2022 UK Gender Pay Gap Report

Kent is a global engineering services company. In the UK, the Kent Energies UK Ltd entity represents an engineering projects and consultancy business with 265 staff working across all energy markets. The majority of our UK staff were previously part of SNC-Lavalin’s Oil & Gas business prior to the creation of new organisation Kent in 2021. Our data for this year has been compared against the relevant portion of the data previously presented in SNC-Lavalin’s 2021 Gender Pay Gap review. At Kent, our gender pay gap is largely a reflection of the UK engineering landscape, with more men than women working in the sector. Our UK workforce gender balance is 24% women / 76% men, with greater representation of men in our upper pay quarter, where higher salaries impact directly upon the gender pay gap.

Tackling the Gap

We are committed to eliminating our gender pay gap at Kent, along with all other forms of inequality and bias. Our approach to achieving zero gender pay gap at Kent is multi-faceted, and can be divided into actions and commitments associated with key stages in the employee lifecycle.

Attract

We use a strengths-based approach to writing our job descriptions, and ensure the language used is gender-neutral.

All of our roles are advertised as flexible, part-time, and hybrid or fully remote.

At the principal level and above, our interview panels are gender diverse. We provide positive mixed role models via our STEM outreach work with schools and universities. This supports a longer-term change to the gender representation gap in the UK engineering workforce.

We do not set gender targets against our recruitment, though we monitor and check for underlying trends that may indicate bias.

Our hiring managers are required to complete our all-staff Inclusion Induction and have recently all undertaken Conscious Inclusion training.

Retain

In the UK, we support flexible and hybrid working for all of our staff. We empower our staff by trusting them to work in a way that suits them and their external commitments, such as parenting or caring. Almost all of our staff work flexibly, and 25% of our women and 7% of our men choose to work part-time.

In 2023, we’re committing to reviewing our approach to new parents leave, in addition to removing the minimum qualifying time for staff to access these benefits.

We will continue to challenge the assumption that women are primary family carers, and the ‘motherhood penalty’ that this often leads to. By normalising men working part-time in order to care, we can improve the work-life harmony of men, whilst simultaneously breaking down barriers and unconscious biases that impact the career progression of women.

Develop

Inclusion & Belonging learning is woven into our staff learning journeys at Kent, and an inclusion induction forms part of our onboarding process for all staff.

All internal roles and opportunities are advertised.

We have overhauled our promotion process to ensure fairness and transparency. At principal level and above, our promotion and internal interview panels are gender diverse.

The gender balance of our organisation is reflected in our UK leadership team, in the senior appointments of our Market Directors for both Offshore Wind and Oil & Gas. These high profile role models are representative of the equality of opportunity that we strive for at Kent.