 Diversity Monitoring Reports 2020 Summary This report describes the diversity of the Scottish Parliamentary Service staff group and any pay gaps for gender, ethnicity and disability. The publication of the report meets the requirements of the Public Sector Equality Duty of the Equality Act 2010 to gather and use employee information on the protected characteristics. The employee profile information in this report uses data at the snapshot date of 31 March 2020, along with recruitment data collected from 1 April 2019 to 31 March 2020. Information has been collected about age, disability, caring responsibilities, marital status, maternity and paternity, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation and trans status. What do the findings tell us? This year's report tells us that the number of staff from an ethnic minority background has increased from 4% to 4.8%. An outreach programme targeting ethnic minority people was carried out working with a partner organisation. The introduction of a values-based recruitment approach has also helped us to attract a more diverse range of candidates. The number of LGBT plus staff has increased from 5.7% to 6%. And is in line with Stonewall Scotland's estimate of 5-7% LGBT plus people. The number of staff declaring a disability has fallen from 8.6% to 7.7%. The disability pay gap is in line with the gender pay gap at 2.4%. The Scottish Parliament continues to be recognised as a disability confident leader employer for our commitment to the employment and development of disabled people. The average age of our staff group has slightly increased this year from 45 years to 46 years. The proportion of the staff group who are young people 16 to 24 years old has decreased from 5.6% to 4.3%. At grade 6 and above, the percentage of women has increased to 46% from 43% in the previous year. At the most senior grades there are no staff members who have declared that they are from an ethnic minority or LGBT plus background. This year we are proud of the progress made to improving the workforce diversity. The pay gap for gender and disability remains within our plus or minus 5% target. Our leadership group met its target of 50-50 by 2020. There continues to be a near equal representation of men and women in the upper quartile of our pay grades. There has been an increase in staff members making self-declarations on their ethnicity and LGBT plus status. This could be an indicator of people's sense of working in an inclusive environment where they feel comfortable to be themselves at work. However, we are also very aware that we still have a challenge ahead of us and know that there is more to do. The applications from diverse groups may be increasing but some groups continue to be significantly underrepresented at different levels in the organisation. This is why we must continue with our targeted outreach and embed diversity into our recruitment practices using a values-based approach. Looking inwards, the ethnicity pay gap remains significantly high at 21.3%. Ethnic minority people have joined us through the apprenticeship programme but we still lack ethnic minority people in senior roles. To this end, our aim is to develop and nurture talent by developing our existing ethnic minority staff to reach their full potential in 2021. What we will do next? Our values of stewardship, excellence, inclusion and respect are a central part of our working culture and are used to recruit, manage and develop our staff. In 2020-21, they will support our aims to continue with a targeted approach to recruitment including working with external partners and stakeholders to help us engage with our underrepresented groups continue to embed diversity into the Parliament's recruitment practices using our values and behaviours to recruit people Develop an emerging leaders programme for ethnic minority people to enhance their careers in the Parliament.