Diversity & Inclusion at
MOJ Digital and
Technology
Interacting with any part of the justice system is not always pleasant if it's the result of a negative experience, which is why we aim to make it as easy and painless as possible. We do this through the principles of user-centred design and we know that we cannot be truly user-centred unless the people in our teams represent the people we build services for.
We’ve been collecting data on our demographics to understand how representative we are and where we need to focus our efforts to improve. Here we share with you the latest data showing, where possible, a comparison between our team and the UK population. We commit to updating this data on an annual basis and will use it to hold ourselves accountable and ensure we’re constantly reviewing our actions to keep doing better.
It’s not just about numbers for us though. As acclaimed diversity activist Vernā Myers puts it: "Diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being asked to dance®". We have a network of champions working on activities and events throughout the year to ensure our team members feel included, engaged and valued, and we measure their success through fortnightly pulse surveys and the annual Civil Service People Survey. You can read more about some of those initiatives towards the bottom of this page and in our diversity and inclusion blog posts.
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We don’t currently have any data on gender non-binary people.
Our numbers are much better than the average among the tech industry, which has remained at
around 16% since 2009, but we still have work to do.
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Our gap is smaller than the Civil Service average, but we believe any gap is too big so we’re working on reducing ours.
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We’re pleased that this is above the UK population.
However, we do not have data on the ethnic diversity of our senior management as the numbers
are too low, and although representation looks good, the declaration rate was only 74% and
4% chose to answer ‘prefer not to say’. This suggests we have some work to do to encourage
people to feel safe sharing their ethnicity.
*We’re not fans of the term BME or the homogenous grouping of ethnicities that it
encourages, but this is the language that’s currently used across government. We’re setting
up conversations to try to change that.
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This is above the known UK population but the declaration rate for this question was only 62% and 15% chose 'prefer not to say’. This indicates that a lot of the team don’t feel safe or comfortable sharing their sexuality.
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This is below the UK population and for this question the declaration rate was only 65%, with 17% of people choosing 'prefer not to say'.
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This breaks down as 45% Christian, 13% ‘other religion’.
This is below the UK population and for this question the declaration rate was only 62% with
16% choosing 'prefer not to say'. Also none of our senior team has a religion other than
Christianity.
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What have we done?
Loads! Here are a few examples:
Champions: We have a network of champions who meet regularly to review our
demographic data and work together to deliver initiatives to improve representation and inclusion.
Inclusive recruitment: We’ve reduced the essential criteria on our job descriptions and run them through a gender decoder to ensure the language we use isn’t putting people off applying. We ask candidates to remove their names from their CVs and ensure all our interview panels are gender-diverse and ethnically diverse.
Spreading the word: We’ve hosted and presented at events aimed at women and diversity in tech to spread awareness of our job opportunities and benefits.
Partnerships and apprenticeships:
LGBTQ* inclusion: We have a strong LGBTQ* community, which contributed to the MOJ rising from 204th (in 2016) to 5th in Stonewall’s most recent Top Employers list.
Fair and open pay: We have standard pay scales based on the level of responsibility of each role and we publish these openly with our job adverts. We have also been working to align our existing team members’ pay with the Digital Data and Technology Pay Framework set up by the Government Digital Service, which allows for specific pay increases based on performance. We hope this will help to reduce any pay inequities including our gender pay gap.
Flexible working: All of our roles have several options for flexible working, including working part time, job shares, or working remotely. At the moment most of us are working from home full time but even when there’s not a global pandemic we have the opportunity to choose how often we go into the office and set working days and hours that fit around the rest of our lives.
Equipment: Everyone can request equipment for use in the office or at home to make their workspace more comfortable and suited to their needs, including assistive technology and ergonomic chairs.
Inclusive benefits: We offer an array of inclusive benefits as standard across the Civil Service including generous (shared) parental leave, paid sick leave, bereavement and special leave, and access for all staff to an Employee Assistance Programme that includes a 24 hour phone line with occupational therapists and the ability to self refer for counselling sessions.
What’s next?
Digging into the data: We’re trying to source data on areas such as socio-economic background and parenting or caring responsibilities, to give us greater understanding of our team’s make-up and needs. We’re also working on getting data by profession as we suspect that representation may be worse in some than others. For example we believe that we have fewer women in more technical roles, such as software development, technical architecture and cyber security. Knowing which professions are least representative will help us to focus our efforts to attract and support minoritised people to join us.
Intersectionality: We’re working on getting intersectional data as many people will fall into more than one underrepresented group and we want to make sure we’re not only hiring - for example - straight, white, cis women, and that we’re considering the compounded effects of battling multiple biases.
Job advertising: We’re working with organisations leading on diversity in tech to advertise our roles to their communities and promote the many benefits of working with us to a wider, more diverse network.
Committing to improve:
Developing training: We want everyone in the team to appreciate how important diversity and inclusion are and know how they can contribute to our efforts to improve. We’re developing training to help us do that.
Mental health support: We’ve started running regular online sessions with the NHS on various mental health topics to give extra support to our team members throughout lockdown and the pandemic.
Seeking inspiration: We’re organising regular online lightning talks from prominent women in the industry to share their experiences and expertise with our team members. We plan to widen this to include representatives from other minoritised groups.
Listening and learning: We’ll continue listening to our team members and reviewing their feedback to make sure we keep improving. We’ll also be setting up sessions with experts on different areas of diversity, equity and inclusion so we can learn from them.
Notes on the data
We ask our team members to answer demographic questions via the MOJ online HR system. This is accessible by permanent staff, who make up 75% of our team (817 people). The data is then processed by data experts and shared with us anonymously with responses below five suppressed to ensure individuals cannot be identified.
We receive this data every three months to analyse and act on but the latest we can share publicly is from March 2019, in line with the most recent public data shared on the MOJ as a department. Once that is updated we will update this page too.
The data we have currently only covers a handful of areas and does not allow for intersectional analysis - we’re working on this so that we can get a fuller picture of our team make-up and ensure that everyone feels respected and celebrated for all of their characteristics.
The gender pay gap data is collected from HR data and shared with us anonymously. It is just for permanent team members, it doesn’t include contractors or agency staff. The latest publicly shareable data is from March 2020 but we do have more recent data internally that we’re reviewing and acting on.
We’re using data from the 2011 UK census as a framework for comparison because it’s the closest we can get to an estimate of our user base and recruitment pool. Once the 2021 census data is released we’ll use that.