In a report done by the BBC it has been discovered that four in ten companies state that their gender pay gap has increased since the last time that they published it.
In the research conducted by the BBC it was the company’s median pay gap that was analysed. The median pay gap is the difference in earnings between the middle ranking women and the middle ranking man. Only 10% of firms have published their new and updated gender pay gaps as of yet and 74% of those firms indicate a pay gap which is in favour of men, whilst only 14% have a pay gap that favours women and 12% of firms report no gender pay gap inequality.
Some of the large companies who pay gap has increased since last year include Virgin Atlantic, Npower and Kwik Fit.
Despite these figures the overall picture of gender inequality tends to be brighter. Of the 1,146 companies who have revealed their pay gap so far, the average gender pay gap is reported at 8.4% which, even though only small, is an improvement on last year. “This study shows that whilst great strides have been made in gender equality in the workplace, there’s still a significant amount left for us to overcome,” ( HR Grapevine, 2019)Sarah Kaiser, Employee Experience, Diversity & Inclusion Lead, EMEIA at Fujitsu, said.
Additionally, Sarah Kaiser suggested that one major cause for concern in terms of gender pay gap is the pipeline problem. “If organisations are to address the low number of women in more senior-level positions the first step is to increase the pipeline of talent by driving recruitment of women at a graduate and apprentice level,” Kaiser explained. “The introduction of this type of reporting, however, makes the issue more transparent and forces employers to sit up, take notice and hopefully take action. It will be interesting to see how the land lies after the April 4th reporting deadline.” (HR Grapevine, 2019).
The differentiation between equal pay and the gender pay gap
The Equality Act of 2010 was implemented to give women the right to be paid he same as a man who is doing the same job. An example of this is in a restaurant, a waitress would have to be payed the same as a male waiter and could not differentiate based on sex.
However, the gender pay gap is the difference between the median hourly wages of all men in comparison to the median hourly pay of all women within an organisation. So depending on the roles within an organisation in could appear as if men were getting paid more despite the company being compliant with equal pay laws. An example is in a factory, if all line workers are women and their managers are men, then there is no wrongdoing with paying the men a higher wage.
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