For International Women’s Day, the party has published the gender pay gap for its employees. And it’s good news.
Liberal Democrats fought hard in coalition for large companies to publish the discrepancy between what they pay men and women to help close the gap of gender inequality in the workplace.
As of March 8th 2016 the annual gender pay gap for staff employed by Liberal Democrat HQ was 0.4%, with women earning more than men on average.
Liberal Democrats are working hard to encourage a better gender balance within the party and a motion on Electing Diverse MPs will be voted upon in its upcoming Spring Conference.
If you were wondering how the gender pay gap is published, you basically work out the average pay for women and men in any given organisation and your gap is the difference between them. I’d definitely be interested in seeing what the other parties’ figures are.
What’s also good is that women make up the majority of the Directors at LDHQ.
The Scottish Party is an accredited Living Wage employer and Tim Farron has said that his proudest achievement is eliminating unpaid internships from Party HQ.
This is all good news. I do worry about how hard some of our staff work, though – especially when so many of them do so much for the party as volunteers too. Resolving that is our next challenge.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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2 Comments
the party has published the gender pay gap for its employees. Where? Can’t find any reference to it on http://www.libdems.org.uk/.
If you were wondering how the gender pay gap is published, you basically work out the average pay for women and men in any given organisation and your gap is the difference between them.
You could but then you wouldn’t satisfy the minimum reporting requirements nor the objectives that Jo Swimson was trying to achieve…
I therefore conclude an opportunity to showcase a LibDem policy initative has been lost…
The draft government regulations about the publication of gender pay include
Employers will have to publish:
The difference in mean pay during the pay period between male and female employees (regulation 4);
The difference in median pay during the pay period between male and female employees (regulation 5);
The difference in mean bonus payments between male and female employees (regulation 6)
The proportion of male and female employees who received bonus pay during the period of twelve months preceding the relevant date(regulation 6), expressed as a percentage of the total number of all relevant male employees and female employees respectively;
The numbers of male and female relevant employees according to quartile pay bands, A,B,C and D (regulation 7).
Where are these details for the Lib Dem organisation?
Note also:
The definition of pay will be consistent with the definition of pay used by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) for the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE). Pay includes basic pay, paid leave, maternity pay, sick pay, area allowances, shift premium pay, bonus pay and other pay (including car allowances paid through the payroll, on call and standby allowances, clothing, first aider or fire warden allowances). It does not include overtime pay, expenses, the value of salary sacrifice schemes, benefits in kind, redundancy pay, arrears of pay and tax credits (regulation 2).
The gross hourly rate of pay will be determined using the weekly pay divided by weekly basic paid hours for each employee.
Also consistent with the ONS approach will be the week to be reported on; this will be the last week in April, which ONS has advised is the most typical week for earnings. For their first report, employers will be able to reach back into that week.
Are the Lib Dem figurs consistent with these requirements?