Every year, the gender pay gap report is an opportunity to look at where we are as an organisation and to consider the picture more broadly across the life sciences sector. This year, that picture is one of progress at CHASE, set against a backdrop that remains complex across pharmaceuticals, medtech and the NHS.
CHASE’s mean gender pay gap has fallen to 14.1%, down from 14.4% in 2024 and from a five-year average of 15.2%. The mean has moved consistently in the right direction, reflecting sustained effort across recruitment, pay structures, and performance management.
The median figure has widened to 23.6%, compared with 18.6% last year. The movement is not a sign of worsening pay equity. The majority of CHASE employees are deployed on client projects, a significant proportion of them on outsourced nursing programmes. Nursing pay structures are shaped by the NHS Agenda for Change and wider market rates, which sit outside CHASE’s direct control. When project composition shifts to increase the proportion of nursing roles, the median moves accordingly. Removing nursing projects from the data brings the overall pay gap down to approximately 5%, from a workforce split of 58% female to 42% male.
For the 18% of employees on our core payroll, the average pay gap is 4.4% from a 60/40 female-to-male split. For comparable roles within that group, the gap is zero or slightly in favour of women. Four of our top ten earners are female, and ten of our top 20 are female, indicators of where women sit at the upper end of the pay distribution, which matters just as much as the headline figure.
The nursing contribution to the gender pay gap in outsourced life sciences workforces is worth placing in its proper context. Nursing is overwhelmingly female in the UK; the Royal College of Nursing reports that women make up approximately 89% of the registered nursing workforce. The pay structures associated with nursing, set predominantly through NHS frameworks, reflect an undervaluation of caring professions that predates any individual employer’s decisions.
Where CHASE deploys outsourced nursing teams on behalf of clients, those pay structures are shaped by the client brief and the wider NHS and pharmaceutical market. This is a systemic challenge for the sector as a whole, and one that requires collective attention from employers, commissioners and policymakers. CHASE’s commitment is to advocate for fair pay within our client relationships, and to reward the people in those teams as well as the commercial framework allows.
CHASE operates within a sector that is making progress on gender pay equity, though the pace remains uneven. The UK-wide median pay gap for all employees stands at 12.8% in 2025, according to ONS data. For full-time employees, the gap is 6.9%. The Department of Health and Social Care reports a mean pay gap of 7.5% across health and social care, down from 14.2% when mandatory gender pay gap reporting began in 2017 under the Equality Act 2010. That is a meaningful improvement over eight years, and the health and social care sector now sits below the UK-wide average.
Within specific life sciences roles, the picture is more nuanced. ONS data for 2025 identifies health associate professionals as carrying one of the larger gender pay gaps among female-dominated occupations, at 24.1%. Mental health nurses show a 12.7% gap despite a predominantly female workforce. These figures illustrate the structural challenge underlying the gender pay gap in pharmaceuticals and life sciences: the roles predominantly held by women tend to be those where pay has not kept pace with responsibility.
In pharmaceutical industry leadership specifically, women held 28% of executive roles in 2021 according to Pharma Executive data, up from 21% in 2018. Progress is real, but representation at the most senior levels remains uneven. Among FTSE 100 companies more broadly, just 9.4% of CEOs are female. Organisations in life sciences that are genuinely closing the gender pay gap tend to be those making sustained investments in the pipeline of women into senior roles, not just in pay policy.
The Department of Health and Social Care’s bonus pay gap rose to a mean of 14.1% in 2025, driven largely by the concentration of higher bonus opportunities in the most senior grades, which remain disproportionately occupied by men. This is a structural challenge the NHS is working to address through inclusion programmes and leadership development, and one that is replicated, to varying degrees, across the pharmaceutical and medtech sectors.
Organisations making genuine progress on pay equity in life sciences tend to share certain characteristics. They report with transparency, and they explain the data rather than simply publishing it. They separate what they control directly from what is shaped by market structures or client requirements. They invest in manager capability to ensure that performance appraisal and promotion decisions are not quietly distorted by unconscious bias. And they are honest about the fact that representation in senior roles is both a moral priority and a commercial one.
At CHASE, 33% of our board’s executive directors are female. It’s a priority because the link between senior representation and the gender pay gap is direct: when more women hold the roles that attract higher salaries and larger bonuses, the aggregate figures shift. Getting there requires sustained attention to pipeline, to visibility, and to creating the conditions that allow talented people to progress on merit.
The work we have underway includes: training managers to identify and reduce unconscious bias in pay, promotion and performance review decisions; ensuring that women are visible and well represented at every level of the business, including in the roles that carry the highest earning potential; advocating within our client relationships for pay structures that fairly reflect the value of outsourced teams; and continuing to report with full transparency on what the data shows and what is driving it.
Gender pay gap reporting under the Equality Act 2010 is a compliance requirement for organisations with 250 or more employees. At CHASE, we treat it as something more than that: a prompt to examine honestly where we are, to explain what we find, and to make specific commitments about what we will do next. Read the full CHASE gender pay gap report 2025 at chasepeople.com/about-us/gender-pay.
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