Figures, gender split and level of direct employees: FOI release

FOI reference: FOI/18/01781
Date received: 28 June 2018
Date responded: 4 July 2018

Information requested

Regarding people directly by the Scottish Government, please provide:

1. the number of female employees, as a percentage of the total number of employed

2. the average annual wage of all the female employees

3. the average annual wage of all the male employees

4. the number of female employees who hold senior positions

5. the number of male employees who hold senior positions.

Additionally you requested:

Please provide all information held relating to the above request, including but not exclusively all information held in the following formats: email, internal messaging, hardcopy, letter, file, report, graphic, publication, hand written notes, typed notes, minutes, transcript, website and social media.

Please provide the information electronically in the form of word, excel, PDF or image, and if that is not possible please send me paper copies (printed, photocopied or otherwise) at the address supplied.

If it is not possible to provide the information requested due to the information exceeding the cost of compliance limits identified in Section 12, please provide advice and assistance, under your Section 16 obligations, as to how I can refine my request to be included in the scope of the Act.

Response

Some of the information that you have requested can be found in two publications which are publicly available at the following addresses:

Headcount numbers and the demographic information of Scottish Government staff can be found at:
/publications/workforce-information/

Per this report as of the end of March 2018 there were 3031 female direct employees, accounting for 51.3% of the directly employed workforce.

Information and commentary on the gender pay gap in the Scottish Government and a breakdown of mean and median earnings for male and female staff at each step of the grade structure can be found at:
/publications/equality-outcomes-mainstreaming-report-2017/pages/15/

	Mean Pay (all staff)*	Median Pay (all staff)*	Headcount of Senior Civil Servants (SCS)
Female Staff	£35,016	£31,811	67
Male Staff	£36,530	£31,811	95

• Pay figures are for full time equivalent annual salary. Table data is taken from the equality outcomes and mainstreaming report linked above.

Additional details on pay for senior civil servants can be found here: /publications/senior-civil-service-pay-march-2018/

With regards to the second part of your inquiry relating to information held by the Scottish government relating to this topic, while our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the costs of locating, retrieving and providing the information requested would exceed the upper cost limit of £600.

Asking for all formats of information on a wide ranging topic will likely always exceed the cost limit. Since there is no central repository for all the types of information listed all staff would need to manually search all files and records in order to comply with this request.

You may wish to consider reducing the scope of your request in order that the costs can be brought below £600. For example requesting the email communications and electronic documents returned by a specified search term such as 'gender pay gap' is likely to be feasible where a broader request for all information related to a topic is not.

You may also find it helpful to look at the Scottish Information Commissioner's 'Tips for requesting information under FOI and the EIRs' on his website at: http://www.itspublicknowledge.info/YourRights/Tipsforrequesters.aspx

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses