Gender pay gap report 2023

What is the gender pay gap?

The gender pay gap is a calculation of the difference between women and men’s average pay and bonus across all roles within the business.

Our gender pay gap is driven by the fact that for the time period of the report, most of our more senior roles are filled by men whilst outside our senior roles we have a 48% female / 52% male split.

To close the gap, we want to have a gender balanced population at senior levels of the organisation. Since the snapshot date of this report we have made good progress and achieved our 2024 target of at least 40% of women in senior roles.

This report provides our statutory data, which we’re required by law to report to the government each year, along with a clear explanation of the figures and what we’re doing about them.

Download our Gender pay gap report 2023

Closing the gap

Here’s some of the activity and commitments we’ve put in place over the last year to support greater gender diversity:

People Leader training

Our guidance for recruitment covers topics around subconscious bias, gender equity and the importance of diversity.

Inclusion reminders

Our applicant tracking system provides hiring managers guidance, throughout the candidate journey, highlighting the importance of a fair and consistent selection process.

Job adverts

We ensure the language used in our role profiles and adverts is gender-neutral and free from implicit bias.

Salary benchmarking

During our salary review process, gender is one of the factors we look at to ensure consistency and equality across roles of the same type and level.

Gender balanced candidate shortlisting

An ongoing commitment to create candidate pools of balanced gender split when recruiting for all roles.

Women at Nucleus network

Underpinned by a shared passion for raising the profile of women at Nucleus, creating a supportive, aspirational and motivational environment for women at all stages of their careers to feel empowered to develop and grow.

Our progress in the last year

We firmly believe that diversity of thought is required to guide and oversee the next chapter of our growth.

In 2023, we made progress in promoting gender equality across a number of areas:

We announced our Nucleus Foundation partnership with the Verve foundation where we've sponsored our first female only cohort of women to train as financial advisers. We continue to look at similar initiatives to encourage more women into financial advice and planning careers.
We reached our 2024 Women in Finance Charter target of 40% women in senior roles.
We regularly review and monitor our salary and bonus processes to ensure pay equity in like for like roles across the group.
Throughout 2023, the proportion of new hire women in our senior leadership team has significantly increased, with a hire rate of 45% in 2022 (9 female senior hires and 11 male senior hires), increasing to 57% in 2023 (8 female senior hires and 6 male senior hires).

As an overall group, we’re reporting that women were paid a mean average bonus of 60.6% less than men compared to 2022 of 63.15% (median 8.33% less than men compared to 21.97% less in 2022).

However, a smaller proportion of women received a bonus than in 2022 – 87.5% in 2022 v. 84.39% in 2023.

Lower quartile

Lower middle quartile

Upper middle quartile

Upper quartile

Representation of women was higher in three out of four pay quartiles.

Our combined group data

Our gender pay gap

We’re encouraged to see our gender pay gap continuing to narrow in certain areas, but the gap continues to be driven by a gender imbalance in our most senior roles – it doesn’t reflect unequal pay for work of equal value.

Our 2023 mean gender pay gap was 20.36% a difference of 6.13 in hourly rates of pay, which is a 7.25% improvement on 2022.