Addressing the pay gap at Macmillan

News
Published: 02 April 2025
What we are doing to address the pay gap at Macmillan Cancer Support.

Francesca Okosi Chief People & Culture Officer at Macmillan

We need to talk about pay

At Macmillan, we’re deeply committed to being an inclusive, equitable, and diverse organisation where every colleague feels valued, supported, and empowered to do their best work. If we want to reach everyone with cancer, we need to ensure that our own people are set up to succeed. And that starts with fair pay. 

Everyone should be paid fairly for the job that they do, not because of who they are or their ability to speak up for themselves. 

We’re legally required to report our gender pay gap, and we’re voluntarily sharing more information than we’re required to do. We’re also providing colleagues with more information about our disability, ethnicity, and sexuality pay gaps too. Because if we truly care about equity, we need to hold ourselves accountable. 

Where are we currently?

Gender pay gap

 

We’re pleased to note a 1.2% decrease in our mean (average) gender pay gap. That’s progress. But we’ve also seen a 1.2% increase in our median gender pay gap. In simple terms, that means the pay difference between the middle-ranking male and female colleagues has grown. 

Overall, our gender pay gap now stands at 11.9%, putting us in a similar position to 2022. While this remains below the UK’s mean average of 13.8%, it’s not where we want to be. Any pay gap, no matter how it compares externally, signals the need for us to do more. 

 

Read the report in full

Why is this happening?

We’ve been working to understand the root causes of these pay gaps, and have a good understanding of what’s influencing them.  

  • Planned work to address pay gaps was slowed down or paused because of changes we made to our organisation last year. This also had some positive benefits by helping to close the pay gap in parts of the organisation.  

  • Some of the influences on pay gaps are exacerbated by our commitment to flexible working. Females make up a higher proportion of the workforce at Macmillan and represent a higher proportion of colleagues with caring responsibilities choosing to work part-time. We’re proud of our flexible working policies which support female employees, but recognise that this does impact the pay gap, as part-time salaries are lower than full-time.  

  • Our Technology roles attract a salary premium and have a higher proportion of males compared to the wider workforce, and impact our overall results. If we remove the Technology roles from our data, the pay gap reduces significantly. We are committed to supporting more females in these roles with targeted development plans.  

  • Since 5 April 2024, we have made changes to our senior leadership team which will go some way to addressing some of the disparity with greater representation of female, LGBTQ+ and ethnically diverse colleagues. We will see the impact of this in our 2025 pay gap reports.
We’ve improved our understanding of the main causes of the pay gap, so we can focus our efforts on making the changes that will make a difference.  

We’ve made some progress. But we recognise knowing the problem isn’t enough, we need action. 

What are we doing about it?

We’ve been working to understand the root causes of these pay gaps, and have a good understanding of what’s influencing them.  

  • Planned work to address pay gaps was slowed down or paused because of changes we made to our organisation last year. This also had some positive benefits by helping to close the pay gap in parts of the organisation.  

  • Some of the influences on pay gaps are exacerbated by our commitment to flexible working. Females make up a higher proportion of the workforce at Macmillan and represent a higher proportion of colleagues with caring responsibilities choosing to work part-time. We’re proud of our flexible working policies which support female employees, but recognise that this does impact the pay gap, as part-time salaries are lower than full-time.  

  • Our Technology roles attract a salary premium and have a higher proportion of males compared to the wider workforce, and impact our overall results. If we remove the Technology roles from our data, the pay gap reduces significantly. We are committed to supporting more females in these roles with targeted development plans.  

  • Since 5 April 2024, we have made changes to our senior leadership team which will go some way to addressing some of the disparity with greater representation of female, LGBTQ+ and ethnically diverse colleagues. We will see the impact of this in our 2025 pay gap reports.
We’ve improved our understanding of the main causes of the pay gap, so we can focus our efforts on making the changes that will make a difference.

We’ve made some progress. But we recognise knowing the problem isn’t enough, we need action.

 

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