CMI Comment on the Ethnic Pay Gap
Ann Francke, CEO
| Chartered Management Institute
The Chartered Management Institute has long been urging employers to address the issues of the ethnic pay gap. Following Theresa May's consultation on ethnic pay gap reporting, please see below CMI's comment from Ann Francke, CEO, Chartered Management Institute:
We welcome plans to promote greater transparency for measuring and monitoring the ethnic pay gap. Our “Delivering Diversity” report last year showed that Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people are under-represented in business and especially in top management roles. Around 12.5% of the UK population are BAME yet they hold only 6% of top management positions.
This is not just an ethical issue. There is a real commercial value to improving diversity in the workplace: when you have ever-more diverse customers, you need diverse management and leadership to thrive. We have calculated that closing the ethnic pay gap could add £24 billion a year to our economy.
Requiring companies to release their ethnic pay gap statistics will expose which employers are succeeding and which are failing in this area. There is a real commercial value to this: when you have ever-more diverse customers, you need diverse management and leadership to thrive. But transparency is only the first step - we also need action plans setting out how organisations plan to close the ethnic pay gap
