‘Large companies should be required by law to publish data on employee salaries, following the framework already in place for gender. Research cited in the report suggests that addressing the pay disparity could boost the UK economy by £24billion a year. However in March the government peddled back on its commitment and decided against making it mandatory because it did not want to impose additional burdens on employers ‘as they recover from the pandemic’. Instead voluntary guidance is expected to be published this summer for companies interested in reporting.What about the impact of the pandemic on people from black and other ethnic minority groups? Analysis from BITC 2021 Race at Work survey (24,638 employees surveyed) indicate that ethnicity pay gap data will not be widely published by companies in the UK until 2075 (53 years) without legislation and government intervention. In 2021 only 19% of businesses in the UK took note of their ethnicity pay gap and only half of them published the actual data. In this episode of The Elephant in the Room podcast I spoke with Dianne Greyson, the Founder of the ethnicity pay gap campaign on the government flip flopping on legislation, the need for legislation, data collection and actions required to address racial and ethnic disparities. As Dianne said, the ethnicity pay gap is not just about making a business case or the right thing to do it is a human rights issue. Memorable Passages from the podcast👉🏾 Thank you for having me. 👉🏾 Okay sure. I've been in HR for about 16 years. I run two organisations, one is Equilibrium Mediation Consulting, in that space I do generalist HR. I'm also a qualified mediator,. And also I'm an accredited emotional intelligence practitioner, which is something that I've recently obtained, which is quite good. Synergised Solutions is also the company I run and I run that with my colleague Jacqueline Hinds and that's predominantly focused on diversity inclusion.And we design and develop our own products and everything is all bespoke to the organisation. So obviously with all the challenges and the situations that organisations and individuals are having at the minute, doing D&I work is so important to us. Because we want organisations to make a positive transition rather than just paper over the cracks, so that's really our stance. You also know that I'm the Founder of the ‘Ethnicity Pay Gap’ campaign, which has been going since 2018. That was born initially out of my own personal frustration of yet again knowing that we are in a situation where we are struggling to get fairness, and through my initial anxiety and frustration about it I started the campaign, which is still going today. 👉🏾 Total craziness. So we could just quickly touch on the gender pay gap and I understand only 24% of organisations now have reported their pay gap. In terms of why organisations haven't even thought about the gender pay gap is because, in my opinion, they don't see it as important as the gender pay gap, where it should be on exactly the same footing. It's not even a poor relation it's even worse than that. And I think that because the government have not picked up the urgency