GENDER PAY REPORTING
Introduction
The gender pay gap has always been a topic of interest, but in an attempt to increase awareness and improve pay equality, the UK government introduced compulsory reporting of the gender pay gap for organisations with 250 or more employees by April 2018.
For the UK as a whole, the gap has reduced in the last 10 years but is still in favour of men. According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS), the UK’s current mean gender pay gap is 17.4%, while the median figure is 18.4%.
The gender pay gap is defined as the difference in median pay between men and women. The ONS headline measure for the gender pay gap is calculated as the difference between median gross hourly earnings (excluding overtime) as a proportion of median gross hourly earnings (excluding overtime) for men. But crucially this measure does not take into account equal pay for equal work. The gender pay gap differs from equal pay. Equal pay deals with the pay differences between men and women who carry out the same jobs, similar jobs or work of equal value. It is unlawful to pay people unequally because they are a man or a woman. The gender pay gap shows the differences in the average pay between men and women. If a workplace has a particularly high gender pay gap, this can indicate there may be a number of issues to deal with, and the individual calculations may help to identify what those issues are. In some cases, the gender pay gap may include unlawful inequality in pay but this is not necessarily going to be the case. Much confusion exists when it comes to the two definitions and debate continues to gather pace.
The following pages seek to narrow focus to the experience of gender pay gap reporting as seen through the lens of the payroll Professional.
The phrase “What gets measured gets managed… what gets publicly reported, gets managed even better” summed up the decision made by Friends Life to begin reporting its gender pay gap as a workplace issue in 2012 and which resulted in them being the 2014 winner of the BITC Transparency Award .
A familiar phrase to the professionals who have a responsibility for management within an organisation but for many working within the payroll profession, it was a phrase that introduced us to gender pay gap reporting.
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