Ensured fairness of opportunity by suggesting improvements to development scheme processes, meaning recommending that pictures are removed from Aspiring Leaders Forms to limit any biases across the sifting process. Next steps

DWP recognises that our recruitment and retention practices are pivotal to eliminating the GPG and enabling us to ensure we have a strong and diverse talent pipeline in our organisation. Our recruitment policies and selection guidance maintain the following as standard: Mentoring is a relationship between two people with the goal of professional and personal development. The 'mentor' is usually an experienced individual who shares knowledge, experience, and advice with a less experienced person, or 'mentee' – Mindtools.com Bernie Thompson DWP continues to make both in year and end of year performance awards. The significant majority of DWP’s performance bonus awards were paid as end of year awards and were pro-rated for part-time employees. These are paid at set values irrespective of gender or any other protected characteristic. Mean and median bonus pay gap Methodology Kaylisha also has first-hand experience of graduating from the Crossing Thresholds flagship programme and using the tools gained there to achieve anything she has put her mind to!We confirm that data reported by DWP is accurate and has been calculated according to the requirements and methodology set out in the Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties and Public Authorities) Regulations 2017. This year’s survey will seek to understand whether BEIS’ learning and development workstream has provided direct benefit to members of the network when seeking progression in the Civil Service. They also plan to undertake a survey to understand the experiences of parental leave in BEIS. The results will be analysed by gender to gain some insight of any barriers experienced by employees due to parental leave and parenthood that could impact the department Learning and development This year we have also launched our diversity and inclusion curriculum, which sets out our learning offer for all grades to support with building our inclusive culture. In addition, we will continue to work in partnership with our Trades Unions and Diversity Networks, in particular our Women Empowered Network, to ensure that staff views are considered and understood as we deliver our Diversity and Inclusion Strategy. Last summer I approached Bernie to be my mentor as I found her so engaging during our Civil Service Live 'spot mentoring' session. We hit it off straight away. Flexible, home-working, job-sharing, and part-time working to support employees with caring responsibilities and encourage a good work-life balance. Awareness and support of those with caring responsibilities is embedded into all our HR policies and our commitment to this is strengthened by DWP’s membership to the Employers for Carers forum.

Despite our ordinary mean GPG increasing this year, we have made positive progress in increasing female representation at the most senior grades. Our 2025 target was to achieve gender parity of 50% in our SCS roles, we met that target in March 2021 and have now exceeded it. At SCS1 and SCS3, we now have over 50% of roles filled by females. However, at our feeder grades (Grades SEO, 6 and 7), there is further work to be done in reaching proportionate representation of genders, and this, in part, is what contributes to our gender pay gap. Workforce Structure Changes we continue to work in partnership with the BEIS Diversity Networks, which play an important role in supporting our activity in this area, such as Women Empowered NetworkSupported an inclusive working environment by championing BEIS to be women’s health confident through the introduction of women’s health toolkits equipping employees and managers with the right information and guidance to hold constructive discussions around female-specific health issues.