Gender Pay Gap Report 2025

Introduction

Derbyshire Fire & Rescue Service (DFRS), as an employer is required by law to carry out gender pay reporting under the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017. Gender pay reporting shows the difference between the average earnings of men and women within the Service. The pay gap is expressed as a percentage of men's earnings e.g., women earn 15% less than men. The purpose of gender pay gap reporting is to assess the level of equality in the workplace and identify any imbalances. The information contained within is as of 31 March 2024 as per the Government’s requirement.

It is important to note that gender pay reporting is different from an equal pay audit. Gender pay reporting is concerned with the difference between an average male salary and an average female salary within the Service, whereas equal pay concerns the salary gap between employees in the same role, rated as equivalent using the same job evaluation scheme or where work is of equal value.

Gender Pay Reporting Calculations

Gender pay eporting requires six calculations to be carried out detailed below.

Mean Gender Pay Gap	Calculating the mean gender pay involves adding up all of the hourly pay rates and dividing this by the number of employees.
Median Gender Pay Gap	Calculating the median gender pay involves listing all the hourly pay rates in numerical order with the median being the middle number of the list.
Mean Bonus Gender Pay Gap	Calculating the mean bonus gender pay involves adding up all of the bonuses and dividing this by the number of employees.
Median Bonus Gender Pay Gap	Calculating the median bonus gender pay involves listing all the bonuses in numerical order with the median being the middle number of the list.
Proportion of males and females receiving a bonus payment	Calculating the proportion receiving a bonus involves dividing the number of relevant employees who received a bonus by the number of relevant who could have received a bonus.
Proportion of males and females in each quartile band	To calculate a quartile range, order the hourly pay rates in numerical order and split the list into four equal sections. Then calculate how many males and females fall into each section.

More detailed information on the gender pay calculations can be found on the GOV.UK website here.

Gender Split of Employees working for DFRS

The graphs below show the breakdown of DFRS employees by gender. They show that females are significantly under-represented in the Service. This is caused by an under-representation of females in operational roles rather than support roles (please note the operational figures in the graph below includes Control employees).

	Women	Men
Gender No.	243	697
Gender %	26%	74%

DFRS Gender Pay Report Calculations

The calculation results for the mean and median pay gap hourly pay rate for DFRS are shown below.

Mean Gender Pay Gap 8.09%

Women £17.09 Men £18.59

Mean Gender Pay Gap 2.48%

Women £16.53 Men £16.95

National Context

The most recent national figures for the gender pay gaps for all employees show a decrease when compared to the year before. Women earn 13.1% (April 2024) less than men, down from 14.2% in April 2023 (Source: Office for National Statistics, 2024).

Both the mean and median gender pay gap in DFRS are lower than the national figures at 8.09% and 2.48% respectively.

By way of comparison, our 2022 figures showed mean and median pay gaps of 8.9% and 2.5% respectively. Therefore, the updated pay gap figures for 2024 show a decrease of 0.81% for the mean average and a decrease of 0.02% for the median average.

National data shows in April 2024, the gap among full-time employees was 7%; this was 7.5% in April 2023 and 8.3% in April 2022. Over the course of the pandemic period in the years 2020-2021, earnings estimates were affected by changes in the composition of the workforce and the impact of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (furlough). This makes data interpretation difficult in years affected by COVID-19. Additionally, due to data collection disruption and lower response rates, data is subject to more uncertainty and should be treated with caution.

Looking at long-term trends among all employees, the gender pay gap decreased to 13.1%, from 14.3% in 2023, but is still below the levels seen in 2019 (17.4%) (Source: ONS 2024 report).

The proportion of men and women in each quartile salary band in DFRS is shown below:

	Upper	Upper Middle	Lower Middle	Lower
Number of Males	189	193	201	114
Number of Females	46	42	34	121
Percentage of Males	80%	82%	86%	49%
Percentage of Females	20%	18%	14%	51%

The graph shows that the greatest proportion of female salaries fall into the lowest quartile salary band and the next highest proportion of salaries fall into the highest quartile band. As a result, the upper salary band offsets the lower salary band to reduce the pay gap between males and females in the service. However, greater context can be provided by analysing the salary quartiles when they are broken down to operational employees (including Control) and support employees as shown in the graphs below.

	Upper	Upper Middle	Lower Middle	Lower
Number of Males	172	169	161	119
Number of Females	14	18	26	68
Percentage of Males	92%	90%	86%	64%
Percentage of Females	8%	10%	14%	36%

	Upper	Upper Middle	Lower Middle	Lower
Number of Males	26	24	15	11
Number of Females	22	24	33	38
Percentage of Males	54%	50%	31%	22%
Percentage of Females	46%	50%	69%	78%

In both Operational and Support roles, the proportion of men to women in the Upper, Upper Middle and Lower Middle quartiles are generally consistent, although there is a slight decrease in the percentage of women within the Upper quartile for both areas. In the Lower quartile, a significant difference can be seen as there is a higher proportion of women within this quartile in comparison to the others.

The reason for the disparity in the operational employees' graph is because the lower paid roles are control employees, and the majority of these posts are filled by women. Likewise, for the support employees graph the lowest paid roles are administration posts where again the majority of the posts are filled by women. Overall, the data sets showcase that women are statistically employed in lower paid roles within the service thus achieving a lower wage average.

Bonuses

DFRS does not offer a bonus scheme, therefore calculations related to bonuses are not applicable to DFRS.

Factors Contributing to Derbyshire Fire and Rescue’s Gender Pay Gap

Occupational segregation remains a factor for the fire and rescue labour market locally and nationally. There is an imbalance in the number of men and women throughout the organisation, particularly women in middle and senior roles.
It is recognised that within the operational roles, women are significantly underrepresented, both locally and nationally.
- Nationally, 9.3% of firefighters employed by fire and rescue services were women, as of 31 March 2024, an increase from 8.7% in the previous year, and 6.4% five years ago (Source: www.gov.uk).
- In Derbyshire 12.7% of firefighters were women on 31 March 2024. This compares to 12.3% in March 2023, 10.3% in March 2022 and 8.8% in March 2021, showing a positive year on year increase (Source: DFRS Workforce Data).
- A continuing positive trend in increasing the number of female operational firefighters will reduce the gender pay gap by increasing the average female salary.
A large majority of the roles within support and control functions are occupied by women and these roles generally fall into the lowest pay quartile. This is particularly relevant to support roles where female employees account for nearly 80% of the lower quartile.

Conclusion and Recommendations

DFRS are committed to making improvements to continue addressing the gender pay gap and there are actions that can and have been taken to reduce it further. The mean pay gap and median pay gap figures shows that female employees at DFRS are disadvantaged compared to their male counterparts, although this disadvantage is less when comparing to the ONS data nationally.

The Service has taken the following steps to increase gender diversity in all areas of the workforce, but has mainly focused on operational roles due to greater gender imbalance.

Creating an Evidence Base

Using the annual workforce data profiles to demonstrate:

the overall number of female and male employees across the organisation;
the number of female and male employees working within specific role types;
the proportion of female and male employees with a management role in both operational and non-operational roles;

Recruitment and Positive Action

The Service is committed to reflect the communities we serve within our workforce demographics, across all groups and seniority levels. DFRS already undertakes targeted positive action initiatives to under-represented groups, including trying to encourage more women to become firefighters.

Our current awareness programme for operational recruitment looks at broad engagement, whilst focusing on specific targeted events and community initiatives for underrepresented groups. Activities include “Have a Go” days which aim to improve the confidence of potential female applicants who consider applying for the role of a firefighter.

The Service has been delivering positive action awareness training to all employees and managers to promote understanding about what positive action is and the benefits of what improved representation brings to the organisation. This will continue throughout 2025/2026 to all new starters and as a refresher training every 3 years.

Furthermore, our ‘Notice to Advertise’ has been reviewed to include additional equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) considerations ensuring that EDI and Communication & Engagement teams are involved to discuss the most effective strategies for attracting a diverse workforce. Our job adverts are run through a gender-neutral tool to address a potential bias in advertising and write more inclusive job adverts. As a part of the recruitment process, all vacancies are shared with communities through our Community Mailing list to improve reach and promote opportunities and access a wide and diverse talent pool.

Raising Awareness of Gender and Diversity Issues and Championing our Employee Networks

DFRS continues to promote and highlight gender issues by seeking to identify and understand barriers and working on solutions. The Service’s Employee Networks, including the Gender Network, are led independently by employees and facilitated by the EDI Team. The Networks provide a platform for issues to be heard, discussed, and addressed by the organisation. The Service has formalised its Employee Networks by implementing a service level agreement based on the NFCC Employee Networks Framework to improve engagement and influence the Service in its decision making. Networks are also championed by our Senior Management Team to improve understanding within senior leadership.

To maintain awareness of issues across all protected characteristics, including sex and gender, Equality Impact Assessments (EQIAs) are a standing agenda item at leadership meetings. EQIAs are to be completed on any project, initiative or policy that affects our employees or communities, and provide a space for the author to identify impacts on different groups, including men and women, and mitigate any risk of discrimination.

Training and Development

The Service together with the Gender Network and its members hosted and supported a range of initiatives. These included firefighter recruitment awareness day sessions, networking, development events and sessions (e.g. Women in the Fire Service (WFS) Weekend, WFS Development Programme, a female only incident command day, and provided feedback the barriers to promotions as a part of the Service’s promotion’s review) community engagement, and wider awareness (e.g. International Women’s Day community festival, blogs and outreach work).

In addition, based on the feedback from our cultural survey and input from across the Service we have evolved our approach to appraisals within DFRS. We improved our appraisal form to better reflect our goals and values as a Service, changed the language to give employees ownership of their appraisals, introduced a six-monthly check in, and provided new guidance for employees and managers to ensure that people get the most of their appraisals.

Employment Policies

DFRS has several policies to support employees who are carers and parents. These include flexible working options for Support roles, flexi-duty system for Station and Group Managers, compressed hours contracts, job shares, a 52-week paid maternity policy, shared parental leave and up to 18 weeks unpaid parental leave.

In addition, by analysing our policies, projects, practices, procedures, services and decisions through the EQIA process, we identify any potential discrimination or disadvantage and ensure that our decisions are evidence based, transparent and impact employees and communities in a fair way.

Moving Forward

The Service works with employees and other relevant stakeholders to develop targeted programmes which support women to apply for operational roles and which enhance opportunities available to women in relation to promotion and development.

DFRS will continue to ensure that the Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) team works closely with HR and Learning and Development to implement the Service’s EDI, Learning and Development and People strategies.

We will:

Continue scrutiny of the Service’s EDI, People, Learning and Development and Communication and Engagement Strategies through our internal People Strategy Assurance Meetings; Scrutiny Meetings and People Collaboration Meetings;
Deliver an annual EDI communication and engagement plan to promote understanding and awareness, including of gender related issues;
Ensure that EDI is a standing agenda item at relevant internal meetings, and there is a robust equality impact assessment process in place;
Continue roll out of the equality, diversity and inclusion training offer for all employees across the Service, including our mandatory EDI Induction, mandatory and optional e-learning subject specific modules and other related training and conferences;
Continue using our key performance measures and key local indicators to measure our progress and improve diversity within the workforce;
Further develop our long-term positive action framework aligned to the Service’s 10-Year Vision, and specifically:
- A programme of engagement with girls and women through community groups, schools, colleges and universities.
- Create partnerships with educational establishments and community groups in Derbyshire to raise awareness of fire and rescue service careers, breakdown negative stereotypes and promote positive female role models.
- Continue building our reputation as an inclusive employer, by further developing and implementing flexible working arrangements and progressive female-friendly policies such as our maternity and adoption leave provision, our approach to menopause support and our uniform and facilities policies.
- Improve data accessibility to recruiting managers, so they can consider positive action activities to support the reduction in the pay gap.
- Improve analysis of our exit questionnaires, including identifying themes and trends, to better understand and consider ways to improve the employee experience.
- Encourage involvement in opportunities for personal and professional development from employees from across the Service, such as annual International Women’s Day events, the Women in the Fire Service weekends, Asian Fire Service Association events and other development programmes and Employee Networks’ initiatives.
- Consider further leadership development and career progression for women through tailored workshops and continuous professional development, using an evidence-based approach on what the barriers are.
- Through the Promotions Board working group implement recommendations of the Operational Promotions Process Review to ensure fairness and transparency.
- Provide mentorship opportunities through the NFCC Portal, to support employees who wish to develop and progress

This report has been consulted upon and approved by the following officers:

Victoria Walker – Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Officer
Alice Grindey – Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Officer
Davinder Johal – Head of Strategy and Improvement
Fiona Cragg – Organisational Governance Officer
Helen Minion – Strategic HR Partner
Emily Wright – Senior HR Partner
Robert Leverton – Group Manager Learning and Development
Lisa Bayliss – Learning and Development Manager
Rebecca Sims – Co-Chair of DFRS Gender Employee Network
Yvonne Devereux – Co-Chair of DFRS Gender Employee Network
Rachel Palmer – Communications and Engagement Manager
Contact Officer: Lukasz Gazda (Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion)
Contact No: 01773 305305
Email: DFRSinclusion@Derbys-Fire.Gov.UK