Question

To ask the Member for South West Bedfordshire, representing the Church Commissioners, what steps the Church has taken to close the gender pay gap.

For clergy across the Church of England, as officeholders they are paid a stipend rather than a salary. All bishops, male and female, receive the same stipend. All other clergy stipends are based on a national benchmark which is set by post, irrespective of the gender of the postholder.

The Church of England last measured its clergy gender pay gap on 1^st April 2022. Across the 42 dioceses of the Church, the difference in average stipend for male and female full-time stipendiary clergy was 0.3% in favour of men (with the mean stipend for male clergy being £28,288 and for female clergy £28,205). The gap has been calculated for full-time stipendiary clergy alone. As clergy do not work standard hours there is a difficultly in calculating an hourly rate for clergy, which is the standard method for calculating gender pay gaps. There are also difficulties in standardising part-time clergy in terms of full time equivalents, as we do not have complete information about the proportion of a full-time post. This is unlikely to affect the overall figure significantly as only 8% of stipendiary clergy were part-time (less than 1 full-time equivalent) and women made up only a small majority of part-time stipendiary clergy (54% compared with 46% men).

The most recent Gender Pay Report from the National Church Institutions (NCIs) can be found here: national-church-institutions-2022-gender-pay-report-april-2023_0.pdf (churchofengland.org). 57% of the staff of the National Church Institutions (NCIs) are women. Since 2021 the representation of women has increased by 2% in the upper quartile, but the majority of women continue to be working in roles in the lower and mid-lower quartile. As the NCIs approached their pay negotiations in late 2022 and they considered the cost-of-living crisis effects on employees and affordability for the NCI charities, a focus was maintained on NCI values and on gender and ethnicity pay gaps.