Positive thinking

Geraldine Healy, Queen Mary University of London and Mostak Ahamed, University of Sussex   Despite huge amounts of publicity and government efforts to tackle the gender pay gap, it remains a serious issue. It affects women in most industries : from artists and academics to journalists and doctors. We’ve researched some of the particular problems facing the UK’s finance industry when it comes to the gender pay gap. Across finance as a whole, women earn 27.2% less than men an hour, on average. When it comes to bonuses the gap is nearly 50%. Our research shows how this plays out at different levels of the finance industry. Progress on gender pay issues in this sector has been too slow, fragmented and uneven over the past ten years. The UK government introduced legislation requiring employers with more than 250 employees to report annually their gender pay gap publicly beginning April 2018. The principle is that greater transparency will reduce the gender pay gap, but...

The UK is one of the few countries to require employers with over 250 employees to disclose their gender pay gap data. New regulations came into force in April 2017, and 10,527 employers have now submitted their figures . They offer some useful lessons in how to make pay more equal for men and women. 1. There’s still confusion The gender pay gap and pay equity are often conflated. The gender pay gap shows the difference in the average hourly wage of all men and women across a workforce. The gap widens when women do more of the less well-paid jobs within an organisation than men. It is useful in measuring pay equality due to its simple calculation, but it doesn’t measure the pay difference between men and women at the same pay grade, doing the same job, with the same working pattern. More than 200 organisations had to change their data, and over 900 reported an improbable zero pay gap by mean and median . There’s an estimate that more than 9% of reports may be wrong. This sug...

Ernestine Gheyoh Ndzi, University of Hertfordshire   The gender pay gap has been around for as long as woman have been in the workforce. No matter the reasons that get put forward as to why men get paid more than women, it generally comes back to the fact that women take on more child rearing and caring responsibilities than men. The gender pay gap in the UK stands at 18.4% in favour of men for full-time and part-time workers, according to the Office for National Statistics . But what the ONS fails to account for is the number of women on zero hours contracts. If it did, the gender pay gap would be even worse for women. Gender pay gap regulation, introduced in 2017 requires companies that employ 250 employees or more to publish annual gender pay levels in their organisations. But zero hours contract workers are not considered as employees under the law. This means that those on zero hours contracts – a group of which women make up a bigger share – are left out of...

   Barnali Choudhury, UCL and Martin Petrin, UCL The UK is introducing new legislation t hat will require companies to publish the ratio of what they pay their CEO compared to the average worker’s salary. The move follows a number of corporate governance reforms introduced by the government over the last year and a half as part of an effort to build a fairer economy . But if the government was truly committed to building a fairer economy, it would not rely primarily on companies to do its work for it. When Theresa May first became prime minister, she vowed to reform the UK’s economy to ensure that it would work for everyone . Reforming the way that companies operate is a key part of this vision. According to May, corporate governance mechanisms are the tools by which these responsibilities should be imposed. May is not alone in her views on the usefulness of corporate governance mechanisms to promote public responsibilities. Countries around the world, fro...