CBRE urges property to reveal ethnicity pay gaps

CBRE’s diversity manager has urged other real estate companies to publish their ethnicity pay gaps, saying this data is critical to understand the barriers employees from BAME backgrounds face in property. Speaking in a webinar held by PwC and Real Estate Balance, Jake Hobson said CBRE is one of only a few property companies to report its ethnic pay gap voluntarily. The company published the data for the first time in 2019, revealing a mean ethnicity pay gap of 15.44% and a median pay gap of 14.05%. Hobson said CBRE wanted to understand the different experiences that people of colour were encountering in the business, and publishing ethnicity pay gap data was “the first step” in doing so. But he warned that organisations need to make sure that collecting this data does not compromise the anonymity of staff in businesses where there are a limited number of BAME employees. “In some areas of our organisation, we don’t have enough data and we need to make sure that we protect our employees while we enforce that accountability,” he said. “That’s something we have to consider.” PwC real estate partner Saira Choudhry said white people in the industry may feel uncomfortable talking about these issues, but added that a discussion must happen in order to achieve change. “The reality is, people don’t like talking about race, and people don’t like to talk about what it feels to be a minority,” she said. “It’s uncomfortable for non-minorities to listen to this and to ask the question feels uncomfortable.” Choudhry said that PwC has taken several steps to start an open discussion, including reverse mentoring and looking at how to sponsor individuals who need additional support. HR consultancy and mediation service Equilibrium Mediation director Dianne Greyson said ethnicity pay gap data is critical. If not collected, she added, companies will lack insight into the challenges that BAME employees could be facing. “It is really important to collect data to ascertain what inequalities could be occurring within your organisation,” she said. “The data needs to be clear and concise, and you have to be breaking the data down into ethnic groups. There are definite distinctions between each ethnic group. It needs to be made clear where the major issues are and to make sure you are doing what you can appropriately to getting these addressed.” PwC research shows that many businesses have failed to monitor whether people from BAME backgrounds are being paid less, on average, than white colleagues. Nearly all (95%) of 80 companies questioned had not calculated their ethnicity pay gap, and three quarters said they did not have enough data on the matter. Only about half of organisations were collecting any data at all on the racial diversity of their workforce. To send feedback, e-mail lucy.alderson@egi.co.uk or tweet @LucyAJourno or @estatesgazette