When we published our first gender pay gap results in April 2018, we set out a range of actions aimed at achieving greater gender balance at all levels of our organisation. Over the two years since, we have implemented a new family leave policy which brings enhanced provisions for both men and women, complementing our flexible working policy. We have continued to focus on achieving our recruitment target of having at least one female candidate on every shortlist for senior leadership vacancies. We have embedded our new performance management approach – Performance with Purpose – and a scientific approach to measuring potential with the aim of reducing unconscious and subjective bias in the development of our people plans.

We believe that the actions we have taken to date will make a positive measurable difference over the longer term. Still, we are determined to accelerate that change. Set out below are a new set of initiatives aimed at closing our gender pay gap, faster.

Leadership

• Introduce Diversity & Inclusion targets linked to senior leadership bonus plans
• Establish functional targets to create greater gender balance

Reward

• Equal Pay audit. We will partner with an external advisor to validate our approach to equal pay at Abcam

Talent Acquisition

• Increase our target (from 1) to have at least 2 women on every shortlist and report on % of senior roles that had at least 2 women on the shortlist
• Employ gender neutral recruitment advertisements using software designed to filter out unconscious bias from our recruitment campaigns
• Have gender mixed selection panels where possible

Training and Development

• Accelerated growth. Embedding our scientific and objective approach to measuring potential and target at least 50% women on high potential development programmes
• Diversity & Inclusion leadership training introduced across all of our management and leadership programmes
• Unconscious bias training implemented across Abcam to raise awareness of our unconscious biases and provide tools to adjust our automatic patterns of thinking

To continue to drive awareness and desire to make a difference to gender equality, we will also:

• Initiate discussions and engagement with our senior leadership teams to reaffirm Diversity & Inclusion topics as a priority
• Report regular progress updates to our senior leadership teams on Diversity & Inclusion data to provide focus
• Engage functional leadership teams through our Women in Leadership group with data and proposed actions to promote awareness and ownership
• We have appointed an Inclusion Manager to provide focus to programme management and implementation

Our gender pay gap is driven by too few women at senior job levels across our business. Ultimately, changing this imbalance will not be immediate but we believe that the initiatives we have implemented so far, and the new actions we have committed to this year, will stimulate measurable and sustainable change over the long term.

To access Abcam’s full 2020 Gender Pay Gap Report please click here.