Force is called out over its gender pay gap

LEICESTERSHIRE Police was called out by a Twitter account over its gender pay gap after posting about International Women’s Day 2022.

Many businesses and public sector organisations shared their support on social media for a more equal world last week on International Women’s Day, including those in Leicestershire.

This year’s campaign motto “breaking the bias” featured heavily in social media posts but many organisations, including Leicestershire Police, were called out on Twitter afterwards.

The Twitter account, known as the “Gender Pay Gap Bot”, reshared the force’s posts - which were highlighting some of the women working in the organisation - but in a “quote tweet” shared the organisation’s unequal, hourly pay.

“In this organisation, women’s median hourly pay is 31.6 per cent lower than men’s,” the retweet read.

The information taken from government’s gender pay gap service, showed that the difference in median hourly pay was significantly higher within Leicestershire Police than other public sector organisations.

Data for the same year (2020/21) shows that by comparison women’s median hourly pay at Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service is 16 per cent lower than men’s and for East Midlands Ambulance service the difference was 0.7 per cent.

However, Leicestershire Police say there is no difference in median pay of officers specifically, but the police staff, which includes all other various roles within the force, does have a wage discrepancy. Assistant Chief Constable Julia Debenham said: “We are committed to reducing the pay gap and continue to work to do this.

“With training programmes in place and continued recruitment, more and more women are joining the policing family and will work their way up the ranks.

“We continue to strive to create a workforce that is flexible, diverse, and inclusive – attracting, retaining and developing talent from within the communities that we serve.”

The Gender Pay Gap Bot continued to call out institutions over their wage disparities throughout the day with others on Twitter expressing disappointment in response.

Some firms even appeared to have deleted their original tweets after being quote tweeted by the Gender Pay Gap Bot.