Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) is one of our key business priorities in CGI, reflecting our belief that everyone working at CGI should have the opportunity to thrive in their roles and achieve their full career potential.

A diverse and inclusive business is not only a better place to work, but can also achieve greater success. In 2020, we set ourselves a target to start reporting on any ethnicity pay gap, building on the approach taken with gender pay gap reporting. I am delighted to present our first published report.

Ethnicity Disclosure

Our first task to enable ethnicity pay gap reporting was for our employees to voluntarily record their ethnic group in our HR system. Within a year of starting we’ve made great progress, with almost 86% of our employees choosing to respond. We aim to increase this to at least 90% and we continue to encourage all of our new joiners and employees that have yet to record their ethnic group to do so.

Representation

We’ve looked at our representation and compared it to the latest available UK Census data1. Taking our Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) group employees as a whole shows that our overall ethnic minority group representation (14.4%) is just above the national census data (13%). With ethnicity, understanding patterns of representation by geographic location is important, and this is something we have been looking at internally.

As with gender pay reporting, we know that representation by seniority is a key driver of any pay gap. Therefore, in our report we also show ethnic representation by pay quartile level. This analysis has helped us identify that, while the representation of ethnic minority employees among our Senior Consultant population is very strong, there is a lower than expected representation at senior management levels. This is therefore an area of focus.

Pay Gap

In this report we provide an ethnicity pay gap that is calculated using the same methodology as the gender pay gap. Our mean ethnicity pay gap is 4.3% and our median is 2.1%. While the ethnicity pay gap is relatively small, we know that a higher representation of minority ethnic group employees at more senior levels will reduce it further, and, as highlighted above, this is now one of our main objectives.

Summary

Our DE&I focus across CGI includes working in partnership with our BAME network, supporting members to develop their careers and progress into leadership roles. Training and development initiatives that support this include launching a dedicated suite of learning options to support and empower underrepresented groups, and establishing a mentoring framework for our BAME network members.

We’re also encouraging more Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals to join and build careers at CGI through a variety of recruitment strategies. We continue to promote STEM subjects across the country – as well as publishing our BAME Cultures & Celebrations STEM pack.

My hope is that in sharing this information, exploring the data, and discussing both the report and our own experiences around DE&I, we can better understand the steps we need to take to build an even more inclusive environment for CGI’s Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic group employees.

Tara McGeehan – President, CGI UK & Australia

1 Based on the 2011 Census, 87% of people in the UK are White, and 13% belong to a Black, Asian, Mixed or Other ethnic group.