The Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) is moving ahead with a major plan to boost inclusion and diversity in pharmacy.
Ethnicity pay gap in the pharmacy sector currently stands at 11.7 per cent, while gender pay gap is 14.7 per cent, according to the RPS.
RPS CEO Paul Bennett said: “We want to become a fairer, more inclusive employer and our pay gap work is part of a bigger transformation for both our people and the profession.
“Both pay gaps show there’s still much work to be done and we need to improve. It’s disappointing that efforts to reduce our gender pay gap have yet to make a real difference to our overall results.”
Bennett added: “We still have more work to do as we recruit people into more senior roles to ensure they are accessible and welcoming to women and people from BAME backgrounds.
“Change will be incremental, but we are determined to make progress to reduce our ethnicity and gender pay gaps. We will be working with our staff forum, People Team and our internal inclusion and diversity group to build an action plan for our people, which we’ll share with them later this year.
“We’ll also be taking another important step towards inclusion and diversity in pharmacy by publishing our full strategy for the profession on June 22.”
The RPS would use the data as a baseline as it aims to take action to reduce the pay gap.
The pharmacy body also aims to encourage a diverse range of mentors, particularly people who are from BAME backgrounds, including people who are LGBTQ or who have a disability, to help it to understand the challenges in the sector.
“We’ll also be reviewing our recruitment processes to ensure that we’ve done everything we can to be fair and inclusive, to eliminate any potential bias across all our recruitment and particularly to improve representation of BAME employees at senior level within RPS,” it said, adding: “We’ll be working on our more detailed action plans in the course of this year with the involvement and support of our Inclusion and Diversity Group, the Employee Forum and colleagues across RPS.”
