Public Sector employers need to go back to university to learn how to deliver equal pay for disabled workers

Recent research into equal pay gaps across the public sector has looked at what if anything the sector has been doing to remove discrimination from the pay of those workers who identify as disabled.  The research also gathered data on the profile of public sector workforces, by gender, ethnicity and disability.

Critical to analysis of real measures of performance on and evidence of disability equality in this context is the extent to which workers continue to decline to identify if they are disabled or non-disabled to their employer.  As with identifying ethnicity, this is an area of work on which the public sector has conducted a lengthy and elaborate dance of avoidance. 

The figures in table 17 reveal that Health Boards are poorest performers in this context with 62% of the workforce not confident about disclosing whether or not they are disabled.  Other public bodies are next worst performers with an ‘unknown’ rate of 28% and Councils are at a similar level of ‘unknown’ with 20.3%, while the universities are again in the lead with an unknown rate of 17%.  Combined with the second highest employment rate of disabled people found in universities, the data would suggest that the rest of the public sector could, once more, learn from the universities in how to improve performance and evidence of disability equality in the employment context.

Table 18 confirms once again that universities are leading performers when it comes to equal pay audits on the basis of staff disability.  Over 42% of university staff have had their pay system audited for evidence of disability equality. 

This is considerably in the lead from other public bodies which have a rate of 14.66% of staff covered by disability equal pay audits.  Councils trail behind that performance level with a low audit level, with just 3.31% of their staff covered by disability equal pay audits.  Health Boards trail the rest of the sector with only 1.03% of staff having their pay systems audited for evidence of disability equality.

This comparative analysis of the data from the two research reports would suggest the rest of the public sector could improve performance considerably by learning from the success of universities and so being able to improve their own performance in disability equality in their function as employers.