The first round of gender pay gap data should now all be uploaded to the Government website. The Government’s stated aim of using the data to drive forward a debate across society about how to tackle the pay gap is being led astray by some poor journalistic reporting – some journalists appear incapable of distinguishing between median and mean and even creating a new concept of “average median pay”. There are some exceptions, with the Guardian going out of its way to explain that the pay gap isn’t about equal pay for equal work but is really about patterns of recruitment so that there are more women in lower paid roles.
Interestingly the Guardian is focussing on the median hourly pay gap (as this produces the wider gaps), correctly stating that it is is the difference between what the median male employee is paid and the median female employee is paid, expressed as a proportion of male earnings.
The next stage of the debate is what employers are going to do to reduce the pay gap for next year. Given that the snapshot date for the 2019 reporting deadline is 5 April 2018 there is not much that employers will be able to do in the short term.
There may be a temptation to take action that is counter to the purpose of the reporting regime. As an example – let’s assume one employer has almost all of its lower paid quartile as women, due to the nature of their business and the functions of the role. This work is part-time and shift heavy so has a greater impact on the median rate. The role is suitable for women who have child care commitments and don’t want to work full time. As a result of this tranche the difference in the median pay rate is 66% and 33% in the mean pay rate.