Mind the Gap: CEO David Alterman reflects on The Nursery’s Gender Pay Gap

CEO David Alterman uncovers the efforts, challenges and progress made by The Nursery in reducing the Gender Pay Gap.

We’ve just calculated this year’s Gender Pay Gap for the 46 partners at The Nursery.

It’s a mixed picture. Our gap has decreased from last year, hooray – but it is still too big and is stubbornly resisting our best efforts to close it further.

And by best efforts I do mean that:

• Every senior recruit in the last 3 years has been female.
• Every senior level promotion in the last 3 years has been female.
• Our new family policy is best in class.
• Our new Menopause policy is best in class.
• We use anonymous CVs for recruitment.
• Our EDI team educate us every week about the different kinds of discrimination that we need to eliminate from the business.
• And we police any or all types of discrimination or inappropriate behaviour spotted or experienced within the business with a zero-tolerance policy.

So why does this gap stubbornly refusal to shift?

The thing is GPG is a little slice of history, like light travelling from a star in a far off galaxy – reflecting recruitment decisions made many years ago. The Nursery has been lucky enough to generate great loyalty from our senior team – 9 of the 13 men in our business have been with us for 10 years or more.

So, our current GPG is about 2013 rather than 2023. Give us 10 more years and I am sure we will have cracked it.

In the meantime, we’ll keep on trying to do the right things.