Syndio, the expert-backed workplace equity platform, has today revealed new analysis which calculates the UK’s ‘opportunity’ gap – the disproportionate access to higher-paying roles that exist for certain groups, due to bias and inequities at hiring, promotions, and other stages of career advancement. The analysis explores the disparities between genders, ethnicities and per region in executive and management roles.
Gender opportunity gap
Across UK full-time workers, men are 65% more likely to be executives than women and 43% more likely to occupy management roles. Despite women comprising 41.6% of the full-time workforce, they hold on only 30.1% of executive positions and just 33.3% of manager roles.
This analysis is also before we take into consideration those in part-time employment. Overwhelmingly, fewer part-time workers reach executive and managerial positions, but women dominate the part-time workforce – they are three times as likely as men to work part-time – so this is another avenue where women are disproportionately disadvantaged. Including part-time workers in the analysis, men are 131% more likely to be executives and 66% more likely to be managers.
Among full-time workers, the opportunity differs significantly across regions. Management opportunity gaps for women are relatively small in the North East (18%) and Scotland (19%), jumping to nearly 50% when we look in London, the South West, and the East of England.
There are some geographical anomalies among executive opportunity gaps, possibly driven by sampling error with the smaller executive counts when we split by region. For example, in the West Midlands women make up 52% of executive roles, yet represent only 41% of the full-time labour force, making them more likely than men to be executives. In the East Midlands, South East and South West, men are well over twice as likely as women to be executives. The executive opportunity gap is largest in North Ireland, though there are so few female executives in North Ireland that this estimate is less reliable.