Gender and ethnicity pay gap report 2025

All UK organisations with more than 250 employees must publish their gender pay gap annually. Although not legally required to report on the ethnicity pay gap, the Crick chooses to do so as part of our commitment to race equality and creating a fair and inclusive environment for all employees and students.

Our ethnicity pay gap is an important measure of our progress towards becoming a more equitable and inclusive employer, and we welcome the opportunity to share our ethnicity pay gap data for the first time this year.

Equality, diversity and inclusion are essential to the Crick’s mission. Diversity drives unique collaborations and facilitates scientific innovation.

We aim to attract and retain under-represented groups in science careers, and to create an environment where they can thrive.

The Crick reports gender and ethnicity pay gaps at a fixed moment each year. We use the data as an important measure of progress on our inclusion strategy 
 

Equal pay – paying people the same for like-for-like work – has been a legal requirement for over 50 years. We are confident that we do this and have robust frameworks and guidelines in place, applied consistently to ensure fair pay for comparable roles across the institute.

The gender pay gap is the difference between the average hourly pay of men and women, regardless of the work they perform. The ethnicity pay gap is the difference in average pay between White and Black, Asian and other ethnic minority staff (grouped together as “Ethnic Minority staff”).

Comparing average rates of pay helps to highlight broad trends and inequalities in employment and earnings.
 

On 5 April 2025, the Crick had a gender gap in median pay of 4.3% and a gender gap in mean pay of 9.8%.

Compared to 5 April 2024, the median pay gap increased by 0.6% (from 3.7% to 4.3%) and the mean pay gap decreased by 0.2% (from 10.0% to 9.8%). 

This is significantly lower than the UK median gender pay gap, reported as 12.8% in 2025 by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). 

Our gender pay gap is primarily a result of:

• men making up a smaller proportion of employees in more junior roles,
• women being more likely to work in teams where market-rate salaries are lower, and
• women's career progression tending to slow at mid-career stages.

Over the past five years, both the mean and median gender pay gaps at the Crick have shown an overall downward trend. While there have been some fluctuations, these are expected and largely reflect variations in the gender distribution of staff joining the institute at different grade levels.

This downward trend is also reflected across other UK organisations and in data from the Office for National Statistics. Although the Crick’s gender pay gaps have consistently remained below the UK average, we recognise that there is still more work to do to address the structural and systemic factors that contribute to our gender pay gap.

Mean gender pay gap

Median gender pay gap

This is the first time we have reported our ethnicity pay gap data. On 5 April 2025, The Crick had an ethnicity gap in median pay of 6.5%. Our ethnicity gap in mean pay was 17.3%.

For the data in this report, people’s ethnicity is categorised as either “ethnic minority” or “white”. We acknowledge the limitations of these terms and expect our approach to continue to evolve.

In 2025, of the 84% of staff who had shared their ethnicity data with us, 28% were from an ethnic minority background:

Our ethnicity pay gaps are a result of low representation of people from racially minoritised groups at more senior levels. 

These findings should be interpreted with caution, as ethnicity data has not been provided by approximately 15% of employees. This is a significant proportion of the workforce, whose data could affect the pay gap calculations considerably.

We don’t pay bonuses, but for gender pay gap reporting purposes, we are required to report any rewards related to profit sharing, productivity or performance.

In 2025, we spent less than 0.32% of our total salary bill on payments that meet the requirements for reporting purposes. 

In total, 72 employees received a payment and of these, 82% were non-consolidated payments made under our Outstanding Contribution Review scheme that recognise high performance. These have been included in our bonus pay gap report since 2024. They were previously made as consolidated pay increases, so were included in our gender pay gap calculations.

We also made a small number of larger payments under our 'rewards to inventors’ policy. These payments are significant and recognise individuals who have created intellectual property (IP) that the Crick can commercialise, allowing them to share in the net revenue generated from its commercial use. We also operate a couple of exceptional executive or senior staff incentive arrangements. These distort our gender bonus pay gap and make year-on-year comparisons difficult.

Our mean gender bonus pay gap in 2025 was 72.2%. Our median gender bonus pay gap was 0%. In 2025, 5.5% of women and 4.0% of men received a bonus payment.

• The Crick did not report a bonus gender pay gap before 2022
• In 2023, the Crick made a cost-of-living payment to all staff with six months' service or more.

We are pleased by the progress we’ve made in decreasing our pay gaps, but we have much more to do. That’s why we’re strengthening our equality, diversity and includion ambitions in our revised inclusion strategy, which will be published later this year.

Two themes in the strategy are of relevance to the gender and ethnicity pay gaps:

• Fair and inclusive recruitment and progression
• Developing our inclusive culture

In March 2025, the Crick was successfully re-awarded the Athena Swan Bronze accreditation, which serves as a robust framework for assessing the institute’s career development, recruitment, progression, and overall culture, particularly concerning gender equity.  

The 2025-2030 action plan developed for the Athena Swan assessment is now integrated into the inclusion strategy action plan. It is structured around the following key themes: 

• Increasing the proportion of female senior scientific staff
• Supporting career progression for early and mid-career female scientists
• Enhancing recruitment data and developing inclusive hiring programmes
• Embedding gender equity into institutional culture
• Expanding support for parents and carers

These objectives include specific targets that we’ll keep under regular review as we endeavour to become a more inclusive and diverse organisation.  

We will continue to take a broad range of actions to narrow the gap further – affecting recruitment, development, pay standardisation and promotions. 

As part of a commitment to inclusion, the Crick has undertaken a series of positive initiatives to reduce pay gaps, some of which are outlined below.

In 2024/25, we have:

• submitted our gender and ethnicity equality actions as part of the Crick's Athena Swan bronze award renewal. These are now being implemented across the Crick,
• launched a career development framework for our laboratory research scientists to enable consistent and fair recognition and reward
• introduced the Disability Confident scheme and developed our recruitment practices,
• reached a milestone in gender balance at senior entry levels: women now make up 44% of our early career group leaders and 50% of our clinical research group leaders, aligning with our postdoc population, and
• welcomed our first cohort of four students to the Crick through our new Future Leaders fellowship programme for Black PhD students. Demand for the fellowship was exceptional (187 applications for two places), underlining both the appetite for opportunity and the Crick's ability to attract outstanding diverse talent.

Take a look at our equality, diversity and inclusion webpages to find out what we're doing to make the Crick a more inclusive place to work. You can read more about pay gap reporting on the gov.uk website.
 

Ethnicity and gender pay gaps arise from the systemic and structural inequalities that exist in our society and systemic change continues to be needed to reduce these gaps, which reflect an under-representation of women and minority ethnic at the senior levels of the Crick.

The Francis Crick Institute is committed to addressing our gender and ethnicity pay gaps through evidence-based actions that are integrated across the institute and embedded within our strategy.

Our actions will be guided by evidence, by what we learn over time, and by the lived experiences of everyone in the Crick community.

We will continue to monitor and review these actions to support an inclusive culture and enable the progression of women and under-represented groups, helping to reduce our gender and ethnicity pay gaps.

I confirm that the information and data provided in this report is accurate.

Candice Cross
Chief People Officer