Hachette tracks uplift in BAME staff numbers but pay gap widens

Hachette UK has published its second ethnicity pay gap report, showing the number of black and minority ethnic (BAME) employees at the company has increased but the mean average pay gap between them and their white colleagues has widened.

The publisher released its first report voluntarily last year, the first and currently only press to do so, as part of its Changing the Story programme to attract and retain more diverse talent. Hachette also pledged a BAME representation target of 15% of the total group workforce within five years.

This year's report, which uses snapshot data from 5th April 2019, shows there has been progress towards that goal, with the proportion of BAME staff across Hachette Group, which includes the distribution arm, rising from 7.7% in 2018 to 9.6%.

However, the mean ethnicity pay gap has risen from 9.8% in April 2018 to 14.1% across the group. The median gap also swung from BAME employees earning 6.9% more than other colleagues in 2018 to taking home 7.9% less in 2019. The median wage is calculated by ranking employees from highest to lowest-paid, and taking the wage of the person in the middle; the mean is the average wage across the organisation.

Hachette said the change was due to an increase in BAME employees across every quartile of the group, aside from the upper middle. Changes to its distribution business in 2018 also saw many lower paid, non-BAME employees leave the firm, increasing the average pay of white staff.

For Hachette UK, the legal reporting arm which does not include distribution, mean pay was 21.9% less for BAME people than their counterparts, up from18.7% the previous year. The median gap had also shifted from BAME people earning 2% more than white colleagues in 2018 to 15% less. However, the publisher pointed out changes to its legal structure in 2019 meant the entity now included nearly all employees of its publishing divisions, bringing in Bookouture, Octopus, Orion, Quercus and Little, Brown. That meant making like-for-like comparisons with the previous year was not possible.

As with last year, the publisher also stressed the overall number of BAME employees was still low, meaning that a small number of jobs can disproportionately affect the figures.

Head of diversity and inclusion Saskia Bewley (pictured) admitted the numbers were “humbling” but told The Bookseller: “I am really encouraged that we're moving in the right direction and I'm really encouraged by the people that we work with at Hachette, the commitment, the drive for change, and it's the actions that I really focus on.

"I'm not here ticking boxes. For me it's a focus on action plans and things we need to be doing to make that change. I know what the starting point is and I don't look at those numbers and jump up and down. But I'm really inspired by the people I work with and I know there's change that's coming.”

Since the last report, Hachette said it had recruited a third cohort of publishing trainees in a programme open to people from BAME backgrounds, published a new respect and inclusion policy, and held its first Changing the Story Day, a company-wide showcase exploring ways to become more diverse and inclusive that looks set to become an annual event.

The company has set-up a “Mirror Board” career development programme for high-potential BAME staff to work alongside the main HUK board on business challenges. In April 2019 there were still no board member from BAME backgrounds. New communications director Doyel Maitra joined the board in March 2020.

Bewley said some of the initiatives would take a while to bear fruit in the figures, but she said Changing the Story did appear to play a part in encouraging new employees into the firm.

She said: “Anecdotally, people say Changing the Story is what made Hachette stand out. I think there's definitely a real openness and a real transparency here and I think Changing the Story is incredibly unique as far as diversity and inclusion work goes. It's so holistic, it's not a single issue approach. There are lots of conversations taking place simultaneously and there's real interest in the intersectionality of those issues. There are definitely direct lines between employees and all parts of the business right up to the board, so I think all of that helps and people can see that from the outside. The ethnicity pay gap report is just another piece of that jigsaw which just shows that openness, that transparency, that commitment to change.”

As with 2018, the figures showed the majority of BAME staff tended to be in central functions like IT rather than editorial and sales. Bewley said the firm was committed to increasing representation across all publishing functions including commissioning roles through initiatives such as its traineeship programme.

A resourcing review has begun, Bewley said, looking at the company's entry level roles with a second phase to examine things like how jobs are advertised an applicants are tracked. A task force led by Dialogue publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove will also gather data on author diversity.

Bewley said of the report: “It's is a really good mechanism for holding companies to account because you're responsible for that progress year on year. We're not just going to be doing this for a one-off or two years in a row, we're going to do this again and again and we're holding ourselves accountable for that change in a really public way.

“I think it's a real launchpad to talk about race and ethnicity in the workplace which I think companies might want to avoid otherwise and put it in their 'too hot to handle' box. But when you're doing this report, and I think we saw the same thing with gender pay gap reports, companies that had never engaged with certain issues before were suddenly confronted with questions from employees and potential employees. So I think it's a really interesting mechanism for doing that but it's still really blunt if you don't engage with it properly.”

Referring to the recent debates on publishing diversity thrown back into the spotlight following the Black Lives Matter movement, she said: “This for us is not a trend, it's not some bandwagon we jumped on in the last few weeks. We've always been doing this and we're going to continue to do it.”

She added: “We know the climate we're putting this work out into and we know there's extra emotion at this time but it's not something we're doing in a reactive sense. It's about progressive, sustainable long-term change.”

David Shelley, c.e.o. of Hachette UK, said: “We believe diversity in all forms is the key to the creativity and culture that will make us a better publisher. We’ve always encouraged open and transparent debate about representation in publishing, and the events around the world in the last three months have brought even more urgency and immediacy to these conversations. As a publisher, our mission is to help all people, everywhere, to access new worlds of learning, entertainment and opportunity — and to achieve that, we have a responsibility to ensure that more diverse perspectives and stories are shared with the world. And we can only do that by creating a more diverse workforce.

“For us, meaningful change starts with acknowledging and understanding where are today. Our ethnicity pay gap report is one of the ways in which we choose to hold ourselves to account and it’s encouraging to see that we’ve made some progress towards our 2024 target of 15% BAME representation, but there’s still a long way to go.”