Gender Pay Gap Report 2021
At Knights, we are committed to maintaining our unique culture, a ‘one team’ approach which at its heart has a culture of fairness, openness and trust. We seek to enable all of our people to strive to fulfil their own potential on an equal footing, supporting flexible working, training, and giving our staff more flexibility when it comes to plotting their career path by opening the door to moves between different specialisms, and between fee earning and operational roles as and when vacancies arise.
Knights remains unusual in the legal sector, operating as a Corporate entity rather than as a partnership, and as such all of the data within this report incorporates the remuneration of everyone within the business, including all Partners, Directors and Board members. In the 12 months prior to the snapshot date of 5 April (‘Snapshot Date’) we acquired 3 law firms, our data set includes all those who were employed by us as at the Snapshot Date, whether they joined through organic growth or acquisition.
The information provided in this report therefore clearly reflects the position at Knights, and the analysis demonstrates our even-handed approach across all elements of the business.
Under the law, men and women must receive equal pay for the same or broadly similar work, work rated as equivalent under a job evaluation scheme or work of equal value. Knights has a clear policy of paying employees equally for the same or equivalent work.
Knights’ gender pay gap has increased slightly from the 2020 report, but reduced slightly from the 2019 report.
We have not seen any significant change in our gender pay gap since reporting started in 2017, and we remain committed to continuing to take steps to ensure that our staff are paid fairly for the work that they do. We remain confident that our gender pay gap does not stem from paying women differently for the same or equivalent value work, rather it reflects the type of roles that our female staff predominantly work in, as demonstrated by the gender split across our quartiles and quartile pay gap data.
Knights is proud of its commitment to fairness and equality to all of its workforce, we are working hard to continue to erode historical gender pay gaps arising through restricted access to the legal profession generally; this is demonstrated by the fact that 66% of those promoted in the reporting period were female, and 62% of those promoted to Partner were Female. We continue to promote on merit alone, which has resulted in a greater proportion of promotions for female fee earning colleagues as compared to male across the board. Furthermore, Knights has focussed on family friendly rights within the business, matching the pay available for those on maternity leave and shared parental leave, and accommodating a wide variety of flexible working arrangements, with 20% of the workforce working part time in the reporting period.
While it is still the case that a greater proportion of women as compared to men work part time, we seek to ensure there is no impact on salary resulting from working part time hours.
The promotions data does not include data about promotions within firms acquired by Knights prior to the acquisition date as historic data is not gathered with the exception of the award of training contracts. As is clear from the below charts, a greater number of female colleagues have been promoted than male colleagues in both fee earning and operational roles.
Knights takes care in its review of remuneration across the business; as our staff do not have monetary targets pay increases are awarded based on merit, taking into account the overall contribution made to the business over the preceding 12 months. We continue to strive to reward our staff based on merit alone and feedback from our colleagues has been consistently in favour of salary reviews to reflect performance rather than using set criteria or pay grades. Staff are invited to challenge any decisions about remuneration without fear of reproach, and we pride ourselves on our transparent and even-handed approach to remuneration across the business as a whole.
When acquiring other businesses, Knights take particular care when reviewing the salaries offered, and seek to adjust where appropriate to ensure that staff are rewarded for the work done including non-financial measures of performance and taking into account market rates where relevant. This process takes place in the 12 months following an acquisition to ensure that a fair assessment can be made.
As a general rule, Knights do not pay bonuses as we prefer to pay a higher non-discretionary salary. The approach to bonus payments is reflected in the fact that only 0.3% of staff received any bonus in the reporting period. All staff receiving a bonus within the reporting period were female.
Where a contractual right to a bonus is inherited on acquisition of another company we usually seek to buy out this right and instead reward those members of staff through a guaranteed salary at a higher level.
DECLARATION
I confirm that the data in this report has been calculated accreting to the requirements of the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017.
Mark Whitehouse
HR Director, Knights Professional Services Limited