How much progress have UK resellers and MSPs REALLY made on their gender pay gaps and workforce balance over the last six years?
According to the latest gender pay data logged by 41 mid- to large-sized UK channel partners, the improvements, though patchy, are beginning to look tangible.
Look at the graph below, which is based on the 19 companies in this group that have reported pay gap data since the base year:
The yellow and blue lines are going up. This means that – on average – resellers and MSPs employ a higher percentage of female staff overall, and in their top quartiles, respectively, than they did when gender pay reporting was first introduced in 2017/18.
After a bumpy start, the green and red lines are now heading south, meanwhile. They represent the mean and median gender pay gaps.
Diving into the data
So which resellers and MSPs have the lowest gender pay gaps, and which employ the highest percentage of female employees? And who is making the most progress on both counts?
The key data for the latest year (which has a ‘snapshot’ date of 5 April 2023) is as follows:
The first thing to note is that there may be an inherent tension between efforts to close the gender pay gap on the one hand, and to employ more female staff on the other (with new recruits logically more likely to enter the company in the lower pay quartiles).
Those leading the way on the former often lag behind their peers on the latter, and vice versa (indeed, looking at the 41 firms there is a 0.33 correlation between the % of women employed and the size of the median pay gap [the more women employed, the higher the pay gap, on average].
Pay gap pioneers
Littlefish, a Nottingham-based MSP with one of the lowest mean and median pay gaps (actually logging a negative pay gap on the latter), expressed frustration at its lack of headway on its % female number.
It stood at 14% in its latest year.
“Last year we were able to report an increase in the number of females currently working at the company but, unfortunately, this has not been the case for 2023,” it stated in its latest gender pay gap report.
“We would like to assure readers that our aim continues to be to increase the number of females working for Littlefish to 20%.”
It’s a similar story for the likes of Acora, Iomart, ANS, Air IT and Adarma, who all have relatively low gender pay gaps but also lag behind the average on % females employed.
Gender mix masters
Conversely, some of the big IT resellers and software licensing giants, including Softcat, Insight and Bytes, appear to be experiencing the opposite issue.
While more numerous (see below), their female staff are much more likely to sit in the bottom and lower-middle quartiles of their business.
Softcat recently set a new goal to reach 40% female staff by 2040 after hitting its 35% goal six years early (its figure for the latest snapshot date of 5 April 2023 stood at 33.5%). Reaching this will be like “pushing on an open door”, Softcat CEO Graham Charlton told IT Channel Oxygen last month.
But the LSE-listed giant’s mean gender pay gap widened in its most recent year, both year on year, and compared with the base year.
In its latest Gender and Ethnicity Pay Gap report, Softcat chalked up the 5% rise in its mean pay gap to the “performance of its Sales Account Managers”.
“We have spent time this year focusing on developing our sales women by helping them build on their confidence, improve their technical and sales expertise and develop their careers in a sales role for the longer term,” it stated.
“We are aware that our pay gap data will not positively improve immediately due to the sales business model we currently have,” it added.
A gander at gender progress
On average, females now make up 27.3% of employees at the 41 resellers and MSPs we looked at.
Their average mean and median pay gaps stood at 21.1% and 16.7% in the latest year of reporting, respectively.
Among the 19 to have reported data over the full six-year period, who has made the most progress?
When it comes to workforce mix, Microsoft consultancy Avanade leads the way. Its % female staff has risen by 16 percentage points over the six years, from 19.5% to 35.5%.
“This growth is due to conscious changes Avanade has implemented throughout its hiring practices, ensuring diversity is put first through gender neutral job postings, mandatory inclusion and unconscious bias training for all hiring managers, and candidate and interview slating guidelines,” Avanade stated in its latest UK gender pay gap report.
Trustmarque, ANS, Apogee, Computacenter UK and Softcat have also all seen their % female staff rise by at least five percentage points over the period.
Bytes and ANS are among those that have done the best job of narrowing their pay gaps since the base year, meanwhile.
Taking stock
Gender pay gap reporting measures the difference in average pay of all men and women in an organisation, regardless of the role they have. It is therefore not the same as an equal pay comparison.
The yawning average pay gap in our industry therefore reflects structural imbalances in the workforce (rather than ‘unequal pay’), with the highest-paying roles (eg in sales, technical and management) disproportionately filled by men.
In fact, looking at the top pay quartiles of the 41 firms (see above), on average just 16.9% of those positions are filled by women (compared to 35.5% for the bottom quartile, 31.1% for the lower-middle quartile and 25.5% for the upper-middle quartile).
Bytes Software Services hit the nail on the head in its latest gender pay gap report when it said that “as with any technology company, we find that fewer women apply for technical and sales roles, which is where our highest earners usually sit”.
Addressing what it is doing to tackle gender imbalance within its organisation, Softcat said it had this year introduced an Inclusive Cultures workshop to its management team. This is designed to help managers build more inclusive teams and create inclusive social events for their teams.
Softcat’s Supporting Women in Sales workstream has “listened to women across sales to establish where further interventions need to be created to enable a long and successful career in a sales roles”, it added.
CDW said it had retained 90% of the women enrolled in its most recent Sales Academy programme, up from 40% year on year, meanwhile.
“Having females in sales and leadership positions is crucial to inspiring and empowering more women to pursue these roles,” it said in its latest pay gap report.
To put it bluntly, the UK IT channel has struggled with the perception that it is too male – and too white.
This has spawned a growing number of industry movements designed to champion women and diversity, and ensure the channel appeals to a broader range of potential talent (including, just this month, the launch of Tech Channel Ambassadors).
Although at the current rate of progress it would take 42 and 48 years to close the median and mean gender pay gaps, and 47 years to reach a 50:50 gender balance, at least at a reseller level*, many will greet these figures as evidence the industry has made tangible progress on gender diversity over the last six years.
* The distributors tend to employ a much higher percentage of female staff (with the ‘big 4’ of Westcoast, TD Synnex, Exertis and Ingram employing 43%, 41.2%, 39.4% and 40.2% women, respectively, in their latest years), but their gender pay gaps tend to be higher (presumably for the reasons mentioned above). The vendors we looked at tend to have slightly lower pay gaps and employ slightly more females. We focused on resellers and MSPs due to the greater availability of data.
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
