10 November 2017
It's Equal Pay Day 2017
Today (Friday 10 November) is Equal Pay Day 2017, the day of the year when women in full-time employment in Britain effectively stop being paid relative to men.
You already knew that, right? You should, because, while the day is meant to vary to reflect the actual pay gap each year, for the past few years Equal Pay Day has repeatedly fallen in early November because figures have barely moved.
To put it into context it means women are effectively working for free for the rest of the year - that’s 51 days to be precise!
While figures from the Office for National Statistics may provide a glimmer of hope with the median average for full-time employees narrowing from 9.4% to 9.1% - the lowest for 20 years, the mean average for full-time work shows a 0.2% increase this year at 14.1%.
Regardless of the figures, the picture is far from rosy and highlights that the gender pay gap is still prevalent in today’s workplace at a time when it should cease to exist at all.
Pay transparency is key to not only reducing the gender pay gap but also creating a motivated, more productive and engaged workforce.
From April this year, regulations came into force requiring organisations with over 250 employees to report annually their gender pay gap figure within 12 months.
Despite this requirement, only 219 of 9,000 organisations, who collectively employ just under half of the UK workforce have done so to date: https://gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk/Viewing/search-results
Gender Pay reporting, what is it all about?
An employer must publish six calculations, showing their:
- Average gender pay gap as a mean average
- Average gender pay gap as a median average
- Average bonus gender pay gap as a mean average
- Proportion of males receiving a bonus payment and proportion of females receiving a bonus payment
- Proportion of males and females when divided into four groups ordered from lowest to highest pay.
Gender Pay Reporting is different to Equal Pay. Equal Pay focuses on the pay differences between men and women who carry out the same jobs, or work of equal value whereas the gender pay gap shows the difference in the average pay between all men and women in a workforce.
To help organisations measure the Gender Pay Gap accurately, MHR Analytics has developed a new solution, which provides a Visual Representation of Gender Pay Gap Metrics to help gain a deeper insight into your existing gender data, easily report on the above requirements and set out a plan of action if required.
