Melissa is an Associate within our Board Management Services practice and leads the Pay Gap Analytics Team, providing consultancy services to corporates and charities.
Melissa’s ethos is to go beyond pay gap reporting figures as standard, helping clients to understand core drivers of their pay gap and target change, through deeper data analytics. She is particularly motivated to improve the financial wellbeing of employees and connects her work with wider corporate governance.
Melissa advises a range of well known brands, across multiple sectors, with a particular interest in the retail sector.
Other expertise:
Melissa is a regular contributor to industry press and has pubished a number of articles in REBA Magazine. Melissa has been broadcast as a leading pay gap expert by the BBC.
She has presented at events including the launch of a Fawcett Society research report, an SPS conference hosting a session on tackling the gender pension gap and was the key note speaker at a gender equity event for the Greater London Authority. Melissa has recorded a number of podcasts including featuring on an episode of the apple podcast “Big Career, Small Children”.
Significant expertise:
- Analysed the pay gap data of several large retailers, including identifying the job roles at the median point, which helped them to explain their pay gap and evidence that the pay gap was not due to women being paid less for the same job role, a common misconception.
- Conducted analysis of the impact of each Directorate on the overall pay gap and identified one international team was significantly impacting results. This helped the charity explain their pay gap in their narrative.
- Utilised gender pay gap data points to deliver CEO pay ratio reporting figures cost efficiently for an organisation, under methodology option B.
- S-curve analysis to identify a wider pay gap between men and women in non-sales staff compared to sales staff in a consultancy. This provided data led evidence that there could be bias when performance was less measurable and enabled targeted investigation and action planning.
- Analysis of multiple elements of remuneration and deduction, against legislative guidance to conduct a review of accuracy of reporting figures.
- Contributed to The Diversity Project response, led by Helena Morrissey, to the Government consultation on introducing ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting.
Listen to this podcast to hear Melissa discuss the need for accurate data analytics as a first step to understanding why and where your pay gap is occurring.