When Jo Swinson was Minister for Equalities, she introduced the requirement for companies with more than 250 employees to report on their gender pay gap. That requirement came into force this week. Jo wrote on the Huffington Post about why this is important and how the information will help organisations understand what they need to do to improve their gender equality.
The numbers are really a springboard for further questions, and companies can delve into the data at much more granular levels than what will be published to understand what’s driving the pay gap. If it seems high in some divisions, you might do a deeper pay review to check pay levels and pay rises are being fairly decided. Staff who identify as neither male nor female can be omitted from the calculation, but given the discrimination non-binary people face at work you may wish to look more closely at the data for these individuals to reassure yourself pay and reward systems are working as they should. Similarly if your monitoring data is good enough, look at the data by race, disability, sexual orientation and other equality strands (and if it is not good enough, then now is a good time to improve your monitoring practices). This is an interesting exercise to identify potential problems – and it may give you a head start in the event that pay gap reporting is extended in future.
And what happens once they know the size of the pay gap?
While some parts of the media will unhelpfully focus on naming and shaming and misreporting the numbers, this is about the journey of each organisation.
Transparency on the numbers means staff, shareholders and customers can hold companies to account on progress, so communicate with them your analysis of the problem and what you plan to do.
Gender pay gap reporting is not a panacea, but it is an important and helpful tool to bring urgency and accountability to efforts to tackle the entrenched problems of gender inequality in the workplace.
You can read the whole article here.
* Newshound: bringing you the best Lib Dem commentary in print, on air or online.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
Electrification of the Midland Mainline is paused yet again
Ninewells Community Garden Big Biodiversity Bash #dundeewestend
UN panel raises concerns about impact of Labour's welfare bill
Reform turn up in time for the end of the meeting
Peter Martin
Andy Daer
David McDowall
Mohammed Amin
Graham Jeffs
6 Comments
What a nonsensical scheme, pandering the the ‘pay gap’ campaigners’ dubious claims and sometimes lies. There is no account of qualifications, experience, capability, seniority and even job title…yes, the role of the employees themselves!!! When these are taken into account, the ONS states there there isn’t really much of a gap.
Yet under this reporting scheme, my own firm will possibly be ‘shamed’ due to a 30% pay gap, simply as a consequence that most women have chosen the stability and regular hours of HR and support services, whilst men chose the high demands and long hours of professional engineering.
Wow. Ginger! Get the popcorn! 🙂
Jo’s thoughtful article explains very clearly how the data should be looked at and how companies can use it to identify problems to tackle. Perhaps rather than grumbling in advance, PT could offer to help analyse his or her firm’s data in a rigorous way?
PT: “When these are taken into account, the ONS states there there isn’t really much of a gap.”
This usually comes up on one of the regular Grauniad articles on this subject. Synopsis – woman columnist writes article bemoaning the difference between male and female pay, refers to report, cherry-picks stats from said report to “prove” there is a pay gap. Commenters to the article will (i) point out that unequal work for the same (or equivalent) job is illegal, and that anyone suffering from this should take legal action; and/or (ii) use stats from the same report to demonstrate that in their twenties, women actually earn slightly *more* on average than men, and/or (iii) posit a number of valid reasons why women earn less over their lifetimes than men, including career breaks to have a family, subject choices when studying for degrees, a greater number doing part-time work, and the larger number of women in lower-paid caring professions such as nursing and social care.
What this ultimately tells us is that it’s not really a “pay gap” as such, but an “earnings gap”. Dressing this up dishonestly as a “pay gap” helps no-one, and knocks the crediblilty of those campaining for proper change.
Now no doubt there are actions that can be taken to ameliorate the earnings gap, such as encouraging women – and men – to make different choices for university study, such that more women enter the higher-earning professions. Caring for a young family (apart from the obvious pregnancy and childbirth bit) can usually be shared between partners equally where there is a will for this to happen, and fathers should be supported as much as mothers to take this on, freeing more mothers to return to work earlier. And the reasons for men not being attracted to the caring professions should be looked into. But even with all of this, I suspect that the earnings gap will still remain to some degree.
The question is, how far does society wish us to go in changing this?
“Jo’s thoughtful article explains very clearly how the data should be looked at and how companies can use it to identify problems to tackle.” – Mark
The trouble is that there is plenty of history of the media and general public simply picking up a headline figure eg. £350m per day, and decide to run some campaign to address some supposed wrong.
The ONS data clearly shows, whilst there maybe pockets of gender pay discrimination, the biggest issue is the earnings gap arising from people prioritising bring up a family over work and thus either taking an extended period of time out-of-work or in part-time work.
Translating this into the real world (and taking a very broadbrush, black-and-white and possibly slightly sexist view), it means that we basically have two pools of people:
1. Women in their late 20’s-early 30’s who had a family in the late teens-early twenties and thus have very little real experience of the world of ‘work’ and thus will have problems getting jobs above entry level.
2. Additionally, we have a pool of older women, who had their families later and thus stepped off the career ladder in their early 30’s now trying to rejoin the workforce as skilled workers.
To me, and from my own experience, perhaps what is actually needed in addition to the incentives for appentices, is an incentive for employers to take mothers rejoining the workforce.
I’m not discounting the needs of fathers in similar situations, just that the big problem society actually faces is about women in the workforce.
If any business uses this figure to inform their decision making they are so badly run their will be no effect.
Any decent business of this size will be monitoring the split at different levels by more than this. Those with the biggest splits, like If engineering, are already the most concerned. Any business of this size is likely to already going to do pay comparisons for comparative roles to cover themselves legally.
This is useful for tracking changes by industry over time but isn’t for managing a firm. It is important to know what a metric is and isn’t good for or you will end up drawing odd conclusions (as I’m sure we are about to see in the press).
Businesses not already doing more detailed tracking is not going to make good decisions based on this metric.