Nigel is an Independent Statistician based in Bath and his career of 28 years’ splits into two parts. From 1991 to 2006, he worked in the food industry in numerous roles that required him to interact with nearly all business functions that would exist in such companies. Since 2006, he has provided statistical consultancy and training services to almost 150 organisations across a wide variety of industries in both the public and private sector in the UK and beyond. The common denominator throughout his career has been working with non-statisticians, explaining complex statistical ideas to non-statistical audiences in a way such that they can make use of his results even if they have no statistical skills.
The publication of the 2017 gender pay gap data sparked his involvement in pay gap analysis. His initial intention was to use a publicly available data set as examples for statistical training courses and blog posts but he quickly realised that ~10% of employers had submitted incorrect data. At the same time, he found that the available guidance to employers on the calculations was seriously inadequate. All this led him to write extensively on how the situation could be improved and the result was a collaboration with the Royal Statistical Society (RSS). Together they produced the report published in April 2019 which listed 10 recommendations for improving gender pay gap reporting.
He continues to write about what can be learned from the published gender pay gap data in order to close the gaps, how it can be misused and misinterpreted and whether or not it can be extended to other pay gaps (such as ethnicity and disability). He is keen to introduce best practice from the field of quality improvement, which is the application of statistical methods to improve performance (such as a pay gap) within an organisation. In this endeavour, it helps that he was recently Chair of the Quality Improvement Section of the Royal Statistical Society.