The diversity of De Montfort University’s (DMU’s) staff and student population is something we take real pride in and ‘equality for all’ is one of the cross-cutting themes of our Empowering University strategy. Our mission is to discover gateways of opportunity that empower students, staff and our community to create a fairer society, and ‘empowering people’ is one of the four key pillars of our strategy. Championing diversity is at the heart of this – having a nurturing community which is inclusive, dynamic and draws on our diversity to challenge the status quo and to drive change. For us, aiming to have no significant pay or awarding gaps is a critical success factor for achieving this, and reflects our firm commitment to ensuring equitable opportunities and improving outcomes for all our staff and students.
This summary, which outlines the current gender and race pay gaps at DMU, shows that while our pay gaps may be below average for the sector, they still remain and have not reduced during the last reporting year. Having placed equality for all as one of the central aims of our strategy, reducing these gaps is a core and urgent concern for us, and one we will keep innovating with measures to address.
Among these measures, we are developing career pathways across all staff groups to offer clearer opportunities for progression into more senior roles. We have also initiated a series of actions linked to our Athena Swan and Race Equality Charter mark applications, along with the continued embedding of flexible and hybrid working. In light of the lack of further reduction in the pay gap, we are also creating a new, dedicated task force to look in greater detail at what factors are driving our existing pay gaps so we can focus our efforts to maximum effect. We expect to carry out widespread engagement as part of this work, drawing on a range of expertise and lived experiences to help inform the actions we take.
The importance we place on diversity and inclusion here at DMU means we will continue to work as innovatively as we can to address our pay gaps, striving for equality for all to be at the front and centre of everything we do.