Our gender pay gap reports
View a snapshot of men’s and women’s average pay in our organisation, what’s causing our gender pay gap and what we’re doing about it.
Working to close our gender pay gap
As an organisation with more than 250 employees, we’re required by law to report our gender pay gap every year.
Our report found that on 5 April 2025:
Women made up 84% of our workforce, and men 16%
Women earned 89p for every £1 earned by men when comparing median hourly pay
Our median gender pay gap has narrowed by 2.94 percentage points since last year and 13.27 percentage points since 2017
A note on inclusivity
Gender pay gap reporting only includes colleagues who selected either ‘male’ or ‘female’ on our diversity monitoring form. Colleagues who selected another option or didn’t disclose their gender were not included in this data set.
It’s a legal requirement to calculate the gender pay gap in this binary way and we recognise it doesn’t reflect the diversity of our workforce.
Why do we have a gender pay gap?
Like many organisations in the charitable sector, most of our employees are women. Men make up 16% of our workforce but occupy almost a quarter of our highest-paid roles – while roles in our lower pay bands are predominantly filled by women.
The relative overrepresentation of men in higher pay bands and underrepresentation at lower ones creates a gender pay gap. And although this is influenced by historic and systemic factors, we’re committed to doing all we can to rebalance gender representation in these areas. What are we doing about our gender pay gap? Over the past year we’ve taken steps to improve equity of opportunity between genders and narrow our gender pay gap by:
Monitoring age as a factor in our gender pay gap
Providing further support for those with caring responsibilities
Improving job evaluations.
But our work is far from over. Our median gender pay gap is higher than the estimated not-for-profit and public sector figures, but lower than those of other sectors - but it’s still too high. Over the next 12 to 18 months we’ll implement the following measures to reduce it further:
Attracting and hiring
We will ensure we have diverse interview panels that conduct structured interviews. We’ll report progress to our Executive every quarter.
Progression
We will continue to ensure that the language and messaging used in our external advertising actively encourages women to apply for senior roles. We will provide confidential pre-application discussions to anyone seeking more information regarding our application processes.
In addition, we will develop targeted coaching and leadership development opportunities for women who are aspiring to move into senior positions.
Retention and flexible senior options
We’ll identify and analyse themes in the reasons why our female colleagues leave Anna Freud, acting where appropriate.
Pay governance and calibration
We’ll introduce annual checks on our senior pay rates and seek justification and approval for any that fall outside the normal range. Our pay policies will be applied consistently.
Monitoring of key performance indicators and transparency
We’ll publish our performance figures every six months by measuring our mean and median gaps, quartile mix, hiring and promotion rates and leaver rates by gender. Updates will be provided to our Board of Trustees and People Committee.
By implementing these measures, in the next 12 months our goal is to reduce our mean gender pay gap by 2% to 3% and sustain the improvement in our median gender pay gap. We also hope to lay the foundations for a more gender-balanced leadership team.
Previous gender pay gap reports
Visit the Gender Pay Gap Service to see our statistics from previous years and compare our gender pay gap to other UK employers. You can also read more about our journey to reduce our gender pay gap in our past reports.