Data published by the UK Government revealed that King’s College London (KCL) has shown minimal improvement in addressing its gender pay gap over the last five years, with substantial inequalities remaining.
KCL’s median hourly gender pay gap sat at 9.4% last year, meaning women earned 91p for every £1 earned by men. This is lower than King’s five-year high of 11.5% in 2022/23, but higher than the previous academic year (2023/24) when the gap was 8.6%.
The 9.4% median hourly pay gap places King’s with a higher disparity than the 2024 national average, which was 4.4%. Yet this is an improvement on previous years, as in 2016, Roar reported King’s had the largest gender pay gap of any large UK University, at 17.74%.
Further, there is a gap in the median bonus pay, sitting at 11.3% for 2024/25. The median bonus pay means that women earned 89p for every £1 that men earned through bonus pay. However, this is a significant decline across the past five years, with the median bonus pay gap hitting highs of 53.3% in 2021/22.
In 2024/25, a greater proportion of women (10.9%) than men (10.5%) received bonuses for the first time in five years, yet a substantial pay gap persists in the value of those bonuses.
Both the median hourly pay gap and the median bonus pay gap are used in these data, as the median is preferred when reporting the gender pay gap due to reduced skew and consideration of all pay levels. The mean can still be considered as an average, with caution, and does display even more disparity. At KCL in 2024/25, a woman’s mean bonus pay sat at 43.5% lower than a man’s, with the mean hourly pay also being 12.2% lower than a man’s.
Additionally, while women make up 56% of King’s workforce, they are still underrepresented in the upper hourly pay quarter. In 2024/25, women made up 45% of the upper hourly pay quarter, a rise of only 3% across the last five years. In the lowest hourly pay quarter, women are still overrepresented, as in 2024/25, women made up 60% of the lowest-paid group, a decline of only 1% across the five years.
All employers with 250 or more employees are required to report their gender pay gap data to the UK Government by 31 March each year. KCL has reported theirs since 2017.
King’s position is mixed compared to its Russel Group counterparts in London. They rank third out of the four on both the median hourly gender pay gap and the median bonus pay gap. LSE has the smallest hourly gender pay gap with 5.5%, while Imperial has the lowest median bonus pay gap with 6.3%.
However, King’s does have some positive takeaways from the data, ranking first with the lowest average hourly pay gap, with a 12.2% gap, and first on the percentage of female workers in the upper quarter of pay, at 45%.
On the whole, the data suggests King’s still lags behind the national average when it comes to the median hourly gender pay gap, despite improving in comparison to its Russel Group counterparts in London.
A King’s College London spokesperson said:
“We take pay gap reporting very seriously and are pleased when we report progress, particularly this year’s achievement of promoting more female than male academics to professor. Work is ongoing and while progress cannot be overnight, our goal is lasting, sustainable change driven by impactful action and transparent reporting, which includes voluntarily publishing ethnicity pay gap data and, for the first time this year, disability pay gap data.”
