Gender Pay Gap Report

A joint report from the Government Equality Office and Deloitte has revealed that a gender pay gap between women and men of 19.2% remains, despite more women being in employment than ever before.

 

The report entitled ‘Trailblazing Transparency: report on closing the gender pay gap’ was published on 9^th February 2016 and analyses the gender pay gap in different sectors. In 2014 the Prime Minister pledged to ‘end the gender pay gap in a generation’; however, research has shown that the gap has not improved in the last four years. The report contains contributions from organisations who have been involved in the ‘Think, Act, Report’ disclosure initiative which is a voluntary scheme for employers to report their gender pay gap.

 

One of the interesting points revealed by the report is that lower paid roles are more likely to be taken by women than men and the report emphasises the fact that there is a lack of women in the most ‘lucrative’ professions. In occupations where women are underrepresented – such as chief executive roles – the gender pay gap is greater than in occupations where there are closer to equal numbers of women and men.

 

The report explores the reasons for the pay gap which include the fact that women more often take time out from work to care for children, individual choice of profession, corporate cultures; unconscious bias and, more worryingly, discrimination.

 

The report explores the challenges faced by businesses and sets out how the economy would benefit from closing the pay gap, recommending the following action by businesses:

 

• Attract, recruit and train women;
• Carry out transparent reporting;
• Monitor gender pay;
• Publish their gender pay gap for accountability;
• Focus on work place culture and make public commitments.

 

The Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015 requires the government to make regulations under the Equality Act 2010 requiring employers within the private and voluntary sector employing 250 or more individuals to publish information about their gender pay gap. Legislation to achieve this requirement is likely to come into force in October 2016 and a further consultation on the issue is underway.