Going beyond compliance with gender pay gap reporting
Recent press coverage has highlighted the importance of organisations conducting effective gender pay gap analysis — here are four best practice tips to avoid reputational and financial damage from the HR and employee benefits consulting services firm, Gallagher.
In the UK it has been illegal to treat men and women differently in terms of pay and conditions since the landmark Equal Pay Act of 1970. Yet more than 50 years later, you don’t have to look far to find examples of organisations getting into financial and reputational hot water over gender pay discrepancies, with the public and retail sectors being hit particularly hard.
Such stories are often not down to nefarious and deliberate discrimination – more likely it’s not-fit-for-purpose reward structures and strategies and errors in data and reporting that are to blame. But that doesn’t make them any less damaging.
In an attempt to clamp down on gender-based pay differences, since 2017 all companies with 250 or more employees have been legally obliged to publish annual gender pay gap reports, setting out the mean and median salary for each gender, as well as detail on bonuses and breakdown by pay brackets. In 2022, the UK’s gender pay gap for full-time employees was 8.3%, meaning that for every £1 a full-time male employee earned, his female equivalent was only paid 91.7p.
