It’s time to face our uncomfortable truths

Nine months on from when the UK government closed its consultation on ethnicity pay gap reporting, we have yet to hear anything on the outcome. Some companies have started looking at their ethnicity pay gaps voluntarily, others have no idea where to start, and there will be others that just do not feel the need to look at whether they have a gap. There is very little data on the pay gap in the world of real estate, with only CBRE and Cushman & Wakefield so far making their reporting public. But both have reported double-digit figures. At Cushman, the median pay gap is 24% and bonus gap is 57.1%. The figures are based on incomplete data, however, with the firm admitting that it currently only has ethnicity data for 64% of its employees. At CBRE figures were a little better, with a median pay gap of 14% and a bonus gap of 40%. It has ethnicity data for 83.3% of its workforce. Gender pay gap reporting, which became mandatory for firms with 250 employees or more in 2017, has led to an increase in actions tackling gender inequality within businesses. Could ethnicity pay gap reporting to the same from a race perspective? BAME in Property founder Priya Shah certainly hopes so and gathered experts from across the built environment to find out more about the role that pay gap reporting can have in creating equality and the hurdles that the industry will need to overcome to foster real change. Challenge of data collection Being able to have a clear picture of your workforce, who they are, what they do and, crucially when it comes to pay gaps, how much they each earn, is vital if you want to deliver change. But when it comes to ethnicity, the problem of collecting data is twofold. No-one really knows exactly what we should be collecting and none of us really know how to ask for it properly. “People worry that by asking the question, they’re going to cause offense,” says British Property Federation, director of strategy and external affairs Ghislaine Halpenny. “People worry that they’re going to get the language wrong. People worry that the information is going to be used in some way against them. It’s very visceral. It’s very raw. “ For Bola Abisogun, chair of DiverseCity Surveyors, its all about recognising an uncomfortable truth: that there is a huge ethnicity pay gap and that it is caused by institutional, maybe accidental, racism. That success is not based solely on talent, but on whether your face, your personality, your gender, skin colour, etc fit. Abisogun recalls how he was a star pupil, acing his A-levels, getting a first at university, winning numerous awards, but then how when he joined the world of work in 1994 he was immediately put at the lower end of the pay spectrum. “How do you allow your people to aspire to be the best they can be when they know that they’re going to be shortchanged financially?” he asks. “What needs to happen is that leaders need to recognise that difference is good. “Historically, difference has been offensive,” he adds. “My success has been offensive. I still suffer from impostor syndrome, not because I don’t feel that I have earned my space, but because society says there is no way on God’s earth you are worth the same as this person because they look different. These are the uncomfortable truths.” Abisogun sees ethnicity pay gap reporting as a measure that helps reflect back to businesses those uncomfortable truths. No quick fix “This isn’t an easy overnight fix,” adds CBRE responsible business manager Jake Hobson. “This is a journey that we have to go on. We have to tear up the rulebook and put the new processes in place and really start to think about driving the principles of inclusion into our policies, our procedures and our practices.” He says that for CBRE the ethnicity pay gap was about fostering greater accountability and transparency and  making sure that what they said they were doing to change was actually happening, but the biggest barrier for him in delivering that change has been data collection. “The challenge around bringing in ethnicity pay gap reporting is that the success of it would require us to have mandatory ethnicity data capture to be able to report accurately,” he says. “We need the government to make that a part of the conversation and to give us really robust guidance on what they want us to report on.” Halpenny says that, without clear guidance, too many businesses are left “fumbling around in the dark”. “It really is the data collection that is the challenge and I’m really interested in whether we can pull that together and begin to create a baseline of that data in some form of anonymised way to make people feel comfortable, but also to think about whether there are some guidelines or whether there are some things we can do to help those organisations that are potentially a bit further behind on that journey,” says Halpenny. Small actions matter For Elsie Owusu, architect and founding chair of the Society of Black Architects, the journey can start right now and without the need for full-scale data collection. “The easiest thing to do is just go looking for people so that we change the statistics. rather than waiting for the government,” says Owusu. “We know what’s wrong. We all know people who have had to leave the profession because it’s just an uncomfortable place to be. “The solution is really simple. There will be people in your workplace, so find out what they’re doing, find out how they’re doing. Find out what they’re paid, whether they’re paid more than anybody else and how you can promote them, how you could boost them. “If they are there it means they have done an awful lot of surviving to reach where they are. So they’ve got to have something about them. Make it a personal thing and find out who they are. Go talk to them. Take them out for lunch. Find out how they can be promoted. Find out what their pay is. Do something small where you can, something modest. It doesn’t have to change the world, it just has to change one life at a time.”   To send feedback, e-mail samantha.mcclary@egi.co.uk or tweet @samanthamcclary or @estatesgazette Photo by Shutterstock