4 ways to improve gender equality in the workplace
4 ways to improve gender equality in the workplace
Equality & Diversity
Peninsula Group, HR and Health & Safety Experts
(Last updated )
Peninsula Group, HR and Health & Safety Experts
(Last updated )
Read our article: '4 ways to improve gender equality in the workplace'. Contact us today for more information about our Employment Law, Health & Safety, and HR services.
Loading content...
4 ways to improve gender equality in the workplace
FAQs
Got a question? Check whether we’ve already answered it for you…
HR management outsourcing is when a team of experts manage your HR by looking after your contracts, policies, and procedures.
These are the HR essentials every business needs. Without them, your staff could bring successful claims against you, you could lose thousands in legal fines, and even face prosecution. Never underestimate the benefits of HR support for a small business.
We have years of experience in providing HR for SMEs and HR management outsourcing. Contact us to see how we can support you, including HR advice for small businesses - as well as medium and large companies.
Good human resource management is having round the clock support when you need it the most.
Whenever there’s a staff challenge or an important legal update, you just pick up the phone and get the help you need – no matter the time or place.
The main benefits of HR outsourcing are:
- Cost saving: Reduces the expenses for such things are hiring, training and employing an in-house HR team.
- Time saving: Saves time for staff members away from HR tasks.
- Improves expertise and compliance: Provides ongoing advice and support to ensure complete and total compliance.
- Reduces risk: Reduces the risk of any payroll and compliance failures.
Outsourcing HR is cheaper than hiring internal staff and saves you money overall when it comes to your HR service. Plus, you avoid making mistakes that could cost you heavily in claims and legal fines down the line. Every business should consider HR support as a way to avoid claims.
Peninsula is one of the leading HR outsourcing services in the UK, and by working with us you get access to our HR advisory service. Contact us for your outsourced SME HR today.
The key functions of HR outsourcing services are:
- Payroll and benefits: Helps a business to manage employee wages, tax processing, and employee enrolment.
- Recruitment and onboarding: Helps with job descriptions, sourcing new candidates, interviewing, and ensuring a smooth onboarding process.
- Compliance with employment law: Helps to ensure compliance with ever-changing employment legislation.
- Employee relations: Helps to manage grievance and disciplinary procedures, and any ongoing support that's required.
- HR admin: Helps to handle and manage daily tasks, such as employee records, sorting employment contracts, and processing any leave requests.
- Training and development: Helps to create and deliver staff training programs to improve employees' skills.
The Government has released a Statement of Changes to the Immigration Rules, setting out a number of reforms to be implemented from its recent Immigration White Paper.
Tribunal claims relating to neurodiversity are on the rise. In fact, in 2024, neurodiversity was cited as a factor in 102 alleged discrimination cases, up 40% compared from 2020
Peninsula Team Peninsula Team
Equality & Diversity
Created by experts, powered by
HR and H&S advice to the next level!
Our enhanced AI solution...
1. Train senior staff
To improve gender equality in the workplace, you need to introduce a specific policy and you need to get your top people on board with it.
Explain your gender equality policy to senior staff so they understand you take it seriously.
Give training to everyone with responsibilities under it. This will usually mean staff who make recruitment and promotion decisions, as well as those who make the call on entitlement to any benefits you offer in your company.
The training should involve examples of situations that management may find themselves in and then set out the principles they should follow.
Keep records of any training you’ve given and review the training sessions themselves to keep the content up to date with legal and social developments Be consistent to bring integrity to the policy.
You may need to be flexible with the gender equality policy at times, so when you do, document the reason why you departed from the norm.
2. Make gender blind decisions
In a similar way to ‘name-blind’ recruitment, employers could adopt a ‘gender blind’ approach.
This would mean removing any part of an application form which would indicate the job applicant’s gender. In doing so, you make recruitment or promotion decisions on merit and not on gender, intentionally or otherwise.
3. Take positive action
Positive action means that you can make a recruitment or promotion decision based on a protected characteristic such as gender, but only if it’s underrepresented in your workforce.
Say your workforce is predominantly male. If you have two job candidates equal in merit—one male and one female—you can select the female to address the imbalance.
The important term is equal in merit. But say your applicants have to pass a competency test during the recruitment process, where a pass is 80% correct answers and above.
If the female scores 85% and the male scores 90%, recruit the male. If they both score 85%, you’re free to pick the underrepresented female.
4. Take gender pay gap reporting seriously
All employers with 250 or more employees must report annually on the difference in average pay earned by male and female employees.
If you discover a pay gap, carefully consider the reason for it. If there’s no non-gender related reason, it could be gender inequality.
Make sure you seek to address it to avoid claims of equal pay in an employment tribunal. At the moment, the law to report the pay gap doesn’t apply to you if you have under 250 employees.
But the Government announced it would take further measures to close the pay gap, which may mean bringing smaller businesses within the scope of the law.
Blog
Peninsula Team Peninsula Team
Blog
Blog
