01
Pay Equity
Are equally qualified people paid differently because of where they started?
- The premium, in percentage and in pounds
- How much of it bypasses credentials entirely
- Whether it protects weak performers
- What closing it would cost, phased
001
Your organisation has three pay gaps. You report one.
( The gap you cannot see )
Gender pay gap
Mandatory since 2017
Measured and published every year
Understood by every board
You report this
Ethnicity and disability pay gap
Confirmed by government in March 2026
Draft regulations already annexed
Coming for employers with 250 or more staff
You will have to
Socio-economic background gap
Mandated by nobody
Measured by almost nobody
Larger than either of the other two
You cannot currently see it
Source
Progress Together, Shaping our Economy (2023), found that socio-economic background affects career progression more than gender or ethnicity.
002
Existing reporting counts who is in the room. It cannot say how they got there.
( Why it matters more )
002The limit of
current metrics
current metrics
A gender pay gap figure is the difference between two averages. It tells you a gap exists. It does not tell you what produced it.
It cannot explain why two people with the same degree, the same job title and the same performance rating are paid differently fifteen years into a career. There is no variable in that report for the thing that separated them.
The variable is the background they started from, fixed before either of them made a single career decision. It is the strongest structural predictor of pay and progression in the UK workforce, it runs almost entirely outside the credential system, and it appears in no metric a large employer currently produces.
Equalise educational opportunity completely and you move less than five per cent of the gap.
Understanding Society, pathway decomposition
That is why credential focused equity spending underperforms. It is aimed at the part of the problem that credentials control, and credentials control very little of it.
003
Sixty years of data, and a number your board will act on.
( What the evidence shows )
003Three UK
longitudinal studies
longitudinal studies
0%
Typical pay premium
Between an employee from a professional background and one from a working-class background at the same level.
£0
Per month, per unit
Extra monthly income tied to background after controls, close to twenty thousand pounds a year.
0%
Bypasses credentials
The share of the effect running outside education, where a graduate scheme cannot reach it.
0
Education substituted
Background substitutes for roughly twelve years of education in the outcomes it produces.
The gap widens with tenure
It runs at 56 per cent at age 25 and 110 per cent by age 60. Your longest serving people are your least equal cohort.
Same degree, different odds
Among graduates, 52.71 per cent from professional backgrounds reach the top income quartile against 28.25 per cent from working-class backgrounds.
It protects before it promotes
Background is 2.08 times more powerful at preventing low pay than at accelerating high pay. It is a floor under weak performers first.
004
A prism adds nothing to light. It shows what was always inside it.
( What we measure )
004Four scored
dimensions
dimensions
Everything scored is a measure of background, following the Social Mobility Commission's recommended employer standard. None of it is a protected characteristic, which is what makes the result lawful to use in workforce policy.
Occupational background
What the main household earner did for a living when you were fourteen. The primary measure in the government standard.
Educational background
Parental qualifications, and whether you were the first in your family to reach university.
Material circumstances
Free school meals, childhood housing tenure and how the household managed financially.
Educational context
The type of school attended and the conditions inside it.
Sex, ethnicity, religion and disability are collected and never scored.
They sit in a separate optional section, held apart from the scored answers, and they carry no weight in anyone's result. They exist so the background gap can be reported for women and men, by ethnic group and by disability status.
That intersectional view is the analysis most clients actually want, and it is only possible because the characteristics were kept out of the score rather than absorbed into it.
How each dimension is assessed→005
Four things we will never do with your data.
( Hard limits )
005Built for
your legal team
your legal team
Never
We do not score sex, ethnicity, religion or disability.
They are optional, reported only in aggregate, and carry no weight in any individual score.
Never
We do not produce individual reports.
A minimum group size of thirty applies throughout. No employee is identifiable in any output, and that includes managers, recruiters and interviewers.
Never
We do not feed decisions about identified people.
No automated decision making, and no output permitted to inform a decision about a named individual.
Never
We do not infer anything from names or postcodes.
Background data is reported by the person it belongs to, or it is not collected.
Everything we score is lawful to collect and follows the government's own recommended standard.
Read the impact assessment→006
Four questions your current reporting cannot answer.
( What you receive )
006Four analytics
modules
modules
02
Hiring Pipeline
At which stage of recruitment does background advantage enter?
- Stage by stage advancement odds
- Whether the same degree returns different value
- Which sourcing channels carry which backgrounds
- Whether the pattern is justified by later performance
03
Progression Velocity
Does background accelerate careers, and does it shield underperformance?
- Advancement speed and time to first promotion
- Whether protection exceeds acceleration
- Exit and redundancy risk at equal performance
- The ceiling each group actually reaches
04
Intervention Return
Did the money you already spend on this actually work?
- Whether the gap moved, with a significance test
- Return in pounds against programme cost
- How fast the effect fades, and when to reinvest
- Head to head comparison across programmes
007
Start with a readiness assessment.
( Where to start )
007Two weeks,
at no cost
at no cost
Before any survey runs we look at the workforce data you already hold and tell you what it can and cannot currently show about background.
You send
A pseudonymised extract covering job level, tenure, compensation band, performance rating and function. No names.
You receive
A written assessment of what your data supports, which parts of the workforce are large enough to analyse credibly, and sector context.
You decide
If the gap is not there, you have lost nothing but a data extract. If it is, you have the baseline before anyone asks you for it.