Call for more flexible working to cut pay gap

All jobs should be advertised as available for flexible working to help tackle pay gaps, the Equality and Human Rights Commission said. The commission believes the change would benefit women and disabled people who are more likely to need flexible working and are often forced to accept part-time jobs that offer lower pay. Extra paternity leave would also help to reduce inequality, it said.

ALL jobs should be advertised as available for flexible working, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has said, as it said progress on pay gaps has been “painfully slow”.

The proposal was one of a series suggested by the commission to tackle pay gaps affecting women, disabled people and ethnic minorities.

It said that the change would benefit women and disabled people who are more likely to need flexible working and are often forced to accept part-time jobs that offer lower pay.

The commission also suggested that businesses should be made to collect annual statistics which set out their pay gaps for ethnic minorities and disabled people. Extra paternity leave would also help to bring down inequality, it said.

Caroline Waters, deputy chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), said: “We need new ideas to bring down pay gaps – it’s not just about more women at the top.

“Yes, female representation is important but tackling pay gaps is far more complicated than that. Whilst there has been some progress, it has been painfully slow.

“We need radical change now otherwise we’ll be having the same conversation for decades to come.”

The EHRC said the Government’s campaign to promote gender equality in the workplace had received little pickup because “many companies fail to recognise they have a gender pay gap and therefore take no action to close it; others do not see it as a priority.” The issue hit the headlines recently when the BBC revealed that two thirds of its top earners were men. In April it became mandatory for private and voluntary sector organisations with more than 250 employees to report on the gender pay gap within their workforce, and Theresa May promised to extend legislation to the gap between different ethnicities if she won the snap general election in June.

The EHRC is encouraging businesses to voluntarily disclose pay gap details. In June, the Department for Education became the first Government

‘Many companies fail to recognise they have a gender pay gap and therefore take no action to close it’

department to reveal a difference between the pay of men and women (5.9 per cent). The report also warned that women, disabled people and those from some ethnic minority groups were more likely to be paid less than the living wage.

The EHRC found that the gender pay gap shrank after the introduction of the national minimum wage, particularly for the lowest paid, but added that raising it to the living wage would do little because “so few women occupy the highest-paid jobs”.

The difference in the public sector is lower overall than the private, it said, noting a link between large pay gaps and “the ‘bonus culture’, which is more prevalent in the private sector and which tends to reward men more highly than women”.